How Platinum Design a Combat System

[Music] in the entire canon of combat centric action games one name stands above all the rest sorry Capcom sorry from software but the best developer of high-octane bad guy smashing beatmaps is without a doubt Platinum Games from Bayonetta 2 Metal Gear Rising to the wonderful water one turn near automata and a bunch of others besides platinum have become known for seamlessly blending cinematic stylish action with complex and rewarding combat mechanics that feel just as good to fully master as they do to use for the first time whenever I read this air Platinum game I always end up finding out new tricks or discovering a new detail about the combat system or just figuring out a new way to push my skills past why I thought were their limits in short platinum are the masters of making games that have depth but what is depth well unlike a lot of other game design concepts depth means exactly what you think it does deep games are games with a lot of layers and a lot of potential scope for different ways to interact with their mechanics truly deep games allow players to unlock new strategies and complexities from within the same set of mechanics they've been using the whole time check out my sorry excuse for Bayonetta gameplay compared with a real master of the craft like general Beatrix who's a speedrunner we've got exactly the same stats a moose our disposal we're just using them on completely different levels think of depths like an ocean of gameplay knowledge that you start off only seeing the surface of but that reveals more and more nuances the further down you descend all the best competitive eSports tiles are usually very deep for exactly this reason only games that can support a wide variety of competitive strategies and offer the greatest possible tests of knowledge of mastery will be able to keep the kinds of psychopaths capable of only playing a single game for a thousand hours occupied but there's a million deep games I could be talking about there's fighting games strategy games dota style stuff and shooters what makes platinum special why am i singing their approach to depth out well I think that we've got a lot to learn from the way the Platinum can make insanely complex games that take years to truly master but still be able to accommodate less skilled players and give them just as much of a good time as the people on their Millions playthrough by changing how we view depth complexity and mastery and by following pylons example we can help to make games more inclusive for newer people whilst also making that depth more satisfying to plunge into I've played Metal Gear Rising revengeance a grand total of three times and every single time that I've gone back to it I've managed to discover new cool things about how the game works or about the best ways to handle right in the Twinkie ninja cyber emo my first trip through the game saw me gain completely bodied by even basic enemies and barely even using stuff like Perry's or blade mode except when I was required to making the whole game and almost Dark Souls II and struggle for survival against the odds but with way more triumphant metal music second time around I got my teeth stuck in and spent my time really mastering all those mechanics that I'd ignored the first time around and it was great to see just how much combat potential I've been missing with blades I'm cutting people's limbs off and watching them hop around is so much better when they gave you real trouble your first time fighting them and did my most recent playthrough the experience was almost Zen nothing really posed a threat to me anymore and so I whirled through each level like a cold calculating tornado of death using my accumulated knowledge to push flow the elusive s ranks so how did plan and managed to pull this off how did they give me three different but fundamentally linked experiences within the limits of a single game well it all comes down to how they think about depth as well as the fact that the people over at platinum sort of design games backwards where most Studios spend the opening months of a new project hashing out raw mechanics to get them feeling just right platinum start out with the big-picture abstract stuff their first job is to settle on a particular fantasy setting or vibe that's then going to inform the rest of the game for example transformers devastation engages with the childlike fantasy of smashing action figures together and the wonderful 101 is all about feeling like you're a part of the superhero team at sushi Innova head producer a Platinum says that a pro designer should be able to come up with at least three unique selling points the rough like this theme and it's only once these ideas are in place the work on the mechanics characters and everything else can actually begin one example of these unique selling points is the ability of them main character or Vanquish who's a douchey cool guy to casually flick his cigarettes around to distract the thermal vision of bad guy robots it's it's pretty awesome contrary to what you might expect the core mechanics in any of Platinum's games from mad world to vanquish are usually very simple you'll almost always have a light melee option a heavy melee option a ranged attack a dodge a jump some saw Superman and that's about it doesn't sound like a lot right well that's because these mechanics are designed in such a way that their depth and challenge comes not from complexity but for emergent factors meaning that they're really easy to get to grips with but still have very deep gameplay for experts to enjoy novice players will begin their time with a platinum game by engaging with the combat mechanics of face value and not really putting much thought into their advanced applications that means it's important for platinum to make combat accessible and to ensure it still engages with those two Matic ideas even when players are working on a very basic level adding enough combos so