Difficulty IS Content! A conversation with @TheElectricUnderground

today I'm Talking To The Man Behind the electric underground a Content Channel dedicated to the coverage and discussion of arcade games among other things Mark welcome to the no frauds club today I want to kick things off just by talking about something you covered in as of right now in recording your latest video on ghosts and goblins resurrected you talk about how play styles are uh in some ways struggling to be expressed in modern games in games that have a lot of modern designs and if you adopt limitations to the player what the player is able to do in their games and such that actually improves in some ways the breadth of different choices you have you give a couple of examples in that video I'll obviously have a link in the description for it and people can check out the rest of your content there as well but I wanted to ask you it's sort of like you know if you had to restate it just very briefly the thesis of how can you convince somebody who doesn't already agree because I'm fully on board by the way but the idea of play Styles not really being able to be expressed if you have all of the choices at once what is it about having so many different choices that makes it so that bizarrely you don't really have as much Choice as a player yeah well awesome it's really cool to be on the no frauds Club am I officially not a fraud you are officially not a fraud yeah that's all I I'm gonna put that on my page there it is yeah awesome uh so you know that there's a phrase that a lot of people will use when they talk about pixel art and they talk about video game music where they say limitation breeds creativity you'll hear that all the time and it's funny you'll hear that in all kinds of different contexts across many art forms not just video games but the one area that people don't seem to accept this or you know mainstream reviews and critics don't seem to accept this is with gameplay mechanics it's this view that gameplay mechanics since the days of Pac-Man ironically a very well-made uh underappreciated game there since the days of Pac-Man you know those are the cave painting era of video games and since then it's just been this upward trajectory of third person cameras and parries and uh Combos and air juggles and all this and that all these other choices of the past like for example in Ghost and goblins Resurrection have that dedicated jump you can't control the jump in the air it's just this dedicated jump that was because they just didn't know about fully controllable jumps and so like modern the idea of like a modern game now is giving the player as many options as possible whenever possible and you'll see this in something like Devil May Cry For example where Devil May Cry 3 had the style select so you had trick Royal Guard um the other two are Gunslinger and the last one I'm going to get it Gunslinger and swordmaster okay so you had those four Styles and then in Devil May Cry 4 they brought in okay you can style switch on the Fly and then what happened is everyone's like oh this is this is like the correct way to play Devil May Cry so they actually went back and modded it into Devil May Cry 3 and then the switch Port now has it officially in there so Devil May Cry 3 now has this style switching thing and if you talk to a lot of players and critics now everyone will say this is this is an improvement this is objectively better because now you can do anything you can do a gunslinger into a trickster into a swordmaster into a royal guard the funny thing is is though is that if you take all the options and you give the player all the options what will happen is it actually creates a natural singular play style of efficiency where uh you you have no limitations and no tradeoffs so you will always do the most efficient thing and so it actually homogenizes play Styles because why would you do this when you can do the better option and I said this in the third strike with like Chun Lee Chun Le's every move can become a super so you just everything becomes super and so if you watch Chun Le players and third strike they all have to play the same way because it's so efficient and and so without tradeoffs you actually get a uniform style of play if you have the ultimate character that can do everything you will everyone will play that character and everyone will play that character in the exact same way and so that's a concept that fighting game players and action game players now are still they're kind of discussing it but you can cross it crosses across all different genres even Platformers even strategy games the idea of like the optimal build will actually start to crowd out player choice and play style because you're stupid if you don't do it uh so that was kind of the uh little summary there where like limitation creates risk and reward and creates tradeoffs if there's no risk if there's no trade-off how do you as a player express yourself you just learn to play optimally and that's it there's nothing left to it yeah and it feels like really the the diamond and the rough is the game that often unintentionally which of course is going to be a subject later about intentionally design but sticking with this expressivity thing like the reason why I phrased it as framed it as play style more than skill is I'm really interested in high skill expression but you can have high skill expression that doesn't actually look that interesting and I would actually argue a point that you made in another one of your videos about gameplay density is the whole concept of speedr running and how that's like one challenge that you can do but often times and maybe a point that um you you'll end up agreeing with here is that the my stance on speedrunning is it's great if it can happen organically but if it ends up being not about anything remotely close to what the game was intended to be played or I guess a better way to put it instead of invoking intention would just what's the natural and fun way to play the game right natural gameplay yeah and so if we're in a situation where we're playing a game and we're deliberately like in halflife 2 you know moving backwards and changing our camera angle and and save load save load so we can skip dialogue okay that's kind of like an interesting Sideshow circus act kind of thing but it doesn't really invoke any interesting feelings for me as a as a player or as a designer I wouldn't imagine it would be fun to make a game that where that's the goal of doing that those inputs and with that Visual and all this sort of thing it's not not a satisfactory experience because of itself it's almost like a novelty because you're breaking the game in a certain way to achieve some you know High time or something right and so it's a metag game actually outside the original design of the game uh a really common example this that I bring up is Ocarina of Time speedrunning where what happens with speedrunning and a lot of people there's things about speedr running that are cool but there's also things that are critical that I'm critical about because like you said certain things in speedr running will not actually capture what the game is strength what its strengths are so like in ninja giden the strength of that game the the newer ones is like combat and fighting the enemies and the risk rewards and all that but speedr running it avoiding enemies is always best and then also just spamming like special moves is always best so the speedrun ends up being incredibly boring because it's solved what you do is you run through the game avoid encounters and then when you have to do encounters you do uh spells or you spam and you know it's you're losing like 90% of what makes the game good so why even bother and with the glitch manipulation stuff like ocarine of time if you sat down and talked to a speedrunner about what makes ocarine of time a fun game old puzzle solving and traversing the dungeons but Ocarina speedr running has become like manipulating these really esoteric uh problems in the code where you're falling through the ground and skipping through half the game in five minutes and stuff like that and what ends up happening is because speedr running is a metag game on top of the original game what speedrunners constantly have to do over and over and over you'll see this in all their speedrunning history videos is the metag game will start to diverge from the main point of the game and then speedrunners have to make up like random rules to stop that like okay we're going to do a a time but we're not having major glitches no major glitch so you can't fall through the floor into the end of the game but you can still like clip through a wall here or there like you so they and it's all what's a major glitch which is a minor glitch and it's all very like H whatever we'll we'll just kind of think as we go type of thing whereas what I really respect about arcade games and I sure strategy guys can also respect this is what I call like formal design where an arcade game there is no committee online where you look to and say is this good or not good is this allow or not loud if the score goes up it's good if the score is getting higher you are doing something right whether the game wants you to do that or not that is the metric of performance analysis and uh yeah I I appreciate that design a lot more and it's funny speedrunners are slowly starting to say this even like the devil M cry speedrunners are like you know speedr running was more fun when developers didn't try to make games for for speedrunners when they tried to make games for like real players and then we just did our little things on the side uh cuz that is more fun for speedrunners because they get a more solid product to work with uh I bog will like this example a new game came out that bog really likes it's a I always say it's like something big adventure it's like the the sonic Mania guys made I can't remember it has a really stupid name whatever the game is but big blast or something like that but it's like a a 3D sort of platformer game and already speedrunners are finding like glitched exploits glitched movement and stuff like that that undermines the fundamental version of the game but now because speedr running is such a like a thing the developer is like oh I don't know if we want to fix these glitches because we'll make the speedrunners mad it's like yeah but what about like the Integrity of your game what about that fig yeah let the speedr runners figure out what they need to do make your game as solid as possible so yeah exactly absolutely agree yeah and and the reason I bring up speedr running as an example is like you can say what you will it does take some rope memorization some mechanical timing some Precision some skill to pull off what they're doing but it's just not interesting to me right and you compare a lot of RTS speedruns can be the same way funnily enough although maybe less on the glitch side and more on the let me find a strategy that basically means I don't have to play an RTS in order to win and it it ends up being awkward because I mean yes there are some games where the existence of speedrunning communities can influence whether or not get balanced or adjusted uh which I do think is a bit of a problem because speed running is Niche despite it being you know maybe a widely viewed hobby or something like that I don't think that the performance of the like the metrics or whatever of players trying to do speedrunning stuff are anywhere close to the number of people who are just going to play normally and so it's kind of like a weird it's like a vocal minority in that sense and you're you're getting affected by the signal bias if you're thinking as a developer you should do that but even beyond that I just think catering towards a crowd that demands more skill expression it it kind of misses the boat for me because I think you can definitely have both you can definitely have a high skill game and you should in my opinion but if you're going to have play style expression you've at least achieved the idea that many people can do many different things and you know really the speedrunning thing and the play style thing are both connected in my mind because developers have this idea that they are the the sort of the buck stops with the developer it's what I as the developer wanted the player to do but the players don't really care about that they take your tools and they're going to use them in ways you could never have imagined as a designer and that's happened all the time in the games that I've made or the the work that doing now we've got competitive tournaments running for the project that I'm working on currently and people are finding really clever uses and interactions that you know we don't have a crazy big player base but even among that it's still enough for people to say make me go hm and I made the unit or whatever that they're using and so it's it's it's very interesting to see that process unfold but just because they're doing something that I didn't intend or initially Envision doesn't mean that I should change it so that you know they can't do that thing anymore and fact I'm very excited to see does this break the game is it interesting because even if it feels bad in the moment to have maybe like a game trivialized because somebody abused a mechanic it's still really compelling to me to see that whole process unfold and I feel like designers shouldn't be thinking to themselves yes I am the the architect I am the the only person who can pass judgment on whether something is valid and yet that does seem to have taken over modern game design in a way it's like okay yeah sure you can color within the lines we'll just make the lines more expansive so you have more things to do but in practice everybody colors the same way is that sort of more or less what you were getting at with your ghost and goblins video there about how like okay yeah you say you want more things that you can do as a player but in practice you always you all do the same thing it just you said it homogenized stuff right yeah actually that that's the point the funny thing is is that players will say if you talk to them you know everywhere they'll say I want more I want more individuality in games I want more uniqueness in games and I want games that challenge me and make me like develop my skills all people will say that but their tastes actually don't reflect this what most people want uh game journalists especially is they want lateral changes but they want most games to play the same because that way they can translate their skills so like if you've played 10,000 hours of Mario and then you play Ghost and goblins and you can't control yourself in the air and you all the meta and all the strategy you learned in Mario does not work in Ghost and goblins there's immediately that like this isn't no but if you make like Hollow night or like a game now where it actually play or the messenger actually plays much more like Mario than ninja gide and even though the messenger looks like ninja Guiden it has the fully controllable mechanics of Mario the level design of Mario but people love that they love the kind of they want their skill to translate from game to game and you'll see this across game design now where EV you'll notice like one game introduces a mechanic and it's popular and all the other games are like let's do that too so oh you know secro has Perry and SRO popping let's put Perry's in Resident Evil 4 I mean that's hot and so like what what people want is they want to pick up a game that's kind of got some surface level differences that makes it feel unique but its core is very similar to all the other games so they don't have to relearn fundamental concepts like oh jumping is risky I have to consider my jump or movement is more limited I have to consider my movement they don't want that type of uh that level of uniqueness and so that I think you'll see that a lot with games coming out now where they'll bring in mechanics that on the surface seem oh that's so different but then the fundamentals will play exactly like every other game that you play like cameras are a great example of this if you do anything different with a camera people lose it people like Resident Evil 4 Resident Evil 4 and five I had my friend sit down and play it and he plays more modern games he could not he's like what is with this camera I can't I cannot do this right now and I'm trying to explain to him no the camera system in this game is really good it's really responsive and it it creates the play style of the game he's like I don't I don't give a [ __ ] I don't want to deal with this camera you'll see that all the time where people will say they want uniqueness and changes but what they want is just surface level aesthetic or slightly mechanical differences but they want every game to basically play the same way well it's it's funny because you talked earlier about how speedrunning is a meta game on top of the existing game and for me there's another layer or another thing you can Define as sort of like a meta game across all of gaming which is exactly what you just said about how you you want your skills to transfer you name dropped yeah you name dropped uh uh games reviewers games journalists and what's really funny to me is that they often really don't have the expertise necessary to critique a genre that they're sort of Dipping their toes in but you won't see them acknowledge it or if they do it doesn't seem to factor into their score and personally I kind of think scores are a little bit silly because you know my enjoyment of a game might change depending on my mood or whatever so really you should just say like do you recommend it based on X or Y that's how I try to uh involve myself in it anyway and I respond better to those kinds of recommendations too but it's funny that the the journalist class if you want to call them that for games people is very hellbent on the idea and and they're kind of a mockery amongst most enthusiasts now anyway I don't really know that many people who go to watch IGN or whatever but you know maybe the funny thing about them I I say this on my Channel all the time because it's very easy to dismiss them as a gamer because what they say is absolute nonsense that's exactly it yeah I mean like it's you can't even take them some of the stuff you read in these reviews is like complete nonsense in terms of like for example the gam spot or whatever it was saying like it has ghost and goblins has clunky sluggish controls nothing about the controls in any metric is clunky or sluggish it's just they didn't like the style of mechanic and but they couldn't articulate that right because their view is that game like I said game mechanics are on this evolutionary path and so older style or like more limited styles of controls are not different style it's like that's outdated it's like a Windows operating system this is Windows 998 we need to get on Windows 12 now or whatever it is that's how they same thing with res all the Resident Evil 4 remake reviews that was driving me up the wall where all of them all the reviews were like they fixed the camera like now the camera's like good the old camera sucks and the new camera is good they could never they could never put together that the camera changes everything and that creates a distinctive style of play but the thing about game journalists though I do take them really seriously because it's they have this really nice option select where if you're a a hardcore Enthusiast gamer type uh everyone on this channel is right because we're the no frauds channel so all of us legit Gamers you read their reviews and opinions it's absurd but the thing is is that they actually still have massive amounts of Market influence and you don't remember that until you start hanging around more casual people and you realize what IGN says as stupid as it is is like incredibly influential and they set the tone for everyone else so like Ain will come out and say this game's a masterpiece and then everyone else is like all the Casual sphere like well IGN says Masterpiece and you'll see it they'll all sort of fall in line and if IGN comes out and says wanted Dead's a piece of [ __ ] everyone's like well I guess I Ian said it like the reviewer class they like stick together they're like the this Union and uh so they actually have a lot it's ridiculous how stupid they are versus how much influence they have over the market and over like the economics of gaming so you have so actually the One reviewer that I really pay attention to is IGN like whenever I'm looking at stuff but not for their opinions not like I'm doing like a meta read of IGN where I don't read them to actually see what they think but like how is what they are saying going to affect the marketing and tone around the game and it is very once you start paying attention you can see the effects of it like if a game comes out IGN gives it the stamp it's got the stamp you'll see then all the other reviewers follow along it's it's insane and it actually and I know like YouTubers and US independent types we think we're immune to this and we're like oh yeah like those those Shields at IGN they they give shitty games high scores because they're shills but us us YouTubers we don't do that [ __ ] yeah you do because what happens is IGN's opinions and like the main Market opinions they trickle into the Twitter sphere and they trickle into the YouTuber sphere and then creates a lot of peer pressure among YouTubers and Twitter people too to go along with that it's or at least pay attention to the product right like it increases mind share look at The Wanted Dead stuff like IGN wanted Dead blows and then all the reviewers are agreeing and then it happens in the YouTube sphere too where they're like you know this is Meme and all that kind of stuff it's actually really rare to see IGN like [ __ ] [ __ ] talk something or like the main reviewer [ __ ] talk something and then the YouTube sphere be like no that's not usually what happens they all everyone kind of Falls in line and so yeah only hipsters are really if you want real opinions you do have to go to like those random ass hipsters who will give you what what uh what's what hey and I try to look the part every day so people know they can come to me and uh pop on in they see that weird guy with long hair they're like what who is this guy so I'll tell you what I think of though is that the The Meta game that we were talking about with the The View as it retains to the viewers is that the transferable skills the Legacy skills there's a lot of pressure then to like basically the the reviewers or whoever happens to have influence are kind of divining the parameters of what the like what can be a game even or what can be a mechanic in a game and then from there it's like oh you strayed too far from it well that's no good you strayed a little bit but you know in some ways it's like easy to maybe you did a really good job tutorial iing it or something well instead of it being like the same thing but you know just explained better uh we're going to call it this is a great new innovation or something you know maybe that becomes like the new the new thing or at the very least it's like a novelty right there becomes like secret like unspoken rules of game design that you'll get for example checkpoints so if if IGN complains about your game having too long of a checkpoint you just set set your watch and just wait because the update patch those checkpoints are going to get patched every time or like uh so like with wanted Dead you know finally did an update and you can tell they literally went through IGN's complaints and they're like okay the game's too hard let's make it easier oh there isn't enough Health let's give them more Health oh the checkpoints are too long let's make the checkpoints easier so they've [ __ ] up the game you know and you know I us hipsters can be like oh we like this and that and this they're not listening to us they don't give a [ __ ] you know because we don't drive the market you know and and it's I do have a sympathy for developers though because it puts them in a really tough position