So Five Nights at Freddy’s: Ultimate Custom
night is the latest and supposedly “last game” in the Five Nights at Freddy’s series
which has a player fight up to 50 unique animatronic enemies with customizable difficulty settings. But you probably already knew that the question
I want to ask today is how do you make a game that allows players to completely customize
their experience scary? Sure you can have creepy sounds or visuals
but how do you make the gameplay terrifying when players are told exactly what each enemy
does beforehand. It’s like me telling you a that there is
a jumpscare coming three seconds from now... and see its not unexpected and not quite terrifying. So how does Scott Cawthon the creator of the
Five Nights at Freddy’s series make his series version of Hell terrifying even though
he tells the player everything about every threat they face beforehand. Oh by the way I’m Etra from Etra games I
break down a game’s design every other week and today we’re going to break down the
design of Ultimate Custom Night to see how it creates fear while telling you everything
but in order to do that we need to look at the design of the first six FNAF games and
see why some were higher rated and some were supposedly scarier than others. I actually made a video on this topic a few
months ago so if you haven’t seen it. Don’t. I called the dominant strategy the optimal
strategy, the video quality was meh, and the audio is just its just sad. The script was fine though, and there are
some points from which are extremely important to understanding Custom Night. So to summarize I noticed that many people
said the Five Nights series became less scary over time and it’s user review scores dropped
more and more for each of the 4 first installments. I concluded that this was due to each game
except for the first having a dominant unfailing strategy that guaranteed victory every single
time if used. However, the first game actually had an element
of random chance that brought fear of the unknown. The only problem is this element of random
chance called Golden Freddy can ruin your run unless you immediately lift your monitor. The issue with is that you are never told
about Golden Freddy or how to prevent him in game so this event created fear of the
unknown with a random chance of ruining your run. The problem with this is having a player’s
death be based off random chance and not skill can make players frustrated. So after getting rid of this random chance
element for the next three games and giving up on the main gameplay mechanics in general
to make a story based mini-game collection for one game he brought back this element
of random chance for sixth game in the series Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator where
your means of defense the audio lure, and flashlight have a random chance of failing
regardless of what you do. This means instead of repeating a set pattern
of events you have to adapt to your strategy potentially failing. What keeps this system from leading to cheap
deaths like the first game is that you would have to have equipment fail several times
in a row to get an unpreventable death. Meaning your strategy is constantly changing
due to your equipment sometimes failing. Yet the problem with this system is that small
chance of a player losing the game due to an unpreventable death regardless of what
they do. So why is all this important to understand
the game design of Ultimate Custom Night? Well, Scott Cawthon actually found out how
to create fear of the unknown using randomness without any un-preventable deaths. As mentioned earlier each installment of the
Five Nights at Freddy’s series has some gameplay loop that is the dominant unfailing
strategy. With the only exception being Pizzeria simulator. Technically each customized night also has
a dominant unfailing strategy that will guarantee victory. For example, I’ll use a very simplified
version of the first preset challenge Bear Attack 1’s Dominant strategy which is Check
the Office, Check the doors, Use the flashlight, check camera and repeat. So we fall into the same loop of repetitive
gameplay that kept games 2-5 from being as terrifying as the original or the Pizzeria
Simulator. Correct? Well not quite. Scott’s solution to prevent repetitive gameplay
was adding DeeDee an animatronic that will randomly appear and add one of the 50 other
animatronics to the rooster. And most of the time this changes the current
optimal strategy. For example, if DeeDee summons the puppet
the new optimal strategy for Bears Attack would beCheck office, Check Doors, Check Camera,
Wind music box, repeat. The catch is you are never told who she summoned. This creates fear of the unknown until you
know who it is and how to deal with, but you will never die cheaply because if you use
the strategy you use when blocking every animatronic you can block whatever DeeDee throws at you
without even knowing what it is. So even with randomness, there is always a
way to win unlike in FNAF 6 where you had a chance of failing regardless of what you
did! Making all customized challenges a small part
of one big gameplay loop is pretty genius because Scott can add in parts from the main
gameplay loop randomly and still have it possible to be beaten. So what keeps people from just doing the strategy
you would use to fend off every animatronic all the time? Well, the gameplay loop of this strategy or
50/20 mode is so hard to pull off that only 10 people in the world have been able to beat
50/20 mode since I’ve recorded this. Meaning always using the 50/20 mode is near
impossible without literal weeks of practice. My favorite part about all this is everyone
I have seen play the from Dawko to Markiplier has died at least once not due to the new
animatronic Dee Dee summoned but because they freak out trying to find who DeeDee summoned
and fail to remember the gameplay loop they were actually supposed to do. But, Etra! You
may ask doesn’t that mean playing on 50/20 mode will just be another repetitive loop
like the other games. You can’t change the gameplay of 50/20 mode
by adding animatronics since there are only 50 animatronics! (Laughter) (Louder laughter) Sudden stop. No, actually there are 56. I lied, Scott lied. When it is 50/20 mode an additional 6 animatronics
outside of the first 50 can be summoned by shadow Dee Dee. Meaning 50/20 mode is a portion or subset
of 56/20 mode just like Bears Attack is a subset of 50/20 mode The only difference is
you shouldn’t use the dominant strategy for 56/20 mode the entire time because not
every animatronic will be active throughout the run and you have to focus on setup at
the beginning of your run. All of this means is you have to adapt your
strategy to one of 32 different dominant strategies several times over 4 minutes to beat 50/20
mode. So however you play the game there is always
fear of the unknown without un-preventable deaths. Which is kind of beautiful for the conclusion
to this series. Through it, we can see the Journey of one
man as a struggling game designer who tried to figure out what made his first game so
terrifying. You can see him think Was it trial and error
or lack of information, was it the setting or design of these beasts, was it the story
that held it all together that created the fear from the first game? In the end, he was finally able to re-capture
the spirit of the original game and perfected this system of fear in a way never seen before. But hey, as always thank you for watching
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day and I will catch you all next time!