the players will randomly activate them by by mashing or sprinkling in scripted segments where even underperforming players get to feel powerful helps to internalize the themes and tone of a game during those crucial first few levels Platinum's games nearly always start with an incredibly easy bubble bastok opening sequence to teach you how to play and ingrain the Koth ematic idea for exactly this reason this fella in Metal Gear Rising is literally two minutes into the game and it's brilliant as a player gets better and better of the game they won't unlock much in the way of new moves or abilities they'll just be able to use what they have more effectively by chaining different basic timings together and discovering some of their fun emergent properties players can slowly but surely develop an expanding repertoire of highly technical skills like combos counters and ways to manipulate the enemy AI high level play allows players to begin engaging with this unique selling points I mentioned earlier let's take transformers as an example as proves the outlined the core fantasy of that game is all about the fun of fighting as a big chunky robot who can transform into a car and then hit people like a truck new players get this feeling in the cutscenes and scripted segments but advanced players who've seen that stuff before can still engage with a turret play skilled transformers devastation players won't spend their whole time in robot full or vehicle form they'll rapidly switch between the two they're chained together combos and rack up loads of damage hitting the transform button at the end of a string of moves immediately turns you into a car and sends you flying at the nearest enemy charging at enemies in vehicle form can shatter shields opening bad guys up for a beat-down in robot mode and vehicle form shrinks your hitbox meaning that it's great for avoiding barrages of range fire or taking down fast-moving enemies your first playthrough of a platinum game is a complete and satisfying experience but you spend it watching and trying to emulate the cool character you see on screen it's not until your subsequent playthroughs that you actually get to become them this is what Hideki Kamiya director of the wonderful 101 as well as other stylish but deep games like a commie Resident Evil 2 and Devil May Cry means when he says that the first playthrough is something like a tutorial and that the real game begins the second time through while platinum do design all their games to be perfectly fun play through just once they're also designed to be replayable with returning players focusing less on getting through the story and more on getting a high score by pushing their skills to the limit each games scoring system is tailored to push players into acting a particular way and fully immersing themselves in that game's core theme Bayonetta's scoring system heavily emphasizes long strings of combos and taking no damage encouraging heavy use of which time and mastery of advanced techniques like dodge offsetting where well-timed dodges and gunfire can allow you to delay combos until you're in the perfect position to strike vanquish heavily prioritizes speed incentivizing aggressive use of the bomb rocket to flank enemies and get through the level faster with minimal cowering behind walls Metal Gear Rising score system interestingly is very forgiving when it comes to players taking damage as one of write-ins core abilities lets him cut open enemies to heal requiring precision strikes to pull off reliably this combined with other uses of blades I'm like chopping missiles out of the air and cutting armor to bits unless you feel like a highly trained ninja barely keeping a brutal killer obey which is like ridings whole deal like I said he's he's really emo to recap Platinum's combination of deep flexible mechanics modulated by distinctive style allows them to create games that let players of different skill levels engage with the mechanics in a way that's right for them but still find common ground in the high concept themes now as great as their stuff is Platinum do make a relatively specific style of game even when they do branch out into third-person shooters or RPGs the focus is still on their trademark deep affair combat so what lessons from Platinum's approach to depth could we take and apply to our understanding of other genres well I think there's three first is the idea that simplistic versatile systems can often be more strategically engaging than very complex ones this is because a few versatile moves offer players much more scope for exploration and self-expression thanks of their emergent properties more complicated systems on the other hand argues to be more rigid and figuring out the best move to use is more a matter of computation than discovery and once you've got all that figured out they're usually easy to optimize take a mechanically dense shoe like Borderlands which has 70 trillion guns on offer and compare it to a much more straightforward one like dusk which has a grand total of nine because bog lance has so many variables like elemental damage level requirements character skills randomize stats and so forth finding the right gun for the job is usually very easy and just amounts to finding the one with the highest numbers that doesn't have a crippling downside compare that with Dusk's much more spawn selection which uses the idiosyncrasies between guns to make your choice of weapon very impactful for example the crossbow has a piercing shot good for sick multi kills but the Moors explosion is more reliable at the potential price of catching yourself in the AoE the choice between the regular shotguns and super shotgun is interesting too one is slow when incredibly powerful whilst the others are faster an appetizer spread but they both draw from the same ammo pool meaning you've got to watch how hard you commit to each weapon in case you get caught with your pants down later on simple mechanics often lead