where back in you know the arcade days or like even early console days the game shipped so if if you send out some crazy ass game with kind of things and people are bitching about it even if you want you can't like go and Patch everyone's cartridges or old discs and be like oh we fixed this or whatever but now because there's that button right there you can just be like you know let's really try to turn this around let's you know okay we're gonna patch it it it's very interesting because patching can be really good in certain situations but it's also I think can lead to some really rash decisions and really screw over something that if they just held in there uh you know it will be appreciated a little bit more and I think that's probably true about wanted dead and a number of other titles too is like there's in a way even though I really disagree with a lot of what like the Gen like the core around Dark Souls as a game like in terms of gameplay I really find it to be quite far from The Mark of what I would want it did kind of make dying in video games cool again it kind of made it so that oh yeah can I can lose in a game and it's like kind of the point know we can't let the game journalists ruin Dark Souls for us you know it it because they make it an awful cliche oh yeah everything the Dark Souls of this I I know and now whenever I'm like doing a review and I'm about to say something about Dark Souls I'm like no you know but those [ __ ] but the thing is is like I I would argue maybe I'll make a video about this that Dark Souls is like one of the few very healthy things that has happened in gaming because it did what a lot of other uh games because they're Japanese I think you know they got the balls to do it they're like no [ __ ] you you're gonna have to [ __ ] do these checkpoints [ __ ] we don't give a [ __ ] and that's like so a western developer you know they're you they're shaking in their boots but you know the Japanese have that little bit of like cultural difference there they're like what are these baby Americans and Western people crying about or whatever they probably can't even read what we're saying anyway they also don't read what you say anyway they don't give a [ __ ] so I would say yeah the Dark Souls series I don't think everything's great about it but it did bring a lot of fundamentals and a lot of like core game design back into being trendy and now it's really funny with like reviewers and with like taste makers the rever the relationship is reversed where in other art forms during their Heyday like critics created taste critics created like they would recognize things that the average player in audience couldn't and then help negotiate that and Elevate The Taste not that's never happened in video games but in other art forms but in video games it's actually reversed what happens is critics watch the Players and what's popular and then they get their opinions from that so like when Dark Souls comes out critics are going to be like what is this outdated old janky [ __ ] but because it becomes a thing and because it starts to gr grow in public word of mouth and people start to appreciate it then the journalists are like oh no I guess this is good so then they right you can see this a funny example of this is godand godand came out got absolutely obliterated by critics as a giant piece of [ __ ] and then years later of course like the hardcore gaming audience has really understood how amazing godand is and then IG in a few years ago we're like okay we're kind of wrong about godan it's awesome and yeah sorry about that what we missed about godan what the yeah exactly design what it is but what it's showing is that the critics that we have now are taste makers in like a good sense they just fall back and kind of watch what's the what everyone else is saying and then they kind of vocalize that and that's your that's your review basically so they always miss Trends is my point they always miss like great Trends in gaming because they're always reacting rather than predicting yeah and so they have to react to it sort of already taking off before they can really do they have to jump in when it's hot you know what I mean it's like a you know I can't think of like like MTV or something like that where back in the past like you know these trendy things they would watch for something to be trendy and then they' be oh we're part of the trend now but none of them are actually like making the trend they just jump on what's popular well yeah and part of that is also because of those really thickly defined parameters right it's like oh you well that game's like way outside what we conceive of as a game as a as a reviewer class yeah I can't just like resume from when I alt Ford to go get a coffee at Starbucks or what you know like what I say alt for they're probably on a controller anyway so you know and it's like it's awkward for the the the designer then to come in and be like wait so I have to make a game and if it's not within like the Paradigm that's already shaped or reinforced perhaps by these uh these people then I have to like get a really good word of mouth hit so that that side turns on the reviewers so that maybe I canall that right that's exactly what you have to do and it's it is really that's why I say I have a lot of sympathy for developers another example of this was a developer these are arcade examples so I'm sorry if your audience doesn't you know a lot of them there's actually a lot of overlap between RTS and arcade I think at least in my crew so I'm sure they'll get it okay cool so a beat him up came out recently a few years ago called final Vendetta it it's a really solid beat him up it's not like groundbreaking or anything but it's really solid but my favorite thing about it one of my favorite things about it was it required the player to do a onecc it like forced you it wouldn't let you continue so if you game overed you'd have to redo it and I was like oh this is really bold and this is really cool and every review complained about it and then the developer patched it out developer is like no we were just kidding guys know that's that's pretty but you know what but the funny thing is if they sent me that I'm like this is bold I really like this and this is like helping teach the player like the you know like what Dark Souls did it's like helping teach the player The Meta of skill progression and like punishment I thought it was a great move but they got pressured you know ultimately it's their decision to Cave or not but uh yeah I mean the pressure was on I mean it's just Steam Reviews every single review of the game except mine they're like this is bull crap no one cc shouldn't be Force you should let players you know credit feed through so you know what's so funny is that my argument and maybe I won't sell any games we'll see but my argument would be hey you go play a different game if you want to do that this is how we do things in this game right like I feel like more developers need to do that but there is a vested interest against doing that right there is I think it's like a short-term versus long-term thing it YouTube things like this as well where like I was critical of Bayonetta 3 the like the day it came out and you know whenever a game comes out I I say one of the most dangerous things to do as a YouTuber is to stand in front of the hype train because it will run your ass over so like whenever like a really popular game comes out uh it's very tricky because you don't want to just be a contan for the sake of it but you're just trying to be accurate right so I thought Bayonetta 3 blew it was a Hu I think it sucks it's a huge step down from the other games especially B1 and I was very critical of it and so when the game came out I got like ran over by the Nintendo and the internet just like who's this [ __ ] always he's just being a contrarian this and that this and that I had uh I had like larger YouTubers a funny little thing you might know this is like when a larger YouTuber comments on your video YouTube sends you like a special notification like oh someone really famous wants to talk to you and usually that's like oh that's so exciting and I remember when I did my Bayonetta 3 review I would get those and I'd be like oh what did they say and then they're just like shitalking to me like [ __ ] you mother grow up stop being a baby I'm like all right but anyway but now that time has moved on everyone looks back at bo3 now and it's pretty much now everyone's like okay yeah bayonet 3 does suck we all agree now yeah but but you have but that window of when it matters is really scary Because the Internet is going to run you over with a train so as a velop ER you release your game and there's something like that in there something that's pushing against mainstream taste the pressure is going to be really hard for developers not to Cave into it's going to be really hard it's going to feel like what are you even achieving here because the people who like it are either a minority like myself or they don't care enough to not buy your game right so like they got rid of the 1cc for requirement am I going to refund the game because of that no I'm just going to be kind of bummed but so it's like a every force on the internet if you're a developer or a YouTuber or do anything every force is trying to get you into that sort of mainstream popular lowest common denominator Lane everything is going to push you that direction your fans uh career opportunities your peers even like everyone's going to push you towards that direction so I always really appreciate when developers and YouTubers have the balls to be like no I don't care if you guys are pissed and you might you might really suffer sales-wise that's the tough thing is like it's one thing to say oh you will you won't but you might you actually might and you know what here's where we can talk I guess what what the you know we we've eaten the the appetizer right it was some nice you know like whatever you want to call it some bread with some seasoning on and you dip it in nicely here's keep under control no here's the St here's the Stak so difficulty right for me the biggest deal about any game is am I being challenged enough to continue playing and that sounds weird to I guess most people who are maybe on more on the Casual side but I need to know that my opponents in a game are actually trying to to beat me they have their own goals and conditions and I think it deviates a little bit from the arcade understanding in some ways where I actually really do like to get immersed in a world and I find that so impossible in most video games because I look at what the enemy is doing in a game and especially in an RTS sense I mean single player campaigns are pretty bad for this you you walk through and you're like you maybe you open the map in the editor or you just like look around the map in game and it's like wait you had controlled the whole map and you had like 300 Supply worth of units so you could have attack moved me with at the start of the game and you didn't well that there goes my immersion immediately like I can't I can't get invested in this and then you know the dialogue will say oh zerat tool is really strong dude he's he's a tough guy watch out for Amon he's like a really powerful dude like no dude like these guys are jokes even on the highest difficulty or whatever so you can kind of tell that and that somewhat is down to your player skill but it's also just down to like how you construct the levels and for me we talk a lot about so far like meta games on top of a game I kind of see video games as this Vector for a way to see that challenges can be overcome and it's like teaching you that meta skill which goes well beyond just video games and in a way I feel like it can actually like you know it it everybody sees video games as almost like a little bit trashy a little bit like oh you know it's just a Time waster but no I mean I've learned a lot of skills from banging my head against a wall of competitive Gam time and time again that like okay now okay I cooperation with other players so that I can keep playing against them to get better and you know studying my own mistakes so I can be introspective and improve and like these are things that it doesn't really matter if you're playing a game or just dealing with you know people at work or whatever there's going to be times and areas where you can use these skills so the fact that you're learning them within the context of a game seems like it's a perfectly valid you know use of your time as as opposed to it being conceived of as a waste of time which is maybe true for the more casual games and so the just bring it all back on the case of difficulty like in my games the tutorials are going to be able to defeat you and probably will defeat you because actually what I'm teaching you in addition to how to play the game is how to lose at the game and then improve based on that so like I love that one of the things that you cover in the most recent video that you did that we brought up at the beginning about ghost and goblins is that there are certain details that you can really only learn if you've died to them already or at least they've already happened and you've analyzed them right and while I can see and understand why some people would think of that as being really frustrating I think if you don't know to expect that behavior like you know the the burrito enemy for example the way that it like has all these nuances and stuff yeah Li and throw Spears like what yeah and so figuring out what the the parameters are for when that unit that enemy will do a certain thing is kind of like you could make an analogy to okay what time does my enemy attack me in this level it's like the first attack comes at like 3 minutes in okay well that means I'm going to try to prepare for that and oh it can attack from the the right or the left so I should Scout to figure where he's attacking for like details that like you can learn even if you learn by dying the first couple of times and in the RTS this is like this is me standing on on an island and like nobody agrees with me initially and like everybody's like well sure yeah I just mean like within the RTS here's something you can throw out the RTS so I'm gonna I'm gonna switch to your I'm gonna code switch to the RTS language hit hit speak to your audience here okay so the first thing is if you talk to RTS players and I do have a love and fondness for brood War I don't know I don't know if that's like lame at this point or still cool I don't know where it lands in the I'll stand by brood War whether it's cool or not cool I [ __ ] love that game and in terms of real life skills it did help me in my real life career because my [ __ ] typing skills playing brood War I go to work I'm like I still work I know I work with a bunch of old Boomers and I have like a mechanical keyboard and they're like what's that for I'm like check out this APM I'm like 100 miles an hour there it is but but the thing about it here you can talk to your audience their language about is if you ask RTS players is are RTS a genre of skill is playing these games competitively skill-based or not you I'm pretty sure most people would say yes obviously it's a game of skill well if it's a game of skill then in order to learn and improve in skill loss is a natural part of that process imagine if you were a competitive tennis player and you expected the first tennis match you play you have to win and if you don't win that tennis match that means there's something wrong with tennis like tennis itself is flawed because you didn't win that first match like or like even musical instruments imagine if someone had the expectation the first time you sit down to play a piano you will never hit a note incorrectly that won't happen you will just nail it the first time and if you don't there's something wrong with posos so like failure is a natural part of the game design and it's an important part and this whole concept that you shouldn't be you shouldn't fail at the game even in the tutorial I highly disagree with because you can't improve if you don't fail like it's literally impossible you'll just be stuck on this what we have now this like just very basic pathetic easy mode situation because anything that requires skill requires failure and Improvement it just is natural it is inborn into the process and another thing that I say on my Channel that I think will connect with what you're saying here is that when people talk about difficulty they often talk about difficulty as like just this weird version of playing a game like oh you're one of those guys who plays the game on a hard mode just for the hell of it but I always say that difficulty is content like literal difficulty is content so if you make an RTS that's easy and the the single player isn't challenging you could have 5,000 levels of that you are missing the real content because the real content is the challenge of fighting the game systems so you could have 10,000 level Campaign but if they're all easy that is incomplete there is not the content is just a whatever you know it's not real the con depth depth and replayability difficulty is the fuel for that if there's no difficulty it's like driving a car with no gas it you need it to fuel the design of the game difficulty is the gasoline for game design so that that's something I say on my Channel all the time and so I'm one of the few people there's some reviews of it where if the game's too easy I will say this game is too easy that is a problem they need to add a hard mode like literally this is required content we need a hard mode of this game because otherwise its design is flaccid you know you can't there's not depth there's not replayability if I can cruise through the game the first time there's not what what am I supposed to do there's even if I want to make up my own little challenges or whatever you know you're missing that content so I I always say that difficulty is content literally and not only that but like I go the other way and say there's no difficulty selection in my games there's nothing planned for that so if you can't beat the tutorial well practice until you can right try until you can and you know I'm not going to lock out the rest of I I won't lock out your ability to play multiplayer or arcade games or whatever if you want to do that but like the idea is you know yeah go through the tutorial if you want to play you know the other single player stuff you want to get further in my hope is that by pitching also like an interesting world and characters and like making you uh like one of the things that I do is the the tutorial for the the first race is like it's very it's basically just humans and so you have this guy shouting at you as like a drill sergeant type character and you you you know the idea is based on the dialogue you want to beat this guy like he's a he's a loudmouth he [ __ ] talks you in the middle of the game he says that you're not doing like you're wasting his time and you fail yeah and if you know like there's break points that we're going to add as well where it's like oh you you beat you didn't even kill a single one of his units or something like a really embarrassing loss or something then he's going to comment on that differently than if it's like a closer game or whatever and so like little things like that really good game design fundamentally I was talking to bog about this yesterday one there is one flaw that I wish I would have brought up in Ghost and goblins but I didn't realize it until yesterday which is that one problem that ghost and goblins has it's not necessarily the core game design but I think the way it presents itself it presents itself a little too passively because what it can happen so what can happen is if you present a game that's really hard and really challenging and present it as like really passive like oh you know this is just like Mario except you get annihilated in three seconds but the game's all Smiley and happy about it what happens is you're not sending that signal to the player that you are acknowledging that this is intentional so like a lot of really great like a lot of games that are known now for being difficult Dark Souls reference incoming um is that they actually communicate this to the player formally and the player understands this like when you D Dark Souls like you died B came on you and then it makes you run back to where you died just to rub your nose in it like oh and if you a second time it's even worse yeah yeah go back to that cliff and get your [ __ ] player so like the game is communicating to that there's another like really funny example of it in ninja giden the arcade version uh when you have the game over screen Ryu has this like like blade coming down that's going to chop him in half like and then schms a lot of schms have this too it's like you failed and like big letters and stuff like that yeah all those types of things if you can communicate to the player through your story or through your what's appearing on screen that you know the game's hard and that the game is like pushing you to accept its challenge I think that is effective so having the drill sergeant be like dude you didn't you suck dude you didn't even kill one unit what's wrong with you I actually do think that is effective design yeah I mean even the the sort of advisor SL like robot assistant that you have says this operation is a failure if you you know if you lose all your stuff and so like even little things like that you want to you want the player to not like that you want the player to be uncomfortable by that because otherwise they're never going to change their behavior and be better at the game right and so that's also about driving improvement so anyway you know not necessarily just to talk about my own stuff all the time but the the point of me bringing it up is I mean I would bring up something else if I could but I haven't played an RTS where the tutorial is actually teaching me the valuable skill of failing in order to get better and understanding even like the other thing is okay maybe you're an established RTS player maybe you've already played RTS maybe you play them all the time you don't need a tutorial to tell you okay I have to lose at the game in order to be better but you might need to see what a good player in air quotes good for actually does in the game to be successful and so the tutorial opponent having a meta composition of units and having strategies that look like well it's constantly making workers it's constantly expanding its economy it's constantly sending more units to attack and building more structures to train more units and all this stuff like the basically engaging in the core gameplay if the if the AI opponent does that even in the tutorial that is also teaching you what you might be able to do better and so you can go back and watch the replay of that or whatever uh and learn that way and so even if you don't need the lesson on okay I should you know fail in order to learn you still need to know what you're supposed to be learning and so it kind of accomplishes it for the veteran and for the Newbie in my opinion and yet again you know I feel like arcades are probably like maybe I feel like I'm preaching to the choir a little bit here because obviously you exist in that space and that those kinds of games do kind of handle that especially in their design language and again like you failed and all this other stuff it's much more obvious but it feels like especially with the direction modern RTS games have gone um there's not really much an acknowledgement of any of this and it's almost like they they exist in two different states at once or at least two different states so stormgate is a game that's been coming out lately that's now in the in the alpha or beta stage or whatever they're calling it now and aside from a bunch of other concerns about the game that I have one of the things is that they are segregating out the Casual player base from the competitive player Base by saying okay you want one V one well here's your hardcore mode that's just one V one and then you want your casual game well here's Co-op and you play with three buddies or whatever and it's like okay that's great but if you're playing fundamentally different games like the whole game state is different and like the AI doesn't use the map or use the mechanics and it's like in Starcraft 2's Co-op I don't know if you've ever played it but it's literally just like the AI spawns in units and doesn't actually engage with the RTS mechanics and so you're not learning transferable skills between the different modes and so what happens is you get all of the people culminating in one spot that they prefer one Niche but if that Niche is ever better served by another game later like a more fun Co-op game well the co-op players are gone a better 1 V one game the 1 V one players are gone because you haven't actually bridged the Gap and had this like healthy interplay the only people who are going to do both are maybe people who have friend groups that do both or people who are naturally just like fine with either one and that doesn't describe a majority or plurality of the people who are playing these kinds of games and it's just weird to me to see like RTS in particular it would be like if arcade games started as a whole body started pivoting towards casuals and not really listening to the hardcore right and it's like it's very confusing so yeah talk to me about that a little bit yeah oh yeah exactly because the issue that comes up is what the developers are doing now is they are trying to thread this needle of fighting games do this all the time too where they're like trying to bring in casual players and the way they think the best way to bring in casual players ERS is to dumb down the mechanics of the game to dumb down the AI to dumb down the difficulty and they think that this is a great way to bring in new players because they're not going to have that frustration period they're not going to have that struggle period they're going to have a lot more transferable skills between games so they can fire up the game on the weekend play it for four hours pass the steam refund point and then we're good but the thing about that is that what a lot of people don't discuss is if you start removing these elements you are literally removing the game it's not that you have a different mode of the game it is a different game so you're just sticking two games together with duct tape and like hey here's this game and here's that game and you'll get that divided audience that isn't going to transfer between them because they are different games they are not the same game if you start taking out the core fundamental aspects of these design yeah I we're seeing this across the board in a lot of stuff now a really obnoxious one in action game games is they'll make the campaigns kind of like you know this immersive story type of thing so they'll put in a bayet of three is guilty of this big time like big big cinematic sections where you just press a and like sections where you just walk through or section bosses that are dead easy so then they get the whole like mainstream crowd to play the campaign for three hours but then they're like oh yeah we spent a lot of time in Budget on that and we kind of foret got like the you know the main difficulty and all that balance so we'll give you like a mode so then and the annoying part is like hardcore players will accept scraps now so it's like okay it used to be that campaigns were fully realized and had a lot [ __ ] lot like that was the game and now the game is like this little mode that you play on the side like Merks mode or something like well you got Merks mode yeah but what about the campaign so yeah I I could see that happening a lot any game that's competitive or any game that's really hardcore they're starting to do this with and yeah I'm not a huge fan of the Approach at all I don't think it accomplishes what they're trying to accomplish this naive idea that people are going to play this dumb down version of the game and then immediately flip mentality and be like yeah no I'm gonna now be absolutely punished to death in the other game it's not gonna happen yeah and describing it as two separate games glued together is really a good way to to underscore it and another example we talked a little bit about Warcraft 3 before we started this and Warcraft has obviously this big like idea of everybody thinks it's a successful RTS in my opinion it was more successful as a platform for a custom map which was of course defense of the Ancients DOTA that started the whole Mook phrase or continued it yeah and it's like I feel like people wouldn't have left the 1V one and general team play and melee and stuff of Warcraft 3 in droves for a custom map if the core game of the 1 V1 was actually that satisfying and so you also run the risk of potentially making one of the two game like obviously it's not like DOTA is a the custom map of DOTA isn't really analogous to anything in Starcraft 2 or in stormgate but the idea of like different modes or different things that become part of the game as far as core player base is concerned is like they are two fundamentally different things and so you run the risk of basically repeating those mistakes where okay you're now you're going to have this mode where all these other players flock to and they're not going to be interested in in the competitive side and vice versa right the the competitive players bought the game and and play the game because they wanted to play the game and now there's this other game on top of it and it it does divide your resources it divides your attention it divides your player base I think it's fine to have offerings for different ones but if you're not teaching the same core skills like one of the things I've learned even with a very small player base that we have here where it's about like 100 people probably and not all of them are competitive some of them are just single player um it feels like just looking at that and studying it as as grown you see people who are interested in taking the plunge into multiplayer and it's in large part because they experienced what multiplayer is some part of what multiplayer is in single content already and you know again that's a test case that's very limited and very you know okay maybe you can say it's anecdotal because it's not like you know a big big game in terms of player base but I feel like that principle will hold true and it's it's certainly the inverse has held true in all these other test cases and I don't know why people are making the same mistakes but I guess it comes back to what we were talking about with the reviewers and shaping the tastes and stuff right exactly uh I was going to add to that point where um what you don't want to see happening in single player content and we see it a lot across many genres is you don't want to teach the single player players a false understanding of the game absolutely so that when they they think they know it they think oh this works and then they go to play competitively and like you need to learn a whole new game again that I call this I had made I made a video about this with Tekken I called it the scrub sand trap Tekken is really guilty of this where like the single player content the AI can't even Korean backdash so the AI can't even do like fundamental things that you need to do in Tekken competitively and the AI plays in a a a style of gameplay that's more about like blocking and throwing strings and just abusing mids and if you do that you can obliterate the AI you can obliterate Tekken so I spent years learning to play Tekken like this just uh you know mids mids strings mids strings and then when you go to play online players still think that style of gameplay works and so the the lower ranks of Tekken are just littered with dudes spamming strings mids never Sid stepping never doing like the more fundamental aspects of the game play and uh then once you get to a certain rank you just are stuck I call it the scrub sand trap you can't P you because that meta game doesn't work once you bring in more of the true meta fundamentals of the game you just get stuck so then I had to do this I had to double back and relearn the entire game again to play it properly uh and one of the one of the game like to contrast that a game that does it much better is virtal fighter virtal fighter 5 single player is so close to the meta of the competitive game it teaches you like Sid stepping option selecting throws teaches you like uh fuzzy guarding like the tutorial literally teaches you these things there's fuzzy guarding tutorials in Tekken 5 or virtu Fighter 5 and so when I was playing virtal fighter I spent hundreds of hours practicing against the AI and then I went to play online and a lot of those skills transferred and I was like this is I've never experienced this in a fighting game before it's always been you learn to play the game against the computer and then you relearn it to play against real people virtal fighter was the one time where it's like it transferred and that was really mind openening to me and I'm sure with RTS RTS players I really like where you're going with like you make the enemy AI I as analogous to the actual meta of the game as possible and teach the players that meta in that contained single player environment and I think that will actually make your multiplayer much more popular because it's really scary and overwhelming for new player to come in and just go into ranked matches with no idea how the meta is played and just get annihilated over and over and over and over and of course online no one's going to teach you [ __ ] they're gonna if you do have any weaknesses they're going to exploit it to the maximum amount so you're just going to get obliterated until you figure it out on your own but if the single player is not giving you the tools to figure it out on your own you're just [ __ ] and so I really I really agree with this like making the single player content as analgous and informative about the competitive play is possible I think that does lead to a more robust multiplayer competitive scene I seen it in fighting games you see it in FPS games I think it would hopefully hold true the same in RTS games as as well it's really nice to hear that it has been done before in even in other genres because again I've been looking high and low played so many RTS games from obscure to popular and yet so many of them or pretty much all of them like the closest thing that I've seen to a Metate teaching tutorial is stuff that they added in one of the Age of Empires 2 remakes where they have these like ways to like you're basically competing in the E economic standpoint you're like for the opening you basically like a build order teacher but in a way where you're harvesting resources and you're doing it can you beat the timing of the AI enemy that's just doing so there's not really combat pressure but you're trying to like race it and that's kind of an interesting thing it's like you could imagine a macro tutorial in any RTS game where it's like can you get to a higher resource count than the enemy uh than your competitor and they're not fighting it's just that stripped down and so that can be useful as like a drill sort of thing like oh I'm going to practice my macro and stuff see what how fast I can get to a certain level and then you always have like this objective like consistent St um I guess thing to to compare yourself to it's like okay am I doing as well as the the enemy or even if I'm doing better than the enemy am I doing as better as I was like am I getting my high score or whatever right and just like to practice that can be helpful at the very least to see like at least you can just look at the guy and see what he's doing right and so that's pretty helpful but that's the only time I've seen anything that comes close to what you're talking about and on top of it all um I mean that's a smaller game right and so you don't necessarily know if it's even like could they get to a situation where the meta becomes something else where now it's like a different thing right yeah well I think the problem with RTS games just from a more casual perspective is I think these genres actually really underdeveloped in terms of its single player content because it a lot of genres are not just RTS games but because what a lot of developers do is they off offload the responsibility of game design onto the competitive scene they they just offload that on you guys and so the way it works this is something that fighting games really struggle with is that can work if your game is really popular so if you Starcraft 2 or whatever it is like if your game's really popular the community will actually do that work for you they'll come in they'll make the guys they'll they'll help you learn you know they'll do all that for you but if you have a smaller strategy game or a smaller fighting game if you're not doing that as a developer you you know you can't get the ball rolling it's like a the more the smaller your community competitive Community is the more you have to do as the developer to help them and guide them and give them the resources and tools that they need uh single player content is a big example of that but what happens is Indie devs look at like big mainstream developers and they're like well this is how they do it so I'll do it that same way it's like yeah but their rules don't apply to you you have to you have to abide by a different set of rules it's like a YouTuber where if you're a big multi-million dollar you multi uh subscriber YouTuber you can do the dumbest [ __ ] ever and you'll still get views you can call your video high with a smiley face and then you can put a thumbnail of like a pinky and a title and have like no video description and it gets five million views because you have that power but if you are you're like our Channel sized and you release a video called hi and you put a little Pinky and your no one's watching that people are gonna think you're an idiot so same thing with Indie indie games like you're kind of held smaller strategy games smaller Indie Games you're held to a higher standard you need to do more as a developer but we're talking about modes I wanted to add this um so I don't want to give the impression that I don't think modes are good I think extra modes are good but what you should do with them is they like that AJ Empires mode you're describing they should feed into the natural fundamental gameplay so if if you get a mode that takes a section of the gameplay like e economics this Mode's going to really emphasize getting really good at economics and you like the m of economics and you love that mode that skill will then translate over to the main game the main way the game is played but if you take a mode and you subvert how the game is supposed to play like you make it too easy you make options that wouldn't work in real competitive play all of a sudden viable uh like for example I remember uh in Starcraft to criticize Starcraft as much as I love the game like the enemy AI is like really chill it's like really like you know it's it's on ketamine or something it's not it's not worrying about it so when I ever I played Teran I'm a Teran player like I never worried about detectors because like the enemy AI in Starcraft like never sends invisible units to you or super rarely maybe like one map or two but it never does it it only just sends like you know visible units to you so I learned for years to build do all these builds and I never included detectors in my builds I go to play online and dude's like [ __ ] nuking me and like dark Templar destroy I'm like what the [ __ ] because I didn't have any and then I like how I how do I stop this and so then I'm like oh I'll just build a detector they come in and blow up the detector I'm like what am I do now like I never learned the detector meta of that game because the single player content never challenged that skill so that's a failure of the single player design and I'm sure there's many more examples and strategy games you can think of but you don't want if you don't yeah if you have if you mislead the the player on what options are viable and what aren't it's you're going to get that cut off with the competitive players where if a dude's been playing Starcraft like myself for decades in single player mode or the decade however long it's been and then you go and play online and like all your strategies and single player mode don't work you're not going to be like all right let me relearn the entire game you're just be like oh whatever I'll just go back to single player mode right yeah yeah and and that that obviously impinges on it I mean there's all I I I honestly think that there's certain aspects that people say that are also a bit overstated like we I hear about latter anxiety a lot I also hear about like certain social right there's like certain social phenomenon and I feel like maybe there is an element and surely there must be some element of it that's latent within people even in like a well-designed game if we imagine the sort of superlative design game in our head sure there'd probably still be some people who would be like I don't know if I want to be competitive like I'm not saying you can fix it for everybody but I feel like the vast majority of those kinds of things or like another one is like oh I I I don't want to play One V one because I can't blame my teammates if I lose right it's like well I don't know I feel like you could probably convince a lot more people to play it if they felt more comfortable and you the reason they don't feel comfortable is because of exactly what you're saying they you know they haven't been trained to lose in the first place and they haven't been trained in what even the meta looks like or what something that would at least give them a leg up and and come up with their own free form like I personally look at I watch a lot of brood War competitive play and a lot of it is kind of mapped out where like they'll get EX the casters get excited if you build like one extra production structure at this time or like you know you like you pretend you're making this unit but actually you're making like that unit like 30 seconds later that's the idea of like Innovation like oh my God what he's he's skipping on this and being greedy and and sure there's an element of Glory to that or there's an element of things where that's really cool but I feel like what you could really see like again you talked about the single player content not being mapped out I I kind of feel the same thing about the competitive stuff too because they have existed within the Paradigm of what something you brought up earlier is like oh you have these tools at your disposal and if you don't use them the right way then you're stupid and that's kind of like how the metas develop at a high level and in some ways that's true but I I Envision a world where the like the decision tree is a lot more rich and yes you still have you still have tradeoffs so one of the criticisms that you levied at some of those like the mode switching the style switching in dmc3 when they modded it back in from uh from four is like okay now you can now there's no trade-offs to to doing this and so you're just going to go with the more optimal thing I think the idea would be you start on a decision tree and it doesn't follow you through the whole game because maybe the whole game is like an hour and you don't want to be like paying for your CH your choices in that particular particular respect like oh I made an upgrade for Bio so I can't make Mech like I I feel like that's a little stupid and it's like I'm sort of positioned away from making Mech because I've upgraded my bio but if it's instead like I built a bio production structure and now I want Mech I'm going to add a Mech production structure that feels a bit better from the standpoint of choice and and that and there still is tradeoffs because you can't make Mech out of the bio structure right so if you want to switch you have to put in the infrastructure and I feel like something like that goes a lot com down to risk it comes down to risk reward is is the key risk reward so like I might be talking out of my ass here because I'm not as good at strategy or as familiar strategy games but I have played a lot of brood War at least uh but like the idea would be like you're in early in a match and you're like okay I'm gonna go with a bio build here I think that's what we're going with and then you get like halfway through the match and you're like I shouldn't have done that that was a bad idea so a great game would be that it there is enough room there to adjust and be like okay we got to get we got to get the mechs going but that there's a cost that's what you want you want there to be a cost and that actually creates skill opportunities because like let's say there is no cost let's say you're going along you did the bio build and then you Scout and you're like actually I should have gone with Mech and then you just go and press a button and you switch over to Mech what skill is that then there's no room for skill expression and there's no room for even like as a a player to see like different decision trees but if you make the game have tradeoffs so that the guy goes in he Scouts he's like oh [ __ ] I should have not done the biobuild and then you see the dude like scrambling his economy scrambling his structures like moving [ __ ] around and like having to make all of these adjustments to make up for that mistake and then he ends up winning the match because he was able to pull it together you can see oh that is a skill opportunity right there but if there's no limitation if there's no punishment there's no risk the skill opportunity doesn't exist he can just hit a button oh I guess I'll just build me now you know and game design wise there's no reason why that's not possible because you know you're the god of the game you can decide as the designer you can decide well if you press a button you get bio if you press another button you get Mech but if you don't so you know it's down to you to create those risks and rewards it's down to you to create those restrictions and players sometimes are stupid in how Games should be designed because they only see it from their perspective so they and they don't understand what they even like I say this all time players don't understand what they even like because the player thinks when he sees that he [ __ ] up and he did the biobuild in his heart he doesn't want to lose so at that moment he's like [ __ ] I wish I could just like switch this whole [ __ ] of me having to change all this stuff it's [ __ ] but when he wins with the Mech then he's like I did it you know that that he doesn't even understand what happened he doesn't understand where that feeling comes from that if he just could press a button and change his mistake there he wouldn't feel that same sense of accomplishment but players can't you know in the moment especially because you don't want to lose you don't see all of that you just see I want to win by any means necessary and so players a lot of times they will always advocate for like actually pretty dumb design decisions but it makes their life easier like I a funny example of that was there with Tekken there was like a ridiculous moment in Tekken 7 where they made not to get to like cuz I know you guys are RTS guys but basically they made the electric track too much and that was like it's big weak they removed the weakness of a move a very powerful centralizing move called the electric and it like tracked so uh and I was a player who played that character and I have admit I had a great two weeks [ __ ] throwing electrics and no one can get out of it and then but then what happened that made me mad is then other people started playing my character and doing that to me and then I was like because before you know I'd played this character for years and I learned how to step it I learned how to counter it but now I lost that skill because the skill was removed from the game so at first it feels awesome when you're the one throwing electrics and no one can get out of them you're like this is a party but then once you realize that other people can