to more strategic choices because you're forced to be creative and slowly master what you have rather than just working out well the best possible option is the second takeaway from this look at depth is that by building games around a particular theme or idea rather than a mechanic we our gamers of all skill levels to engage with the same experience Platinum have shown that this idea can work for a variety of single player games from the melodramatic Neera tomahto to the campy light-hearted fun of the wonderful 404 but this approach can work for multiplayer games - such as in the elegantly designed competitive games rocket league and spy party the main appeal of rocket League is getting to experience the highs and lows of playing football but with everything cranked up to 11 - this effect doing cool things like explosive tackles or diving across the goal to save a shot are very easy to perform are useful strategies and both make heavy use of the game's fantastically designed to boost mechanic just like in a platinum game the more you get to grips with a slightly weird way rocket leagues gravity works you'll be able to transition from boosting along the ground to performing boost enabled jumps and before you know it you've become a real football superstar as you literally fly across the pitch spy party does the same thing the game pits a spy and a sniper against each other in a test of deception and deduction the spy has to complete a number of objectives that involve interacting with the environment and the sniper has to suss out which of the characters wandering around is controlled by a human before taking the shot because the central conceit is so intuitive and we've seen it a million times before in spy movies to novice players can still feel like they're engaging in a titanic battle of wits this is because of the highest and lowest levels of competition spy party is played in basically the same way all that changes is how deep you've gotten into the metagame of tells bluffing and realizing that odd job from Goldeneye is just as ever powered here I could go on but I think the most important lesson platinum has to teach us isn't about how games work but how we can perceive them a lot of the time players and developers alike see complex and challenging styles of play to be inherently exclusionary and the only people good enough a game should be allowed to enjoy them platinum have shown us that this doesn't always have to be the case I had just as much fun playing Metal Gear Rising badly trying to go through the story as I did playing in a manner that could be loosely described as competent while looking for high scores by designing deep games that can be engaged with on a variety of levels we can get as many people as possible to have these experiences without compromising the complexity or challenge that makes them enjoyable for more audiences Celeste is a great example of a non platinum game applying this approach Celeste score themes of perseverance and self-awareness wouldn't come across if the game wasn't challenging but it lets people turn the difficulty right down and avoid particularly hard challenges if they need to in order to make sure the game is about triumphing through self improvement and not grinding your face into a brick wall for hours on the flip side the game also facilitates insane stuff like the optional postgame levels or speed running for people who've already mastered the game but still want that same feeling of overcoming the odds depth isn't always about making sure the competitive players have stuff to master all the people like me have cool details to make a video about sometimes the best thing about making a game that's easy to learn but hard to master and can be experienced on many different levels is that more people get to enjoy the big core ideas that make an experience worth having in the first place and it's for that reason the Platinum deserve their top spot among action devs whilst other studios have a more consistent track record and more creative systems only pilum has been able to give each and every player the experience of looking at Bayon Aires bum with the plausible deniability of pretending to punch angels and at the end of the day isn't that more video games are all about hi friends and thanks for watching this video and every other video on the channel was made possible by your generous support on patreon every single dollar you donate that I don't immediately spend on frazzles goes right back into making the show better so your cash is really appreciated someone else who you really should support is Thomas game Doc's who makes fun bite-sized videos all about game development topics like his most recent one which is all about why and how Linc became hot good stuff of course the real people I should be celebrating are my top tier patreon supporters who are Alex to launch a siren Allanon ID for Baxter he'll Brian Atari Ani Calvin Han chill Daniel matches Dirk Jan Karen bailed Evie eyebath on Jessie Rhine Jonathan Christensen Joshua Binswanger Lieberman Lucas slack lunar Eagle 1996 mace window 54 max filippov Patrick Romberg Philby the bill be phony homeless Prospero Ray's dad Sam Myers Samuel Vander Plaats strategy in Ultima Yaron Miron Zack Shuster and Chow thanks to all those people for supporting thanks to you for watching all the way through and I will see you in the next video bye

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 125,502

Keywords: Games, Gaming, Video Games, PC Gaming, Videogames, Adam, Adam Millard, Architect, Architect of Games, Aog, Review, Retrospective, Analysis, Critique, Video Essay, Early Access, Platinum Games, Platinum, GDC, Spectacle Fighter, Brawler, Beat 'em up, Bayonetta, Bayonetta 2, Metal Gear, Metal Gear Rising, Wonderful 101, Transformers, Transformers Devastation, Vanquish, Depth

Id: D689ZBdOAuw

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 06 2019

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