do it to you and then that opportunity that skill that you learned of stepping it and avoid and mitigating it is gone you realize okay now the game sucks because now we just throw electrics at each other and you've actually removed that depth of the game but if you ask the players that you know they don't have that long-term perspective they don't have that wide view of how the design Works they just have the right in front of me oh I'm gonna have a fun week hitting people with electrics type of thing so yeah they can't say that it's an arms race into you know now whoever's going to use the op move or whatever is just like it's it's an arms race of that now you get mirror match ups all the time right because there's no reason to play anything else yeah and what happens is like a a few months mons later players will all be like okay that was a bad idea right but it takes time for players to come to that whereas you as the developer you have to see that faster and you have to make those decisions because you don't want to get in the situation that you probably see this with RTS games every competitive game has this now where like the developers are always like patching [ __ ] and something's wrong and they're like oh [ __ ] patch that and then they're like oh [ __ ] and they're just like constantly patching things and like shifting things and they have no idea what's happening anymore because they don't have that vision of no risk reward we need risk and reward and if you don't have that you don't have skill expression you need both and a lot of players a lot of commentators think all you need is options op skill is options but if the options have no punishment they're meaningless it's just the same you know it's just spamming the same move in the end so yeah hopefully that kind of translates over to your audience a little bit with like the build type of stuff no I think so because and the main thing that I would say as it pertains to the RTS builds too is just like yeah it absolutely is about trade-offs there's going to be certain things that are different depending on which race you CU like Teran can lift their structures or whatever but you know the other races are going to have to deal with the fact that they built infrastructure that is no longer as useful and if you know I feel like that that goes into scouting and figuring out what your opponent's doing and and having a general understanding of stuff the other thing that I thought was interesting you brought up is um you talked about how like it doesn't feel as satisfying uh in the moment they wouldn't realize it but if they if it was patch so you could just switch it or indeed in the case of the electric stuff it's like I'm winning all these games but then like you realize how cheap it is and then it loses its value in in a funny roundabout way like obviously in starcraft's campaign you you defeat the overmind which is like the god of Zerg and caign yeah you defeat the you defeat Amon who's like a dark God or something or whatever and it's like you know a lot of it is like very supposed to be like really high scale epic and I've heard people have said that they've gotten more value or more satisfaction out of defeating my drill sergeant in a training Sim than like defeating one of these like epic Titan characters I think it's all creates meaning right absolutely yeah that's in game design in game design Aesthetics and lore only go so far I hate to tell you RPG players Aesthetics and lore only go so far uh the like for example the hardest time I've ever popped off in gaming in history like I popped off my heart rate I about passed out was the final boss of donam Pachi his name Hibachi and he is a [ __ ] he he's the thing of night mares and this is after like 50 it takes 50 minutes of the most hardcore just Insanity to even get to the guy and then the guy just eviscerates you and then you have to play 50 more minutes to get back to him and so I I had so many runs where I died and he had like just this bit you know it was like 20 seconds more he would have died but and I died physically painful I was like oh I like buckled over like why God why you know but is there some kind of great lore behind Hibachi you know the game has its cute little like oh he's the ultimate boss or whatever but is it there is there really like this great lore and the his Sprite is like just this flying pile of [ __ ] type of thing it's like they had to make the Sprite like a weird thing to because of limitations anyway but anyway like on paper there's nothing really that crazy about the boss in terms of lore or presentation or story but the difficulty and the context in the game design that is one of the most epic insane bosses in all of gaming because of the context of difficulty so imagine you're playing Starcraft brood war or StarCraft one whatever one you defeat the overmind and that level is just [ __ ] you up all day you you spend weeks just getting obliterated by the level and then you go to kill the overmind and you kill him then he like respawns stronger and like 50 ultralisks come out or something like that would give the actual player context meaning like the story is now supplemented in the gameplay in real meaningful way like difficulty creates meaning like I said it's the gasoline of game design you can have all the cut scenes and lore you want but if the game's easy there's no intensity you're not going to get that same feeling no matter what you do story-wise well here's a question for you because I feel like we talked a bit about certain things that maybe are not mapped out very well so far by the I do view gaming as very much a young medium still you know assuming you we're going to be around for a long long while if we can assume that we can assume gaming is going to continue to evolve really massively and so yeah the thing that I look at it with is like where where are the games with the good stories like you happen to know any because like I I'm not being factious when I say I haven't played a game that has like a single player experience that is like actually a good story you know what I'm saying like all these games like you talked about RPG players or you Nam Dro that it's like I hate to tell you RPG players but this you know it's true though it's like you guys have really I get myself in a lot of trouble with this okay because I'm really critical of video game stories and so you know there's certain video game stories people love and think they're like you know amazing and you know there are some goodish ones out there you know like the Final Fantasy games some of them have goodish stories but the problem with gaming stories is in my opinion I view gaming as more of an abstract medium the most people like if you talk to people who talk about video games in terms of art what do they always compare them to like movies and comic books and [ __ ] like that I don't think gaming is film and I don't think it it's actually much more like music gaming is much more um like game gaming gameplay is much more of an abstract musical style art form so it's like what music has great stories you know it's like that's complicated right I mean there's there is in a sense a lot of music with great stories but in my opinion the best style of Storytelling with music is like when you watch a film and it has that score and is the score telling you a story like in like a traditional sense no but it's it's a more um aesthetic it's more uh abstract like when you listen to certain music like of the Harry Potter soundtrack or the star sort you know John Williams stuff like is that telling you a story that you logically understand probably not Beethoven or whatever but the the way the music's composed the way it evokes emotion that is the power of Storytelling and I think that's the way gameplay works so with gameplay you can't tell a story with gam playay in the sense of like you know War and Peace or Lord of the Rings where it's this very like lore and all that kind of stuff you can throw that on top of it but the the best best storytelling in my opinion in gaming is stuff that is evocative that that's why when you you could take like kind of a basic story and you stick it into a gaming context and it can actually be much more meaningful to you than it should be but that it has any right to be to be honest because the game play Can Can can create emotion that you can't get but you can't because there's all this talk now about like little narrative dissonance and how like yeah oh yeah the this the story and the gameplay don't match up and that's that's always going to be the case because game design is abstract it's you're not gonna if you make a game where the story and gameplay actually line up and is like well written and everything it's going to be the most boring [ __ ] you've ever played in your life you know it's going to be basically the the culmination of this is the walking section like if you believe that narrative that game design should be narrative and linear in like a Story the ultimate form of game design the best form of game design is walking sections where they literally put you in the story and they make you in time go along with it and we all know those [ __ ] suck those are garbage but the so like in my opinion the games that have some of the best stories are going to be games where the story itself is a little bit more abstract or it isn't like that's why I also think why games really struggle to be put into film version of stuff like that it's like why don't you make a movie about a song it's like you could but that's very difficult uh so that that's my view on games I might have to do a video on that pretty soon I'm piss off most of the internet about it but hey I'm all for that the best yeah that the best I think the best video game stories are ones that are like like for example there's a great quote by the guy who did Doom where he said like video game stories are like porn that's like I think that's way more accurate than people realize because like the best video game stories are more of like scenarios and more of like a a framework to contextualize the gamepl like not again hate to keep doing this but like the Dark Souls series really gets this right because when you're playing Dark Souls like I don't know what the [ __ ] is happening in that game story I'm sorry if I'm ruining your monetization I just realized that oh no that's all good we're not I don't think we are so you can fuzz me or whatever but like uh that uh that game do you know what the hell is happening in Dark Souls story if you're one of those like real researchers maybe you might you don't but the way the game evokes feelings and emotions and setting and you feel like what you're doing is like something's going on but it's more abstract I would say that type of Storytelling gaming is much more effective at least for me like when I'm playing a game and I'm feeling like some some stuff's going on here and but it's like the vibe the like super metroid stuff like that like I love super metroid's setting and Vibe and feel the plot of that game is incredibly basic but that doesn't matter it's about the the vibe the framework so that would be my my opinion like the best the best video game stories are like aesthetic and more of a setting rather than a plot I think that's why RPGs really struggle like the jrpg really struggles because it's like it's like bucking against that concept and trying to create this linear plot through gameplay and it's always like a hot mess basically yeah I I've never played it RPG that I actually enjoyed the only exceptions that might come close would be like co-op games but at that point I feel like it's cheating because you're not really paying attention to the story you're just skipping all that stuff what you guys think about tactical RPGs I wanted to bring this up with you guys because like the one form of RPG that I do kind of enjoy quite a bit are like tactical RPGs I think there's things they need to do to get better you talking about term-based specifically or yes like Advanced Wars and stuff like that like where it's like okay it to me because it feels like and I think the TS guys can kind of get where I'm coming from a little bit it's like it feels like tactical RPG is the more correct ver version of the gameplay like the whole like jrpg thing where you go and you grind Random Encounters I feel like that style of game design in its concept is like incorrect it's not a good it's not a good form of game design it isn't because what is skill in an art in a art jrpg skill is patience and free time you know that's that's skill in that game if you have enough patience and free time you can beat the highest level the highest difficulty you just grind let you know and maybe people really enjoy that but that's not skill you know in a in like RTS players no it's not skill imagine in Starcraft if you could just like in the competitive game you could just sit there and grind out matches and like as you grind out matches like your your units get stronger across matches so a dude who just plays 10,000 matches will beat you because his units are stronger I mean that's absurd and I feel like with with RPG turn-based style gameplay like the it feels to me like tactical RPGs turn-based RPGs that don't have grinding and don't have leveling up in that sense to me feel like more proper combat design game design but I wonder what you thought about that well I was railing against upgrades earlier in one of my anecdotes and I actually think the same applies to to like any sort of scaling seems wrong in terms of if this is a permanent thing that happens especially like I think experience and leveling is just wrong it's like the wrong way to even look at any game Des really I I can't imagine a world where progression systems like that equate to a more satisfying end result like okay maybe unlocking equipment because I know some games do that like I've played Hades and that game was re I don't like that either I wasn't really a fan of the fact you had to grind it out because again it's like there's certain parts of the game that aren't even available to you unless you've put in like 10 10 20 or whatever right and so so what are you doing I brought this up with you know I like Devil M cry in a lot of ways but there's some flaws with it that I bring up but like what is the in terms of like true honesty what is the true version of Devil May Cry if if you ask people and they really think about it they'll say okay so you played the game for 50 hours you've unlocked all the moves and then you play on D must die that is the actual real game but to get there you have to spend God knows how much time you know and people you know if you're speedr running or whatever but it's a good amount of time and so it dri me up the wall with these character action games because I know how to do it I have Legacy skill I don't want to sit around and play through this baby version of the game for five hours give me Dante Must Die give me my [ __ ] and if I want to play the baby version of the game I can do that you know there's campaign you can select it and go through the baby version but you should have the full version of the game there and waiting imagine this in like freaking Starcraft you play Starcraft you go to play like okay you open Starcraft you know there's the campaigns imagine if you go to play custom map and you can only play tan can't play or like half your units are disabled half your units are disabled it's the dumbest [ __ ] ever but because it's a trend or like a Trope of RPG design it just lands in other places I don't I don't think it should I think if I was gonna make an RPG which is sort of like I try to prompt myself that way and I've played a number of them if I was going to make a a a RPG and it was going to be turn-based I would definitely not have those kinds of unlocks or whatever and instead I think exactly CU it even when we think about the the nomenclature the verbs or or the words that we use to describe it it's like oh I leveled up oh I got a new skill it's like yeah that's what you would do if you were playing a game though like if you were getting better at something You' get more you develop your skills you would level up your level of play you know that it's artificial right and so we have these systems that are doing it for us that are even like in the in the words that we choose to describe them or or or you know declare them uh Define them as it's like okay yeah you're doing this just so that I can feel a sense of accomplishment or whatever it's like yeah you could do that you could achieve that organically and so and you know what the sad part about this this is the sad part is this is a style of game design that is highly effective it's called gamification yes yeah and if you sit down and talk to developers and go to conferences and stuff they're going to really push this type of game design and the reason for that this is the this is the sad part is that when it comes to commercial interests selling your game not artistic commercial gamification is correct so if you want to sell your game having this artificial progression rewarding the player having like look at vampire survivors or saviors or whatever it's called where has like every time you get a level this I I make fun of that game so much because like the Aesthetics of that game are dog [ __ ] like when you kill enemies in that game they don't even explode and like natural explosions they just puff off screen like everything of that game is super underdeveloped and like ROM hacky except the level UPS the level UPS like [ __ ] explodes and there's like ceremony right yeah yeah well that's called gamification and you can stick that type of design on top of anything and it will become more commercial and effective because casinos use this this this comes from like casino game design like all this stuff or like with the Tekken shop what they did just to be little [ __ ] is they put they sell you the the DLC costume for $4 but you can only buy virtual money in increments of $5 oh yeah of course of course you always have some left over you know why don't you top up again exactly EXA that that's called gamification and that type of design is effective but it's a effective and the manipulative type of thing and oh yeah I talk to Indie devs about this all the time and this doesn't make me like a good counselor because if you want to sell and make money my advice is not going to help you because it's gonna really hurt you and that but I think artistically it's garbage don't do that artistically but you know whatever but yeah so unfortunately I think you the poor RPG guys and RTS guys you're gonna run into that everywhere now I think it's gonna really take over your games because they want to sell them I don't know if gamification hits RTS the same way but what I have noticed is that the new sort of meta for monetization is I'm I'm against all microtransactions let me just say I think they're all bad like I don't actually even think you should be paying for Cosmetics I think that inhibits your creativity of expr ing yourself as a player I think a better way to do it you you talk about grinding and unlocking stuff if if it's a status symbol of your achievements in the game that's a little bit different for me visually like I was thinking about having some kind of fancy thing that I could program in for people who won tournaments in our game it's like okay that's exclusive to them because they won a tournament that's different than oh I paid a hundred bucks for this thing or whatever like I find that all scummy and I I think you know what yeah I want to add to this because this is a point that I agree with you on but I think there's a Nuance here that a lot of people don't talk about which is like cuz you're I we both agree 100% like this whole microtransactions Cosmetics we [ __ ] microtransactions for characters that's [ __ ] microtransactions for half the game it's like we'll give you half then you have to buy the other half or whatever that's all crap but when you bring these arguments up with people a lot of people will say well this is a necessity this has to be done to make money and my response to that is a little bit different which is like okay I can accept that if you are willing to admit that it is artistically degrading if you at least make that admission as the developer that you are degrading your game artistically and you know that you're doing it I actually think that's a much healthier place to be because now when we talk about it because when you talk about this [ __ ] now people try to justify this stuff artistically like it's actually good design but if if the conversation was hey I know the economy is really tough right now I know selling your game's really tough right now maybe you do need to squeeze this extra money to get this off the ground and everything but as long as you acknowledge that what you're doing is degrading to your game artistically I think that really changes the tone of the conversation because what you could do it's not the best thing in the world but let's say you're a developer you're in a tough spot you need to make some extra money and you you start bringing in some microtransactions for Cosmetics you start making money but then you make enough money where you're like okay we're good then you get rid of them you're like okay now that was you know it's like I had to strip on the weekends to get through college but we're done stripping now and now let's get rid of them I think that would be a much healthier conversation because I do get that uh you know the the economics of this stuff can be really tough but as long as we everyone acknowledges that this is like a a commercial move not an artistic move I think the conversation would be much in a much better place because what happens now is people have that cognitive dissonance so then they try to justify it like it's good game design like oh no man like buying the the Cosmetics of the game like brings whatever I've heard all kinds of dumb [ __ ] like that it's like come on or they often times think about it like oh I'm spending money so I can express myself well imagine if you could do that without having to spend the money wouldn't that be better like you know what if you don't have the money so you can express yourself now what about that and yeah I don't know the whole thing doesn't make sense to me I think too I think it puts developers who are more artistically minded in a little bit of a more comfortable position because then at least you can like if you do end up having to do this like you just okay to to put two two ends together here I got to do this at least you can uh come into it with a proper mindset you know come into it with a proper like okay I'm making a concession here I'm doing something that's degrading the game but you know hopefully in the future I can pull this back and I can adjust it and that type of thing I think that makes the conversation a lot healthier I've also seen in some indie games they've done supporter packs which is literally just like oh yeah if you if you want to support us here's like some small trimmings or whatever and you pay like five bucks or whatever and that is like I mean you're you're phrasing it deliberately as like do you like if you if you want to take this extra step you know or the same thing would be like putting a donation link on your steam page or something I don't even know if that's allowed actually but like whatever if you wanted to do something like that if you wanted to communicate that to your players right it gets so murky too because the question always becomes what is DLC what isn't and the part thing is is that this is a gray area and everyone tries to act like it's not but it really is because like let's say you make your game right and it comes out and when you make it you've put everything you have into that game you've got you've left nothing unturned every every thing you could come up with and put into that game you put into it and then you make money and then two years later you add in extra content and charge for it you know it's like oh I see what's the line between expansion pack which is what we used to have where that line but so like that sounds everything there sounds very above board sounds very like hey that makes a lot of sense and the thing about video games that makes them very unique is that they are these digital art forms that can grow in crazy ways and adjust in crazy ways that other art Farms can't you know you don't have songs don't just gain an extra minute or something that'd be interesting three years later they add an extra minute to it or whatever but so games are very unique in that aspect but then there's the other thing where we see this all the time too especially with larger games they have that [ __ ] already they that was in the initial budget that extra content they pull it they pull it and hold it how do you prove that they did that you you know it's very murky and so like these types of things it's really hard to just have like this whole overall blanket of does this work does this not work you know so I think the best you can do is it's like a case by case basis of like does this fall in line with the nature of the game does this fall fall in line with what you're offering the players does this seem legit or does this seem like uh gamification stuff or now you're kind of exploiting your player base a bit and that gets yeah that gets really complicated what's interesting about like for example Starcraft brood war is like one of is my favorite RTS that [ __ ] is an expansion yes that thing is not even the original game yeah but I would never want a universe where Starcraft brood War doesn't exist but at the same time you know what I'm saying it's like it's murky because if if if they [ __ ] it up and they made Starcraft you know double helix or something and it was a big pile of garbage but then that goes on top of the original Starcraft and ruins it I mean that happens too so it's like that's what I'm saying it's like Case by case of like you have to actually assess did this improve the game was it a good step forward with the game design or was it a big pile of crap that you're just throwing in there for money yeah it gets so complicated the metall lesson is almost like and I I do think that I don't know how this even happens like I come from a world like I'm not doing so well financially that I can just afford to like for example okay hell divers 2 came out recently and it's like $40 on Steam I'm not in a place where I can say oh yeah I'm just going to blindly throw at that no I need to research it like is it actually going to be fun do I have enough people who already own it or who are interested in playing that kind of game and like is it going to be a satisfying experience so I have to do some research in order to see is my money going to be spent well on this a $40 purchase is something I consider and so you know I don't know what kind of state people are in where they can spend 6070 $80 on like aleaa games and then be like oh I guess it's not finished yet or something because like they didn't finish the game released it I've really tried to get into the mind of this type of consumer rather than like you know what I mean like trying to understand bit that's what I'm saying yeah and I think where it comes from is a lot of these types of players are they feel something's missing and this is why this is hilarious not to be too mean but what you'll watch like other YouTubers like ones that cover more mainstream games and the reviews are like this hey 9 out of 10 9 out of 10 9 out of 10 great game great game and you just watch their videos and they're like oh they love every game ever they they're having such a great time and then randomly in middle of all this they'll drop a video that's like I'm depressed I can't stand games why aren't games fun anymore I don't like gaming anymore and then the next video n out of 10 there something happening under the surface here that you're not expressing where you know I feel like I try to on my channel I [ __ ] and complain more about YouTuber than other YouTubers but you at least know it won't shock you what I'm going to you know I won't have this veneer of I love everything I love everything and then I make a video I'm so depressed and miserable and I hate everything you know at least if I'm miserable and bitching about things you know what where it's happening but what I'm getting at is I think this type of gamer they feel something is missing but they can't figure out what it is and it's not they don't have the words and language and understanding because think of the critic space the critic space is a bunch of just garbage think of the YouTuber space most of it's just garbage everyone's just chilling everything n Masterpiece what's the monthly Masterpiece this month you know so they they're trying they're searching I think that's what's happening and so they're willing to take these bigger risks of like and they're wondering because these videos that you that you read and hear about like why isn't gaming fun anymore you know you would think a lot of these videos would have like because I made a video like this as like a response to the other videos and like had these bullet points and like this all this whole like philosophy about it but a lot of these videos it's more like they're they're asking the question why I don't understand they don't know they don't have an answer to they don't know so I think this is what's happening is this demographic of uh consumer they're searching they're searching for something but they don't know what it is so that's why they'll just be like all right I'll try it I'll I spend 60 bucks on this I'll spend the microtransactions they seem to like them they're searching I think is my guess they they they're not having fun with gaming but they used to have fun with gaming and they're just trying to find something to connect with and they're struggling I guess the money part is just incidental they happen to be well off that they don't care about that right yeah yeah yeah I me I think it makes a lot of sense because there's a lot of effective marketing admittedly we go back to the reviewer thing there's a lot of effective marketing on the idea of like this game's really good it does this thing that's like really new it's like this game that you know but it's different in these you know superficial ways but they don't say that they're superficial in the review and so they say they don't even say they're superficial they say they're better yeah sure right res evil remake oh yeah res Evil 4 remake isn't just this watered down fan version of Resident Evil 4 it is an improvement and a better Masterpiece it's a masterpiece and it's much superior to the original game so of course you see all this and you're like I love resin for I've got to buy this [ __ ] I mean it's better it's a masterpiece and then they play it and they're like I guess you know well the reviewer said so and and maybe it goes back to what we talked about earlier with the competitive stuff it's like well you know it feels better in the moment to not get you know attacked or I think most games the mainstream games at least now like if you bring up a lot of these things that we care so much about they're like so so if because if you can get the consumer through that first playthrough mission accomplished that's all they need they need you through that first playthrough get out of the refund period get out of like the period where you would even feel the need to refund it just get you through that first playthrough mission accomplished and you'll even see this in like game developer talks and stuff it's like the first the most important playthrough is the first playthrough because if they don't play through it once they'll never play through it again it's like well yeah but you don't even care if they play through it again obviously you just want that first playthrough so they don't refund the game uh but for me the first playthrough is the shittiest playthrough the best playthrough is always like the 50 15th 20th 40th imagine you you mentioned Metal Slug imagine you judged Metal Slug on the first playthrough of that game you'd be like [ __ ] this what is this getting randomly spammed by [ __ ] ran over by things like no but the most rewarding it's a it's a game that builds on itself same with strategy games imagine the first time you play a strategy game that's supposed to be the best version of it no that's not good game design you know you you said earlier like you you gave the tennis example of we were talking about difficulty and it's like I I expect to just be able to win my first tennis match as I've never played tennis before I maybe never even watched tennis before I no real I know sort of like the instruments that they use that's it it's like there's a funny anecdote that somebody shared a while back where they said that their friend um was going out to the store or something and so he told his buddy hey go hop on Quake I'm playing Quake 3 you can play Quake 3 with these guys and it's like a server of like 20 year veterans or whatever you know ridiculous amount of time and so he gets mopped the floor with and then 30 minutes later the guy comes back from the grocery store and he's like he's like well the game's pretty cool but I I thought I should be able to get some frags here and it's like cuz his mind is Warped by like oh yeah I'm playing with what would in any other discipline be like you know Grandmaster tier player or something you know some high up the ranked ladder if we had ladders for Quake and it's like you're playing against those guys and you just sat down and never never played it before and you you think because of the way the games have evolved or devolved maybe you know like you think yeah I should be able to to to win I should be able to get a couple kills even if I don't have a good scoreboard it would be better than if I got zero kills and so it's like why did I get zero kills in 30 minutes on this server well the reason is you haven't played you haven't practiced and it's a skill this is why I think uh your your fan base plays some fpss and stuff right yeah yeah I think this is why the Battle Royale genre has really taken off because I I'll give you an example of my little brother so my my brothers are not like really hardcore in the sense of like they love the types of genres that I like and everything but they are hardcore in that they are really [ __ ] good at FPS games like way better than I am and so like I especially my younger brother he just he was just raised on Call of Duty that [ __ ] just annihilates people in that game and you know even when he was a kid he was like quick scoping and [ __ ] I was like how are you even learning this he was learning it from YouTube and everything but anyway so I used to sit and watch him play Call of Duties and his win rate was like 80% he'd win free-for-all matches team matches like insane win rates then he started playing these Battle Royale games and I sit and watched him play him and he just get killed by the most random [ __ ] and like he was really practicing and getting out and his win rate was like 30% but he he'd get into like the top 10 pretty consistently but then from that point it's just toss up it's just a toss up what's gonna happen and I think that's why Battle Royale games have really taken off because as long as you're in there you do have a chance to win through pure luck if anything else you do have that viable chance versus is if you're playing against a Grandmaster Quake player where you're just owned there's no you know you're just owned there's nothing you can there's no like random thing he's gonna drop his Mouse and you're G to win you know there's no sort of like random element there no Mario Kart blue shell right there's nothing yeah there's no that's why Mario Kart has these elements like Nintendo knows they know we can't let you just annihilate your competition consistently so we'll add in these elements like blue shells and all the types of or like you can't get too far ahead to prevent that you know and that's really actually really good for popular games this is why you're saying before how like RTS players they want to play Team games because then you can get the RNG of an amazing teammate who's like god tier so the natural rngs you could be [ __ ] but if you just get a teammate who's really good you could still win so like that type of design is very popular right now and a lot of the popular games go for that versus like that Quake thing that poor guy yeah tell him all right just play the game for five more years and maybe you'll get a frag right yeah not GNA do that not gonna do that [ __ ] no and and but that's also kind of a shame because it feels like again if the and Quake is also a game where funnily enough the single player does not really match the multiplayer at all it's a completely two different worlds right U that was more maybe part of the ex I think that's fine for the time because it's such a progenitor but we haven't learned from had no idea had no idea and we haven't looked at that with a critical eye and thought how could this be better because you either have like the opinion like okay Evolution right like what you were saying we're now on Windows 12 you know like let's forget about Windows 98 it's like either you're like that and so you don't even you just disregard Quake which is kind of like chesterton's fence almost it's like well why would I why wouldn't I remove this thing that's in my way well maybe it's in your way because limitations are good and all this other stuff but also if you're or you don't even understand it you don't understand quake yes to begin right and so you either dismiss it out of hand because you're you know a modernist if you want to call it that from the game design school or you like overly put it on a pedestal and I find this with brood War people a lot too it's like I am born and raised brood War it was my first strategy game and it's definitely the one that I thought was like I'm absolutely guilty of this okay yeah for me it's like you either think that that's the best like okay I actually do think brood war is the best RTS that we've had but my conception of best is like if you had to put it on a relative scale I'm imagining something so much better that it's like a four you know and it's like if the best thing you've ever made in the whole genre is like a four out of 10 then most people are going to think well for one you've got ridiculous standards and maybe I do but for another it's like well what what could possibly be 10 like how could we get to 10 it's like well we learn by looking at what what came before us in the genre and we try to be almost a little bit historian about it and like figure out how did we get here that's one of the reasons I play so many old games is like was there anybody trying to do interesting things sort of around the corner from the popular games what can you find out if you go back to look at what what for time now we would consider them Indie releases it's like these weird Jank Korean games that they made that have like their own not Tera not Zerg not protos you know they have the same races basically but they're different stuff like that and so um you know anyway going back and through through all that has given me a perspective of like I know what people were thinking I know what people people were trying and yes in some ways it's different than what we have now but also what we're trying now or what we're seeing now is in many ways a Devolution just like what you were talking about with arcade games and stuff it's like you know yeah I don't know I look at the way that the genres are evolving and it's like especially for the single player content people just push that right off a cliff um there's not really any hope for for a translation between that and the competitive audience they just they take it for granted in that way where it's like what you said about the popular RTS games or popular fighting games where it's like oh yeah you guys will do it you guys will do our competitive development for us or or you know mainten fans and the annoying thing is is that the fans are more than happy because it gives them something to do right so it's like oh you know I am the I am the community representative of Starcraft or whatever it is and so like I'm more than happy to do your work for you blizzard don't you worry I'm more than happy to do it because it gets me kind of involved in stuff oh yeah it's it's it's a big mess but I wanted to uh build on your point because I really liked what you said about how Starcraft brood war is a four out of 10 if you're looking at it for like a like your the potential scale because this is a sand trap arcade players fall into this sand trap all the time because there's this there's this balance you have to find that's very difficult where you don't want to be like a lot of the game journalist types now where you disregard the past and the developments of the past you don't you just like dismiss them you don't understand the strengths but you don't want to do the other thing which a lot of my fan base can sometimes fall into or like older arcade thees can fall into where now you're putting the past on this Untouchable pedestal that it's it cannot be ped and when it comes to like creating great art uh you'll see this across all great artists not just game developers like the best artists like respect their forbearers but then they also kind of [ __ ] talk them a little bit because they're because in order to create something great you have to believe you can do something better so like you talk to Leo tooy and he'd be like yeah you know these other writers from the past are good and everything but I'm I'm going to take it to the next level [ __ ] and so like I think that game developing should be that way as well where you look at Starcraft brood War devil make CRI like this as well in the action game fan base like there's a lot of great strengths of that but there's [ __ ] you can look at like brood Wars and like you said like the single player campaign the AI I mean clearly the AI is garbage the game would be better if the the AI was more developed more robust more in line with the meta of the actual competitive gameplay but you get a lot of people who are very traditionalist or whatever You' call it where if the game did it in the past one way that that was good because they like it so if they keep doing it it's still good I T oh I run into this all the time when I do game reviews where I'll talk I'll critique an element of the a game and they'll be like you idiot don't you know that in the first game it had this and in the second game it had this I'm like yeah I do know that so what like there's like this grandfathering in of bad game designs like as long as it was shitty four times in a row it's good the fifth you know so yeah and parsing through that is very complicated though and that's the thing is like you can't you know it's very easy to just be like games of the past are you know underdeveloped we're doing the new thing now and it's also very easy to say well games of the past are perfect and we'll never touch them when the reality is like the it's more of like games of the past had strengths that are unrecognized and we should find those strengths but then there's also weaknesses obviously that should be improved and that's where you get to the next level so I definitely agree there that I could easily imagine a a game much better than brood War but the actual execution of that is much more complicated than people realize so well yes so you you have to both hold it in your head as a great example to learn from and also as a as a game that is only four out of 10 right that's at least in my experience sort of like your to you know your toso example or um you one of the things that that may me think of is how like you you also want to be critical of your own work if you've done a lot of in the space like that's how you learn I mean that's how you learn as a player as you look back at what you did as a player and see like okay I I used to be this bad now I'm this good or whatever and and so it's it's very similar there's like so much of that that's a track of like if you extrapolate out everybody working on design problems as one person or one body and you think of them as like are they learning from the mistakes as is this body is this organism learning from its mistakes well not really in in practice actually we've ignored a lot of what was interesting or or some something worth taking from from the past and we've also ignoring what's wrong about what we're dealing with right now like in general overall and so I'm I'm really hopeful that you know it's a weird space to be in because we're getting into territory now with the project that I'm working on right now where it's like we have no idea what the future is going to look like for it because nobody's we're getting into the territory where genuinely nobody's ever done it like nobody's ever made an RTS game that has brood War style like unit design where the the individual units matter and positioning of them matters and you got to be precise with the micro but also you're talking about like Army sizes that are pushing a thousand even in 1 V ones like if the game gets late enough and you're talking about like huge scale and you have 50 units per race to to explore and and Tech through and it's like the games can go for an hour and you haven't even seen all the units in the game yet even though it's gone for that long and so like we have both the opportunity for stuff to end earlier than that but also if the game goes long enough there's like little little on-ramps you can take to like increase scale little on-ramps you can take to more Tech and I haven't experienced a game like that despite having played so many different RTS games I know that there are some games that have the unit count maybe that we're talking about for individual like uh units of like oh yeah you have a th units in this RTS and then maybe this RTS has like a bunch of units that have like okay yeah there's like 50 different units but all the units are kind of the same and they overlap a lot and it's like oh yeah you know like this tank you know this tank is like this tank and then that this infantry is like that infantry and and there's a lot of difference in disparity where like each unit can kind of serve its own Niche but also be used some of them can be used more as a generalist and so you have to choose like part of the game becomes making a composition and also doing that at scale and that combin one of thinked don't know if's exle think off the top of your arcade or um you know action game type of environment for them where it's like there's a very okay hit me there's a very obvious example and I hate to like I'm saying we can't let the game journalists take this from us sure but um a very obvious example of that to to address your game for example I would say uh cuz schmu developers arcade developers run into this all the time is that unfortunately with certain C styles of design it's not that they can't catch on and be popular but sometimes it takes time for it to happen like you literally it literally sometimes takes time look at my freaking Channel I've been doing this for for forever and there's been many points in my channel where I'm like this is freaking hopeless you know there's no way and it's just this year where things it feels like now it's starting to get a little bit wider I'm breaking out of just this small tiny thing but it's time like that's all you know I've improved things here and there like honed in things but there's not like this magic bullet I shot at my channel and all a sudden it flipped it's just time and slowly like grinding on people over years wearing them down and I feel like with Innovative game design same thing sometimes innovative ideas sometimes they'll pop off right away but a lot of it especially like really fundamental sound good ideas it's just this slow like push forward and an example of that is Dark Souls I hate to you know use that again but imagine remember the first Dark Souls that wasn't it was it became something but if you look at where Elden ring now is commercially it's insane I I said this on like a random podcast one time where we're talking about Elden ring and I was saying you guys don't understand how much of a watermark Elden ring is for this style of game because I went to a party full of like Bros and stuff and like if they ever t don't really game and if they ever game they talk about uh Madden or Call of Duty not judging just how it is I went to this yeah I went to this party with a bunch of Bros and they're talking about like games and stuff and then one guy was like have you guys heard of this game that's really cool it's I've never seen anything like it I'm like oh what is it and I was like thinking he's like I was thinking it was gonna be something obscure of course he's like Elden ring you ever heard of that and all the guys at the party were like no what is it he's like it's this game and he was it it's it was so funny I didn't say anything CU I don't want to be a douche but it was so funny to hear like a casual Call of Duty bro explain Elden ring to other casual Call of Duty Bros and they're like what and he's like yeah and then and so I was like that's a moment that is some that is a moment of a Japanese action Style game breaking into a mainstream audience and you look at the sales of that game it's like [ __ ] insane like that is a game that bucked a lot of Industry trend and now the industry is like trying to copy it and everything's a Dark Souls clone now unfortunately but you can't take that away from what that series accomplished because before then if you go back and look at fromsoft they were just getting pile drived by game critics go back and read reviews of old fromsoft games they're just getting pile drived by IGN and all these other yeah so if you were to if you're like a industry person and you're looking at like what developers should we invest in for a great quarter or whatever they're they're looking at like Activision all this stuff no one in their right mind would have ever looked at from soft and been like this is a great idea let's invest in these like laughing stock kuso gay Japanese developers but from soft they're The Little Engine That Could they kept doing they kept at it and they kept iterating and building and now Dark Souls is this cultural force in gaming but it didn't start there and it wasn't overnight and so I feel like I feel like RTS and like some of these more hardcore genres will have a similar path where Like There's Hope for the genres and hope for these more hardcore genres but it's going to be this grind forward it's not going to be like you wake up one night and everyone's playing you know a new style of brood War but like slowly you just start infiltrating you start taking back players from the MOBA games like [ __ ] you we're taking these guys back uh slowly over time I think so like your game maybe when it first launches maybe you know it's going to be a little much for the casuals and they're going to be like this is way too Technical and stuff but you just slowly iterate build uh continue and uh I think that's the path forward so in it's really funny because in many ways you know we've already been described as the Dark Souls of RTS so I guess we'll see if we could live up to the the uppermost level of that yeah and we can't let the game journalists take that from us the Dark Souls stuff because they're latching on to that but they don't even understand what Dark Souls did they just looked at it and they're like oh it's popular and hard they don't understand the achievements of that series uh yeah it's opened the doors for a lot of action games now I think you know unfortunately the thing about Dark Souls is kind of complicated because it's like in one way it's like open the doors for more fundamental like checkpoints and difficulty and all that stuff then other way unfortunately it's like removed certain aspects of other games because they just copy Dark Souls so like for example character action games now they all feel like we need stamina bars now I'm like guys you don't need stamina bars in games like Dark Souls is an RPG don't forget the RPG is like stamina is an RPG mechanic don't put stamina bars in your action games but anyway but so you can't just copy it obviously but uh the path in terms of like what it did in terms of industry and that I think that's a really strong example that other genres and hardcore games can follow because it it wasn't an overnight success and it wasn't uh you know game journalists weren't hopping on its dick right away it took time well it's almost created its own sub genre that's why you hear Souls like everywhere right yes it is I legitimately yes I think it is yeah it's replaced the Devil May Cry like right yeah yeah well it's so funny um it would almost feel like beating a a dead horse a little bit but to to talk about the whole angle of trying to make your game more accessible because I almost feel like I've read an article and I haven't but I could read it in my brain of a develop of a a game reviewer saying what Dark Souls is missing is accessibility so that more players can EXP so many so many think pieces about stuff like that you miss the whole point of the game like the reason is popular if if Dark Souls was easy it wouldn't be what it is now because again like we were saying the difficulty is the game you know it it's so weird I think just because our reviewer class mostly comes from like you know the like frustrated writers or they want to they actually want to review films and stuff get jobs so they get jobs reviewing games and they try to treat them like that I almost feel like games writers are like that too by the way just as a quick aside I feel like game writers want to be writing movies and that's why they keep putting them into our games exactly no that is it yeah they they see that as a path into movies they're like I'm gonna write this amazing game and sometimes it is so it is what it is but uh yeah but with what I'm saying though is that they don't understand like imagine if you applied this criticism to other types of art You' you'd be laughing out of the room what if you're like well you know Miles Davis made some great jazz and great compositions but don't you think they're a little complicated and like you need to kind of know about jazz a little too much so why didn't he just write pop songs you know it's like why doesn't why doesn't why isn't there a Miles Davis album with like a pop song in it or why isn't there you know like those more experimental films like what if they made what if they explain the plot a little bit more it's like no obviously not and that's like the art the difficulty is part of that art if if Dark Souls was easy it would literally be a different game literally okay so I have a couple angles we can go on here we're pushing the twoh hour mark uh I I guess I'll say because I I feel like I could talk to you about like five or six more times at this length at this rate so we we definitely have a lot of open ends that I'm trying to figure out how to weave back I want to push back on a point you mentioned about because you talked about art as like games as art and you you made a great answer that really have been sitting sitting here thinking about in the back of my head about how games are more like music a good you know story or whatever in a game is more like music as opposed to a narrative I think it's possible maybe this is niev but I think it's possible to reclaim some narrative elements within a game without it being like you described and I agree with this description of a lot of games is that they are boring they're mind numing you walk and you mash the a key or whatever and it's like yeah just get get me past this section I want to go back to playing the game and I describe that as like the story has to catch up to wherever you are in the game because it's like oh we we didn't you know integrate it properly and I think the the problem is kind of like what we were talking about with certain aspects of game design not being mapped out is that it feels like the stories are never actually intertwined properly in a way that feels like it's an value ad instead of this Sideshow detraction that you hope you can Skip and maybe the developers forgot to program in the skip cut scene button or whatever and it's like you know okay that's not really it like I have to play death stranding at some point point and that's basically all about that as far as I know so you know that that you know just looking at it from that lens it's like okay how do I make it so that these are the same and I think you can tell a story without using dialogue at every step or cut scenes like one of the things that I was thinking about in the context of an RTS is what story does it say if your opponent is like like imagine an AI enemy and they're kind of like trolling you like their first strategy is to like Cannon rush you or something and it's like they're proxying or whatever and they're doing sort of cheese and they only start taking you seriously after you like defeat that like really handily and then they'll start to like play more seriously right and it's like that tells you a story like they think you're a fool like they don't want to pay attention to you at all so I feel like if you had a story that was essentially like the premise if we go back to the premise because one of the great things that you made is like stories are often like scenarios or premises if those can be good for games if the premise is you know okay maybe there is like a grander narrative but we just look at the individual Mission premise of this level you're going to get attacked by somebody who thinks that you're a push over and just wants to rush you down like that's actually what happens in the tutorial he just tries to steamroll you with early units he sees if he can like abuse like a particular strategy that you can learn very quickly to try to deny him and it's like you know if you deny him that then the map is really defensible and easy to hold out on but he might still overwhelm you with time and that's like when he'll get more grumpy because he's you're wasting his time in his mind and so if if that's happening you don't really need dialogue that much to even communicate that it's like it's it's right there uh one of the things that was interesting recently is we had people say oh he's talkative when he's owning you like when he's beating you but if you start beating him he's he shuts up and like that's because he's starting to take you seriously again it's like kind of part of the the thought anyway and so I feel like you can have stuff like that and part of it is influence in my own Journey making stuff but I just I always thought this I always thought that like the story The lud narrative dissonance right the story not being connected to the game is not something that is like it doesn't have to be there like you could do it better and I don't know if you've played games that have made you reconsider that either but that's my my initial thought is like okay yes most games that have like involved narratives and stories don't do it properly because the gameplay doesn't actually tell a coherent story but I don't necessarily know it has to always be abstract I think it can be like more concrete like this guy doesn't really consider you a major threat so instead of him just taunting you through dialogue which will get really boring after a while especially if he doesn't back it up in the in the game playay the gameplay will tell you that like the fact that he just disregards you enough to sort of like proxy you or whatever is going to be enough to tell you that it would be like if somebody tried to beat you in a fighting game with only using one move and it was like a Cheesy strategy that as soon as you figure out how to counter it they've got to play differently and then when you do that they start to switch it's like oh this character or person in the game and story doesn't respect me or my character or whatever and I have to prove them to them that I am worth that respect I feel like that's something that I've just never seen within RTS before so I don't know if you've seen that in any game before but that would be something that I would push back on as like a way to do it so the way it works in my opinion is like there's certain elements of what you would consider storytelling that work better than other elements so with like characterization you can characterize someone through gameplay so like yeah there are examples of this in like fighting games and stuff or like the B like think of kof Final Bosses where they're like Ultra powerful like in game like they obliterate you and they taunt you and stuff like that's an example of using gameplay to characterize something and I think that works because the issue you run into with narrative in gameplay and why I I compare it to music more is music is very repeatable and it's meant to be replayed so you listen to a song thousands of times it's meant to be replayed gameplay is like that as well gam play is meant to be replayed over and over so there's certain things you can do in gaming that are like narrativity that work in terms of replayability so like characterizing a character that doesn't fall apart upon replay right he's still that character and he's still acting in this way and yeah it creates a distinctive gameplay experience so like for characterization it's fine but the stuff with lud narrative dissonance that's a problem has to do more with immersion and realism and that's like that that ship is gone because the problem and like plot because for example let's say the walking section the famous walking section where in term there's a there's a conflict of interest that happens where if you have a character in your game that's like trolling you and acting a certain way that doesn't conflict with replayability it doesn't conflict with game design it creates a distinctive gameplay experience but where it starts to conflict is with like walking sections where the goal of the player is to play the game to get to the game play but then you have this walking section that creates like plot points and tells you a story but that's in part of the gameplay and what does what replayability does that have what value does that have in terms of game design if you took this story out would you ever add a section where you just stand there for 30 seconds and nothing happens like that would be absurd in like actual game design but then they make they justify that game design decision with some story [ __ ] so I think if you think about it like you're putting the game design as the priority and then you have like the narrative as a secondary layer over the top of it that works much better that's why I was saying like dark souls and doom and these types of games that's what they're doing they they they don't sit down and say well okay I want to really tell you the the life story of this character so I'm going to have a a section where you walk in his in his room as a baby and pick up a ball and push the ball around that way you get into the mind of the character but gameplay Wise It's a nightmare and it's shitty like max pain has [ __ ] like this where you like run through the hall it's like that's cute one time then you get to that section the fifth time you're play oh my God I have to run through the hall again uh so that's the type of thing I'm talking about where if you put the game play first and then you even find ways to like make it replayable and contextual I think that's fine and I think there's games that pull that off pretty well like King of Fighters [ __ ] uh regul at the end or whatever his name is uh or um what's his name the other guy from King of Fighters geese geese Howard you know like these powerful beasts and it's like it's integrated into the game design so I think that works but I think the problem you run into a lot with like modern games and modern RPGs is they are putting the plot elements over priority of the gameplay and so it really degrades replayability and then you have to ask yourself what why am I playing like am I playing for the story or am I playing for the gameplay and you're going to have a division some people are playing for the story some people are playing for the gameplay and the two don't always match up where like the the guy who the game journalist who's sitting there and he's playing and there's having the walk in section explaining the plot he's like this is the best thing ever because all I care about is the plot in the story and I don't want to do that whole fighting enemies stuff and then you have the guy who's trying to play Bayonetta for like s-ranks and he has to do a section where he runs through a hall for a minute like okay what am we accomplishing here so that's the problem with the the Ludo narrative stuff is that if a lot of that comes from the solution is backwards basically a lot of the lud narrative stuff what they're Sugg suting isn't okay forget the story make the story fit the game play instead what it's suggesting is oh you need to change the game play so like in uh what's that one that Naughty Dog game where you go around and you're like a Indiana Jones type guy oh I can't remember what it is just CA no not just cause oh man Uncharted Uncharted Uncharted yeah like an example of that was like oh the character in Uncharted is shown as like this great guy and like kind of a pacifist in the story but in the gameplay you kill a bunch of people and so like the the conclusion a lot of these game journalists go to isn't all right well then don't make him a pacifist make him a psychotic murderer so that way the gameplay makes sense instead it's like no make the game play fit the story so I think it's just the way you you view it is backwards if you if you fit the story to the game playay correct if you fit the gameplay to the story incorrect because ultimately what is the core right what is the core of what people going for the gamepl that's the core so that's my thoughts on it I think I definitely agree with what you're saying for sure like when it comes to the whole I feel like it's a misallocation of resources and a total like they've got it backwards in terms of what they should be focusing on and maybe that's also Downstream of like Mass Appeal again like that that does degrade the artistic quality of the product if it's you talking about it you I I think of a a really good analogy here which is uh like you know hipop and that type of thing because if you if you talk to people about story in music the obvious example is hip-hop right like the obvious example is well hip-hop has lyrics that tell stories often and that's pretty cool but the let's not forget that rappers and hip-hop artists know you need to be on beat and you need to rhyme like that so you have to actually structure your story and your lyrics around beats Rhythm and Rhymes you can't you can't do this thing where you release a rap album where that's just like poetry the just free free verse poetry and people are like what the hell is this and you're like dude I'm not going to be constrained by beats and rhythms you know I'm my artistic expression exceeds that it's like okay write actual poetry then or write you know or whatever it is you know it's a different art form at that point if you do freee non-rhythmic rap it's just poetry it's not the same art form that would be my my same thing like if you want to write uh you want to make like an interactive game where the story takes place in the game play secondary like that can exist like a visual novel for example but that is a distinctive art form like I like visual novels because they are not games they they are they consider themselves a distinctive art form I think that's healthier than this weird thing we have now where it's like Final Fantasy 7 is a game but it's also a story but it's also a game you know and the two elements like don't super fit well together it doesn't really know what it is in any given doesn't know what it is yeah like Final Fantasy 7 probably could be like way better as like a visual novel if you really think about it but if you say that to Final Fantasy fans piss them off but like imagine Final Fantasy 7 like it's just the best most well-written visual novel of all time they probably would like that better than the weird grindy weird RPG mechanics because I've asked RPG fans all the time like what if they made an RPG that didn't have Final Fantasy 7 story but had its gameplay like how much would you like that would that be iconic at that point or would it be kind of just lame so yeah that's that's a that's a good litmus test too it's like what what part are you actually valuing in your estimation of what it is and so ffs story I think right for sure and I still think it's possible like my thinking is I can I can get you hooked on like a good character in a good setting like good setting like settings most settings and most most PLS settings are very important because you need them to contextualize even if you don't have like for example I don't really care about story and gaming all that much at all like I love stories but I go to usually other art forms for that but you need some sort of visual container for what's happening right and so like the setting is like one of the key things like one of the best things in in video game stories like sin and Punishment I love the Aesthetics and setting and Vibe of that game I have no idea what's happening plot-wise but I love the visual setting and the vibe and all that so yeah setting's huge I think setting characters Aesthetics all of that I think is much more important than plot I also think that when you have games with the really clunky story execution a lot of the times the plot and both probably the setting as well when it it wouldn't hold up to scrutiny but especially the plot they're just not meant for games and that's where you get into like the backwards design like for me I painstakingly designed these these these settings these like if you want to call them universes or worlds these game worlds for the purpose of being a game world and such that when you play it or when you dig into it in any amount because it's gonna there's going to be information that's passively there you can like look pay attention to if you want or you can just let it be window dressing but either way like oh it makes sense like all of the Infantry that you see are actually like clones uh and that's why you can get so many of them right and it's like I mean there's like some they're clones of people they they've been sentenced to many deaths and they are their clones of gener so it's just it's it's kind of dark but it's like you know okay like that's color and flavor for the the faction that's using them that way and it's like okay that's great and so that that way it's like now we can explain the scale that we're reaching in the game and so like the universe kind of accounts for that whereas like if it's just like in Starcraft 2 like you you have like this Rebellion that happens in the beginning of the game and it's like some Insurrection stuff and you don't have that many people and then at the end you're like you're still following the same guy that led that Rebellion to fight like a dark God in the void and it's like like that doesn't make any sense at all when you look at it's like who's still going to follow and and by the way the whole reason you're following him to begin with is cuz he's like in love with a character who doesn't love him back and it's like well then the plot doesn't make sense cuz who is going to in the right mind lead like a rebellion and be followed by soldiers who are going to be Ser survi to him in exchange for him getting his love like that's not a cause that they really care about I don't think it's not like you know doesn't make any speaking of like gameplay story integration I think a game that does a good job of it is StarCraft brood war and Starcraft I don't know about two because I don't like two so I dismiss everything about it but uh brood War and the original Starcraft I think they did a great job in certain ways because is the plot of Starcraft or Starcraft 2 really like you know is that like Dune good no obviously not it's like basic [ __ ] but the the setting the characters the races you know that that stuff I think is Iconic you know Zerg protos tan it's iconic and so it it tells things and like they play differently and that fits into like the way their races are like Teran play technically cuz they're technum and S rush over everything cuz they're the like internet or sorry like uh Universal insects or whatever like so like the you know what I'm saying the characterization in the gameplay are really good the plot God you can skip I mean thank God imagine if you played Starcraft brood war and you had to sit through the [ __ ] uh briefing every time but I think it's not that I think you should get rid of the briefings like I kind of like them I think they're fun and they do kind of have a fun context but you can hit skip get that skip button in there because I think like the funny thing is is like as like conceptual as you can get about this stuff and like how philosophical you can get like the Practical solution I think has basically been figured out just don't forget it which is Skip you know it's like really a it's it it is fixing the issue of like okay if you want to play Starcraft brood war and you want to just play through the campaign and fight stuff you can just hit skip one it takes two seconds you're in the game if you want to go through the story and you want to hear about all the you know Rainer and carrian and their love and what happens there and how she breaks his heart and everything you which I think is kind of fun you can do that too but you don't have to every time the problem would be if you start the game and then you had to sit through that every time you played oh my God and modern games do that they have so many sections like this you have to walk down the hall you have to carry the person down the H like why just make that a cut scene that I can skip yeah please yeah a lot of a lot of sections in games could be could benefit from being turned into cut scenes and uh but also the the cut scene thing is a bit weird to me because I also think you know you've seen video compilations crop up on YouTube of like Starcraft 2 all cut scenes or whatever it's like four hours long or watch I watch the bror ones sometimes I'll P it up yeah and so you get to but you get to see like all of these like and maybe I don't know if it includes the briefings or not but it's like all the story information right and it's like and hours long and so without this non-interactive material if it doesn't respect your time very well by like kind of going on and on which is sort of like the walking stuff and it's also not very attention grabbing then you're going to kind of zone out and if you skip it or if you zone out which might as well be skipping it except you still wasted your time then you're going to really be confused at what's going on in the game and that's another thing that I think is really awkward about games with cut scenes is that if you basically if you need to watch the cut scene in order to understand the plot then at minimum can you make the cut scene like engaging and interesting which is really hard to do it's it's really hard to do if you're not using film because you get to see all these like micro Expressions on people's faces and have experienced actors tell like an interesting story without using their mouth you know they just like on their face you can see it you don't get any of that just by you know like watching digital Recreations of it that are kind of done as like emulation of a Hollywood film you know like the biggest thing is that new DMC game I guess there's two of them now but like the DmC Devil May Cry like literally called that oh yeah has a yeah it has a it actually has like a film team like they had a film team and like writers and stuff like for specifically just the cut scenes like they had all Department of cut scene people and it's like if you have that you've already kind of missed it for me like I can't I don't think I can connect with you if you have to have like a whole Staffing Group specifically for the the cutcenes because that you're going to have to really do a great job and basically make a film inside a game and even then I don't know that I would want to watch a film while playing a game so I don't even think that would cut it but it that would be the minimum requirement and nobody hits that requirement you know yeah the the ultimate answer is one that annoys people because the ultimate answer is is like you for like I said you can't tailor the gameplay to the story if you want to do that make a visual novel or make a different medium but you can't communicate really complex crazy [ __ ] in gameplay you can communicate certain things in gameplay but you can't communicate you know very specific details and stuff in gameplay so what you have to do if you want like a very pure you want a very pure form of Story gameplay integration is you have to simplify that story into something that can be understood a little bit more uh instinctually right not so specific but people want like specific plot narrative [ __ ] in games so if you want that I think you have to do this kind of Band-Aid solution where you like stick it next to it you know and it it doesn't integrate well but you if you try to integrate it in there it you're like like I said it's like you trying it's like me trying to wrap the Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby is a beautiful work of literature can you turn that beautiful work of literature into a hip-hop song no you can't so if you want to make a hip-hop song about The Great Gatsby you have to revise it you have to simplify it you have to change it you have to shorten it you needs to be three minutes long you need to hit like the main plot points and little verses and stuff it's just a different medium with different constraints and I think that's the way the games so there's really funny examples of this like Guilty Gear has this very complex crazy ass plot but you can't obviously understand that while fighting each other so what Guilty Gear does that's kind of funny it's interesting is they literally have an anime film that they just include in the game in the menu so you go to the menu and you just watch an anime and that's Guilty Gear I'm like that's kind of a cool idea that's kind of a cool solution it's like if you really want the story it's it's well done well paced I mean it's anime it's not like the greatest thing ever but it's like better talk about getting fans on the Internet by the way with that comment yeah I know exactly I I I think even anime fans have to admit like in the tier list of anime I don't think the Guilty Gear anime is gonna be like super high you know it's like Ghost in the Shell or something you know but my point is like that that is kind of more on track with then trying to have this weird campaign type of thing and all that like it's little bit more it's like accepting that and I I think that's the best like like the the briefings in Starcraft it's like is that great integration no but it's like it's it's compromising in a more elegant way than trying to jam the story Into the gaml and you know but people but developers get so hung up on this they'll start doing crazy [ __ ] it's like let's just take a step back just make it a cut scene dude I know it's not perfect but it's it's better than you having a mission where you walk through a hall having nightmares yeah four times and the RTS equivalent is like moving three units around instead of building a base you know when those kind of missions crop up it's yeah I mean it's because you're not it's not even like a drill where you're like learning how to micro something yeah yeah it's just straight up you know you have less gameplay now and I don't know where that started like it's been in basically every RTS that I've played yeah BR like old warcraft's have that has that the First Command and Conquer has the Commando missions right and so it's like you've got literally one unit so I don't know what's up with that man that's not my cup of tea but and maybe that's even where you can trace like the lineage of mobas and stuff too but as much as it's like okay sure there's some interesting gameplay that you might be able to get out of it it's clearly that clear that the game wasn't designed for it and so just like you shouldn't make it like levels or whatever you want content where the game is not supporting that content or the premise of that content you also shouldn't be doing that with a story either like the the story or the setting or whatever they need to be supported by what you have what you can use what you can make use of within your genre and so I do think that a lot of design you have to Band-Aid something in there just remember okay this is a Band-Aid let's make it skippable like some maybe you can't fit everything in there and you really want to yeah so you're just like okay I Gotta Throw a cut scene in here it's got to happen just make it skippable please for the love of God yes yeah that'll at least help on repeat one of the things that's kind of interesting is you mentioned um like what will hurt replayability something I haven't seen people do in the RTS cut I'm sure it's happened but in in RTS games in levels I have never seen the second time I play the mission the dialogue is like snappier and so we skip like maybe like a lot of times I like to do this sort of convention where the start of a mission especially it's like the first mission in a campaign or something maybe the intro is like a little bit more wordy and so you listen to that the first time through but if you keep losing and you keep restarting that's just going to grade on you and you can skip the dialogue you can hit the Escape key and it just like shortens the trick or whatever but um if if you don't know that or if it's not not occurring to you it might just annoy you and so what we do is like when you restart the the tutorial uh it basically becomes like a three sentence thing where it's like each character that's super smart yeah each character that's speaking in that mission has one line and they they basically establishes like the the officer guy says I'm I'm Coming For You Cadet and then the your your Aid guy says yeah and I'm on I'm on comms and then your guy is like let's get it done or something and so that's it that's just it's like over in 10 seconds because because yeah that's what I'm saying like if you start to view the problem correctly you can come up with much better Solutions so like if you start to view the problem of like okay the problem with story and gameplay is that on repeat the story is going to start to degrade so if you change it to like it's context sensitive so on the second playthrough your guy's not saying the same 15 lines instead he's just like we get him this time or something you know it's like recognizing that the game is being replayed that's so smart cuz now now now it's like okay we're on the right track here now it's like the game is recognizing that it's meant to be repeated it's recognizing that repeating the same [ __ ] 15 times is going to drive players up the wall and they're going to go to their option settings and they're going to take your you're going to take your text or your voice and slide that [ __ ] down to zero I had to do that with a game uh uh that I just reviewed called uh slave zerox was the name of the game it's like this kind of character action 2D beat them up type of thing and it's got all this vocal coms just constantly the the idea of it is like oh it's nice that it's not like having cutscenes I like that so it's playing over top of the gameplay but the problem is is like share the first time I'll listen to your vocal comms I am not listening to that 15 times so like if they should take your idea of like okay we'll play the vocal comms the first time you play then after that it'll switch off or it'll be a shorter thing or something oh sometimes the event yeah well thank you the event is sometimes also a read if you're repeating it and like this happens like I don't know like an somebody arrives in the middle of the of the map and they deploy as your ally it's like you want to know that that's coming like a minute in advance and so if we have a dialogue event that's there then maybe we shorten that but it's still there in the second playthrough so that you know like okay that's happening right yeah and so that it can still be useful from a from communicating gameplay information using that so you wouldn't want to necessarily skip all of them but also like maybe that's an option in the settings too if you somebody really doesn't like it but I I just think of it like definitely having you can basically like I agree that putting it in and then making it skippable is a Band-Aid and if you can instead of having it be a Band-Aid it just elegantly flows and like it accounts for all that that's like kind of the designer dream of I accounted for everything like we have this joke my brother and I play video games all the time and oftentimes we're s sat there like coming through like the steam store and all these other stores looking for something anything to save us from not being able to play a good game and when we get through and we play something and something it's very obvious that like this is a hamfisted solution that doesn't work we we jokingly say well these developers thought of everything cuz it's just like it's so obvious that like that doesn't work but they had to do it because they didn't want to actually go in and solve the root problem and so that feels like an option right it's like you shouldn't as as the player you shouldn't have to go in and turn the volume to zero turn the slider off yeah there you know the sad thing too is that a lot of like reviewers and critics now oh man this happens all the time where if it's at all possible to avoid on the user side it's like fine yeah so you'll complain you'll you'll say like like for example let's say your game uh starts to get a little bit more popular among RTS players and this aspect of your game design where it shortens on the the dialogue on the second repeat like if I was uh a reviewer of RTS games right your game comes out it has this feature and I'm like this is good this is what game should do then your game has now set a precedent for reviewers in other games to be like where's the secondary uh repeated dialog skip where is that but if no game does it it doesn't become part of the Paradigm and so then you have to like have Solutions of like well if you can turn off the voice that's fine right like uh and so the problem is like a lot of players will accept really unelegant like workarounds rather than like expecting really smart design and so like you the game has like it has to be done before people will accept it as like a thing that needs to be done yes absolutely yeah i' I've experienced this so many times because people will people and and again like I've been talking a lot about this stuff because it's honestly it's what I've been doing we this is actually the first time we're having another uh one of these like interview conversation type deals on in in some time and because during that whole time I've been working on this game and so it's very fresh in my head but I know how it is the other thing to bring up that's on this topic is like people will come in and they'll be like I never knew I wanted to play IED it thinks side tangent but like you know you have different races or factions in an RTS and I think of it kind of in the same way it's like if I made a new race because we're going to add another race to the game this year and it's like if I if if I had a fourth race uh and the game only had three races and the fourth race is like not an overlap between the others but like has some characteristics that are all its own that lend towards very different play Styles like you were talking about how like Zerg feel more swarmy and it's it's kind of interesting that like the muisk magic box micro that Stacks all the mutas is like really obviously not an intended feature but it makes it feel like it's one organ out of many different organisms or something like it feels zery in that way it's really weird that work out very zery and it was totally like incidental but that's the one that that's most used like sometimes you'll see it with rates but very often it's that and so that's really interesting but uh if I add a fourth race and then that race is like it it Fields your play it gives you a vector to express a different play style that you like do it calls to it speaks to you but you never would have guessed that happens it's kind of like that but like on a overall game level it's like here's a game that does something differently and I'm sure you've had plenty of these kinds of experiences just discovering some game that for the first time that has like game that did this for me uh it's a game called devil daggers so it is an FPS type of game uh so this was recommended to me by a patreon patron one day he just messaged me he's like I think You' like Devil daggers I look at it it's like this FPS it's got a cool like PS1 sort of vibe to it I'm like this seems kind of cool I play devil uh devil daggers and it is probably one of the most influential games I've played in my mind in like I think about this game all the time because it does all these things that I'm like that's a good idea but I never would have thought of that on my own that's a good idea but I never would have thought of that like it does so many so I talk about this game all the time and I had no idea this thing it just appeared and it was doing all these things that I didn't know I wanted wanted games to do until it did it like one of the big ones is that devil daggers you know you're talking about like ladder anxiety and like ranked anxiety that even happens with arcade games where people like if they play score Attack Mode they're like more shy to play score Attack Mode because of the leaderboards and stuff anyway what devil daggers does is it turns every time you play into ranked every time you play it takes your PB every single time you have no choice you have to do it but what the game does is it kind of just makes it feel like normal like it's just like oh you're just playing devil daggers and so and then when you get a PB the game's like oh boy and it shows like your PB and it shows your rank rising up the ladder and it's like oh my God this game has figured it out it it because it remove It's the Best of Both Worlds it gets you to play competitively but it removes the anxiety because you have to so there's not that like and then it takes your PBS so like when you do a really shitty run it doesn't like shove the shitty run in your face and say oh you suck look look how bad you are instead it just sits and quietly waits for you to get a PB then once you get it it's like you did it you did it and so devil daggers is you know I don't play that many games for score like I'm a little bit more selective devil daggers is one of those games that like through sheer game design power made me start doing it like I'm like oh my God I I like this you know and so I like and you get a PB and devil dagers you're like popping off and so the game within its own design because I would have never tried to score competitively in it without this type of stuff so now I look at that I'm like oh my God arcade games need to do this this is so brilliant this is genius and I don't think he came up with this system from arcade games like he's definitely inspired by arcade games it has a very in arcade inspired design but this leaderboard thing is revolutionary I've never seen other another game do this and so I would have never thought to do that with a leaderboard until I played devil daggers so yeah like these types of things you can't understand how good they are until they exist basically right no it's G giv me a lot of thoughts about like there's like probably a lot of cases where you can you have to make the initial translation of like FPS game or arcade game mechanic into whatever game you're working on but I feel like there's something to be gleaned from every game that is legitimately Closer To Masterpiece or whatever then you know IGN is talking about obviously right like you can find is one right and you can find games that are like that out there in the world uh like we we have a channel on our server called good games exist it's almost like you have to say that because some people forget it sometimes so that's funny and anyway it's like you know the every now and then we we'll get like a a recommendation for something and it'll it'll it's never in the RTS genre but I can find a way to take a good thing from that game and put it into this or whatever I can I can translate the concept anyway or or see maybe it's something we're already doing and I see that and I'm like oh yeah here suggestion that I'm I'm talking to RPG fans I'm going to make a video about which is scoring systems for for your games so like arcade games have developed scoring systems have really hon that in because that's like one of their main design features but I've recently been realizing Del daggers has scoring obviously that like a lot of other genres could benefit from scoring a lot not just arcade games like imagine okay like let's talk about brood War because that's the RTS I know really well so you you play like the campaign in brood War right and then you have like a mode in brood War like score attack mode or even you just build it into the campaign like you you you do things that are like more meta correct and you get rewarded for them with like a scoring ranking system so like let's say you harvested a [ __ ] ton of materials you built like all these different encamps you swarm the [ __ ] out of your enemies you killed them really fast and all these metrics are getting analyzed and then comput it into a score so that so that even if you're a single player guy who never plays the competitive game online because you have you have ladder anxiety or you hate other people I can understand that sometimes you don't want to deal with other people so you just want to play the game single player but what you could do with the single player content is you could make a metag game within the single player content that mirrors the competitive game so like your performance metrics are rewarded so that the single player person has a reason to play effectively Beyond just getting the clear or just that's what we call in arcade games just getting the win of the level like there's a there's a more meta reason to like play better even in this so it adds replayability to the campaign it adds performance metrics that you can't totally capture with just normal level design like I think RPGs would really benefit from this and I think there are a few RPGs with like kind of ranking scoring systems but I think that's more of a if that was more of a standard for the single player content I think You' have it it would have its own sort of life outside of just being a shuttle to the multiplayers like oh I'm like the highest ranked single player on this map and people just grinding your maps and stuff it just adds so much depth and replayability that you can't get without it so that's something yes it needs to be done well yeah much better much better speedr running right well here's here's something you can do that this is some game design [ __ ] that again I think is getting rediscovered by more mainstream genres is something called rank are you familiar with what rank is just like what do you mean by rank yeah anyway it's a it's a arcade term so what rank is is when you're playing certain games like battle GGA for example um the developers of battle grega the the arcade board operators had a bit of a problem which is arcade players especially schut players turned into beasts they were so good at these games it's unhuman how good they got at the games so what would happen is you run into a problem as a game designer right so arcade games they need to you just walk up and you put a credit in and play right you they need to be made for that context but how do you account for this difficulty issue because you have massive disparities in skill you've got a dude who walked into the arcade for the first time who's going to put his quarter in you need him to play because he makes you money but you can't make the game easy because then your your hardcore customers who spend hundreds and some cases thousands of dollars sitting at your arcade they need a way to keep playing how do you do this the the answer was rank so what rank is another term for it is dynamic difficulty which is that like as you get better and perform better your score gets higher the game gets harder not easier harder so like with your like with your campaign let's say you add in some kind of rank Dynamic and AI type stuff so the first guy playing through it it's like the base difficulty of what you want but then the guy who's getting who's trying to go for like the world record scores on your map like the enemies get more aggressive and there's like bonus spawns and like enemy like more [ __ ] starts to happen the better you play and the better you score and the way you could account for that is through the scoring system so like as they're scoring more the rank gets higher the enemy gets more aggressive bonus spawns or like surprise enemy attacks or whatever it would be but in an RTS but uh that's something to think about too is Rank and I don't know if rtss have that Dynamic rank like that no I I feel like they've mostly steered clear of dynamic difficulty the thing that I always thought was that if you could do Dynamic difficulty well cuz I'm familiar with it more in the context of like halflife 2 where it's like oh you're low on health well make the next he pickup be Health instead of whatever it was supposed to be and then you lose like any idea of like oh I'm specifically trying to find the spot that has Health on the map or whatever that's like more interesting from a a challenge standpoint so I'm I'm mostly used used to it making games easier as opposed to harder yes harder yeah that's the only an arcade thing only because because in console games making the it's not profitable to make the game harder there's no reason to do that you're just shooting yourself in the foot you know it's only in the arcade environment because you again difficulty is content you need that content because otherwise the dude's going to walk in he's a hardcore player he's gonna beat your game in one try he'll never play it again so you you need to it's funny it's it's I think it's beautiful but it's funny it's like an inversion of how people look at game design you want to punish players for playing well you want but you're you're punishing them in the sense of making it harder but you're rewarding them in the sense that you're giving them more content you're giving them more depth so if you think about it in that term difficulty is content you're actually rewarding them but you're a lot of people won't see it that way in like mainstream sense because difficulty is punishment a lot of a lot of people will think of it that way I mean just like the number of people who play the tutorial and then will be killed by it and like they'll lose in the tutorial they'll think of that as a mark of Shame when really what I'm trying to teach them is no it's expected you will lose so you can get better right and so I do think that's a challenge that I face in that I think rtss could really benefit from that in their single player campaigns where you get the better you get you know you're like top ladder player and you play the campaign and the campaign's like throwing everything at you you see isn't that a cool idea I think one of the ways that I I could imagine it working in an RTS because a lot of times you're playing against the same opponents in Universe like multiple times throughout like the whole campaign and so the thing that I've thought of for a very long time now is what if you won the last time you fought against this particular character you eliminated him by you eliminated his army using like air units and you like cheesed him or something you did some cheeky strategy and then the next time he like preemptively knows that remembers that puts an defenses yeah exactly he's got turrets there something yeah and and it's like a different map it's a different scenario and maybe it's like he's got a different team maybe it's even something like you attacked him with bio and he doesn't want to change his play style to account for that but he has a different Ally in the next mission than he would have if you attacked him with Mech and so it's like it's taking into account the player strategies and then like because another thing that I I wanted to say earlier about the story too is that like I think enough times because you had you had pushed back over like the idea of characterization isn't really the same thing as plot but I think like enough times of characterizing something and interactions within the things that are being characterized is almost like a plot of its own and so if you think about it like okay I beat this guy in the tutorial it's one Mission so that's not really a plot but it's like if I if I fight against this guy over and over there's like a an evolving tale of like what I did in this campaign that that could be construed as a plot but like in the context of anyway the the idea of the dynamic difficulty thing I think that's actually what it's about like the single player content can be so much better if we have the idea of you're doing this for many times over you're um you know you know not only are you replaying it but it's adapting yeah it's adapting to you and there's going to be some element of that that's always going to be there even if we don't do like a deliberate like oh you beat us with this strategy we're going to change our our tactic as a result because you know we're designing our AI to be receptive like Scout and figure out what you're doing and then plan accordingly so there's always going to be some adaptation uh intrinsic to the the product but the idea of like a very simple example is that I have like an AI in one of the early missions where if he Scouts that you've built an air structure or even he Scouts an air unit then he will respond by building anti-air defenses around his mineral line so that you can't harass his workers right so it's like very basic stuff and it's not that much of an expense so it doesn't put him too far behind if he does do it but it kind of like bare minimum protects him against like something like that and so but that's only if he Scouts it he's not going to blindly do it he doesn't map Haack and see that You' done it he need that's great and so that's where if you can get it sneakily hidden somewhere and and proxy and you can surprise him at the same time while holding off his normal attack like then there's it's more like a conventional game where you're trying to do that against a real human player very small initial naive example but it still works in that context and so having stuff like that is already good and I guess it's kind of borderline Dynamic difficulty but the idea of responding specifically to what the player has done to make their runs of the whole campaign more demand more adaptation demand more from them more of an understanding a complete understanding of the game I think is really cool because now if you can't just use your same Mech strategy over and over again you got to start supplementing it because they've started to try to deploy counters to it in a game that's got a rich on game state is really cool I think yeah that's why the scoring aspect of it is really important because you need a metric to quantify that because what if you have no metric for that what you can do is again this is something that happens in arcade games is you can I don't know what the exact term for it is but you can like lowball the rank so for example let's say your that first map it has The Scouting guy and I know that scouting guy is there and I know if I do a certain thing he'll adapt to that certain thing what you can do and this happens with games with rank if they're not careful is you can do like low ball it so you can do just enough to not trigger you do just enough to not trigger the counter attack you do just like you like You' shoot him and like Ward him off but you wouldn't kill him so you wouldn't you wouldn't trigger the counter but if you have a a competing metric against that score like like in order okay so like you you counter him you kill him and then you get bonus enemies that spawn to attack but you get score when those bonus enemies spawn that score is then a counter incentive against um lowballing sandbagging yeah it's a counter incentive so if you have the the rank scoring system you can you can make the player you can force the player to do things that are suboptimal for survival that's what we call in rank on arcade games it's called survival it's suboptimal for survival but it's good for score grega has this all the time you do [ __ ] that's really risky to survive but it's lucrative for score but if you don't have that scoring counter incentive then the natural play style that will develop is that the players will learn to like avoid spawns and like avoid like they'll ride that line they'll find the line and they'll ride right along it so they'll like ward off the enemy they won't kill it so they don't get the counter spawn then they'll they'll attack the main base or whatever it is like so that's that that's why I think the scoring aspect of it is really underrated because it's a counter incentive to just lowballing your your AI or lowballing your level design right yeah it's really interesting because in order to to even attempt If the product is well made in order to attempt to sandbag or to ride that line you need to really know the game you need to have put like probably hundreds at that point but I mean in terms of like super super replayability right and I'm not saying it's not a bad thing I'm saying it's like I I I I like the idea that I could make a product which would enrich somebody's life enough that they would keep coming back to it for that much time just so that they could see if they could do that you know what I mean like that's why I kind of view as long as the speedr running doesn't make a total mockery of the product kind of view it as like an honor in a way it's like oh you care enough about the thing abely or it's like a sign that I'm doing a good enough job that you're paying enough attention to do it in the first place and sometimes that can indeed pervert the game like you can find like oh if I stand here or do this rning is so interesting because it's like both a compliment and an insult at the same time yeah it's a compliment because they like the game enough to keep playing it and they want to play it but it's an insult because they are showing you that they want more from the game than that you gave them they want want more they wanted more from the game and you didn't give it to them so now they have to like do this challenge to get more out of it so it's like it is it's I think that's the way to view it it's like a compliment and an insult at the same time it's like you're it's showing that your fundamentals are strong that your game design is uh attractive and fun and that people are into it but it's also showing that you have this Gap that they have a meaning there's some meaningless there where they need something else Beyond just the what's on the page there I guess but for your characterization point I this this will get a really like a high fluty or whatever but I think there is a distinctive difference between characterization and plot just in terms of writing not even in terms of game design like for example there are certain books that are written to actually be read and reread over and over and then there are certain books that are written to be read one time so like an example of a book that is meant to be read over and over is catcher and the Ry and The Catcher And Ry plot-wise if you if you wrote down the plot points of Catcher And The Ry it would be mundane oh a kid gets kicked out of school oh he hangs around in New York yeah but that's because uh solinger is putting much more emphasis on characterization and characterization is much more repeatable form of Storytelling because it's like you're experiencing the world and you're thinking and viewing the world through Holden's size that's in my opinion I maybe I overvalue that but that's it's a certain style of writing that is character heavy but plot because you can't have both you know there's only so much space on the page you can't have both and so or you write like freaking war in piece and it's a thousand Pages or whatever but so with like game design I think it's the same way like I think it's smarter to invest those resources into like characterization setting that kind of thing rather rather than like plots like think of like all these movies and stuff that come out now where they have the twist at the end but if you know the twist like Angels and Demons or the the D Vinci Cod or whatever you know the twist it's like who gives a [ __ ] you know it's like a one-trick pony you got you got the plot you get the twist at the end that was a fun time or whatever knives out or whatever all that was a fun time but are you going to rewatch that are you going to continue to come back to that is it going to like Beyond you know it's a different style of writing but I think one style of writing is better than the other when it comes to games and I think games like the characters the plot the setting I think people do come back to that much more so than like plot [ __ ] I think so too yeah I think there's something it's saying something more something with more meaning something with more content if it's something that still gives you a little bit of a different and not something trivial like oh I noticed this little hidden detail that only somebody would notice if they were trying to make a YouTube video about it or whatever when I watched it the 27th time it's like well that's like trivia maybe it can help you enrich like your understanding of the setting or whatever but it it to me it's more like that you're quibbling at that point like no what what does it say to you and what does it mean to you and that that's the kind of thing that I think is much more evocative of something where you are having an experience and it is it does have a certain amount of meaning to it and it it's kind of like even the thing is like it's almost kind of gotten go to say this but like I am looking for art that challenges me which is I'm looking for games which challenge me and you don't you don't see I guess like now it's almost like I don't know it's gotten very we live in like a really weird ironic culture now it feels like where it's it's kind of like silly to say like oh no I really liked this thing like what are you some kind of yeah have you ever read David Foster Wallace he wrote he wrote this great book about this called infinite just it's all about that it's all about like list how degrading he wrote it in the 90s but it's all about how like in the internet age it was just before the internet age we're coming into this ironic culture and the ironic culture is like a shield for our deeper emotions and so like we can't that starts to get blocked off in our media that's absolutely the case especially with like games like when was the last time you played a game and you're like I think this is actually ironically one reason why so many people gravitate to Final Fantasy 7's story it's because it's so Earnest and heartfelt and like you know it's putting itself out there like whoa so people gravitate and I respect that I actually respect that about the the story I'm just saying doesn't quite it's not like gameplay a great thing but story is great but yeah I think that's a an interesting thing about stories that we seen a lot like they're all very ironic and very like what Winn nudge like oh yeah you're watching a movie right now you and like I hate stuff like that like I hate when the characters basically look at the camera and say stuff you know what I mean it's like yeah and I think that's just a a trapo that a lot of Our Generation writers do because we're deeply uncomfortable to show that side of ourselves even through writing even not even like in person it's even through writing we're so uncomfortable to show that side of ourselves that we always have to have that little meta ironic guard up to be like yeah yeah it's a it's a get out of jail free another reason why I don't like stories and games so much is like you see that all the time and it's like you know yes or Marvel and all that [ __ ] it's like oh yeah like think of all the Marvel movies they're all like that yep yeah cuz it's like if you take it too seriously then what if somebody doesn't like it and then you really put your you out there and everyone like [ __ ] dunked on you right I think there's something beautiful about that personally though like putting yourself out there and being mocked you know whenever I see that it's hard for me to like even if it is like a little bit cringe or embarrassing it's like hard for me to really like jump on that train so much but I don't yeah I I don't I I can't I I hate to say that I wish somebody didn't do that you know what I mean like I don't I can't really think of a time where some somebody's done that and I thought you really shouldn't have done that like no actually it's probably the ironic thing is our generation is so starved for that kind of stuff that usually doesn't happen usually if you put something out there heartfelt people do connect with it then they get like super like aggressive if you come at it you know so it usually does kind of work out unless it's just a complete you know mess but yeah I think it's just people are afraid to do it in the first place well it's it's so funny because like right now in the in the current state of our game I do pretty much all almost all of the voice acting is me but putting on a different voice and so some s you'll get really silly things where it's like me obviously doing like a really bad accent and and yet I'm put I'm still like delivering like a voice actor would deliver it just happened to be not the able to sell the voice or the accent exactly but like the delivery is still like taking itself seriously if you know what I mean I don't like I'm not like doing like a little wink like don't me yeah old school yeah there's something so I miss so much about that old school voice acting in games right and I I think about voice acting a lot even though I don't care about that much you know like it's hard to explain but one thing I really love about voice acting in games of the past is like the actors were coming into these roles were just having fun because it did not affect their career in the slightest they probably weren't even voice actors like all the brood War voice actors were just St a l right yeah but even the voice actors like even the voice actors that come in they're like you know G tier in terms of like actors in terms of like popularity money you know this isn't you know Kevin spy and Call of Duty you know it's like some local theer actor who comes in and does some voice acting but a lot some of it's terrible but some of it you can get like surprisingly like really Earnest and like well done because it's just for fun like they they it's not going to come back to them so they go some of those old voice actors they just go ham you know it's awesome and now if you listen to voice actors now because they know it kind of like could help their career it could be like a bit so it's very more like you know it's close to the chest very more like everyone's the same everyone's sounds the same everyone's very uh limited it's limited that's what I say it's not like cringe in a fun way unfortunately but it's not like good either you know right yeah there's yeah yeah that sucks yeah well what wasn't vacant was pretty much this whole conversation I actually got a lot out of this and I really appreciate your time and uh really I do stand by what I said earlier I do think we there's like loads of other stuff that we could talk about more like we didn't even really get to cover intentional design that much in here we kind back can be the it can be the DLC for this epis that's it yeah so well you guys expansion pack right you guys know who to PayPal if you need that um yeah send us 50 bucks each if you want that episode there it is there it is so yeah obviously in the description will be all your stuff but is there any I don't know if you want to tease anything that you're currently working on you mention a couple do go I do it's a video I've already made but I want to show it to cross audiences so um I have this documentary that I made January that I oh my God it was like giving birth how much work I put into that but it's a schmu documentary and it's called Uh passion against reason and the reason why I'm promoting this video specifically it already exists is because I really want people who are not fans of shmups to see it because there's that kind of funny selection bias with the internet where like if you're fan of schms it's like awesome and here it is for you but I also made it I made it specifically for people who don't understand shmups who aren't into game like arcade games that much it's it's very it's not just like Feelgood oh schms are cool let's all have fun it it gets actually very dense and Technical and like explains the genre in a in a way that I'm very proud of it's like kind of my like my philosophy of game design is very much contained in that video in that documentary so I would love for people who aren't schmu fans who are like RTS fans or fans of other genres to check it out and you know maybe they could kind of learn a little bit more about uh arcade game design and stuff and see how it parallels the games that they like yeah well a lot of people listening to this a lot of people watching this are people who do think deeply or at least would like to think deeply if not um about RTS games or games in general and it's not really limited to one genre it's it's very much like a widespread like oh they they like to hear thoughts like we've had puzzle designers on like Jonathan Blow we've had loads of other people on in the past who have done many other genres so there's definitely a nice cross-section of like General gamer but also who are enthusiastic about thinking about it and discussing it deeply about like yeah I mean I sit and watch like my favorite things now are watching like discussions of like genres outside of schms and arcade games because it's like that feels like kind of a little bit like work to me now but when I hear about RTS games and RPGs and like other genres I'm less familiar with I'm actually love that because then then I can relate it back to what I'm doing so and yeah I'm happy to be part of the club there it is there it is yeah the fraud Club yeah well here for me I definitely think that you've said a couple of things that you given examples from arcade games and from games that you're more familiar with that I didn't know about I didn't know they were doing that thing and yet it reaffirms like the direction that I'm taking the RTS with my work and it's like wait okay yeah that makes sense that that does of course that would click of course that would work and of course I can immediately see the parallel and so it's helpful for me at least I'm sure it'll be very it'll have been very thought-provoking for a lot of other people so again mark thank you very much for your time and everybody watching this can head on over to the electric underground maybe uh find a couple videos that they like obviously the the exact one you for the documentary will be in the description as well front and center so check that out see you everyone

Channel: The No-Frauds Club

Views: 11,488

Keywords: no-frauds, no frauds, club, clubhouse, games, independent, indie, video, game, the electric underground, teu, electric, underground, shmup, stg, shootemup

Id: U0SenfVdvxY

Length: 174min 20sec (10460 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2024