Second Wind Oh, you look a little bit unmotivated,
Ludo, you alright? You're plus 12 pistol not doing it for you? Oh, well try this. Well
it's the same gun, it's just the UI element is purple and fiery. Eh? Just doing it for
you? Eh? Oh Jesus! But why isn't this working? Why do so many developers try to use loot
in such a baseless way, repeatedly misunderstanding what actually makes loot satisfying in
the first place? Well, let's dive into that. Come on, loot, leave the
gun. Welcome to Design Delve. As designers, there are many different
ways for us to reward our players. Currency, gear, and tings. We like tings. Yeah, me too.
Because we all like tings, it's primal. But as simple as this first seems, many developers
still misunderstand extrinsic rewards, repeatedly shoving the same copy-pacer systems down
players' throats even though they've been proven sickened by them. The main problem is,
it's very easy to think of rewards on a surface level. Extrinsic rewards, in their most
basic form, are external elements such as items, gained power or achievements that the
player earns from interacting with the game's systems, meant to motivate the player to keep
them playing, but the problem is that it's not enough to simply give a reward and hope
that keeps the player engaged because in reality, it can do the complete opposite. All of
these misguided looter shooters are trying to emulate a design commonly seen in MMOs like
World of Warcraft, the fabled "Carrot on a Stick". As you progress and complete any form of
content, you're rewarded with items with numerical stat bonuses to allow you to access harder
content. This process repeats itself indefinitely in a loop as new content is released.
The player never quite able to reach that carrot forever chasing, but forever being
incrementally rewarded, keeping them in this chokehold of gratification. This is a very cynical
way of looking at WoW's loot systems, but it's not what's kept it going strongly for
nearly 20 years. So looter shooter devs look at this and think "wow, yeah, if we take this
simple formula and then copy paste it into our games, it must work wonders, right?" Well,
without the correct context, this can cause a whole host of issues. For example, in the
recent Unalive group Kill Your Childhood, they use this MMO gear system as their main form
of extrinsic reward to try and hook players in into this never-ending live service, and
I'm sure you've seen this in many games before. But where all of these looters use
Screw the Pooch is with their loot's frequency. You can't give the player a million
weapons and expect that to be satisfying, because loot is about the journey, not the
reward. For a reward to feel meaningful, there has to be a journey to obtain it. And no,
that journey doesn't just mean having one extra branching path for the player to explore
to find 10 extra gold pieces. Uh-huh. Oh yeah, good point. Bonus design tidbit from
Ludo. With these little branch paths, developers will commonly use something called a
reward reversal reveal. It's when you walk into a room, see that there's no loot for
your efforts and get disappointed. You then turn around to leave and now the loot is visible
on your journey out. This valley of disappointment and sharp peak of excitement is
incredibly effective. Yeah, a cheap trick to be sure, but now that we've shown you, you will
see this absolutely everywhere. You've obtained the debuff to curse with knowledge. Wait,
what was I talking about? Oh yeah, for a reward to feel meaningful, there has to be a journey to obtain it because of
something called juxtaposition gratification. Juxtaposition
gratification is a design technique where the player first needs to feel weak to eventually feel
powerful or rewarded. For example, it would not feel satisfying to load into a game for the
first time and just one-shot everything in sight. Regardless of how satisfying that
gameful was, that feeling would quickly dissipate because there's no mechanical challenge.
But if you first struggle against these enemies, then along your journey find rewards
throughout the world, new weapon, levels or even develop personal skill, you can come back to
overpower those enemies that once gave you so much trouble. That juxtaposition of power is what
makes acquiring new loot or overcoming challenges so satisfying. You must first feel weak
to eventually feel powerful and I honestly need to make an entire episode dissecting
this concept because I personally believe it's one of the sole contributors to making
any game satisfying. Hmm? Yeah, fair enough, I digress. World of Warcraft's loot is entirely
based on juxtaposition gratification in Cycles. They start off by doing this with their
levelling systems, but once this dries up, they then focus on incremental loot upgrades
building up the player's power, but then slowly but surely reduce the drop rate of meaningful
items in later content, not through low percentage chances but by requiring specific
classes to seek out precise stats on items to play optimally, making their choices even
slimmer. This resets the juxtaposition gratification loop, causing the players to stagnate
but when those items finally drop, it feels like a gift from the gods. A lot of looter shooters understand this
on a surface level but then go too far with the gap. For example, in Suicide Squad,
their most powerful items, the infamy weapons, not only have an insanely low drop chance
but also only drop in the extreme regions of its endgame, sometimes requiring players to
replay the same mission 10-20 times to get a specific item to drop. Again, not too dissimilar
to WoW's structure, where in its endgame content they only drop a handful of items
between its party members but they're nearly always useful to someone and then can be
traded. But here, they attempt to bombard the player with useless rewards alongside the lack
of meaningful ones, leading to every mission being this sea of disappointment, but
when a useful item finally drops, you're still disappointed because of
what this reward actually is. Extrinsic rewards can fall into two simple
categories. Reflective and substantive rewards. One makes you look backwards and the
other makes you look forwards. A reflective reward is one that makes you reflect on what you
had to do to get it. A trophy, a unique cosmetic or achievement. These are commonly tied
to in-game challenges. The mage tower skins in World of Warcraft are a perfect example
of this. There were these certain skins that could only be obtained by completing a
difficult challenge mode. These were a stino-prestage at the time and are no longer available.
The gratification in reflective rewards are timeless if the challenge to get them was
meaningfully measurable. Whenever I look at one of these mage tower skins that I gained years
ago, I am immediately reminded of what it took for me to get them,
reflecting backwards on that journey. On the other hand, a substantive reward
causes you to look forward into your journey's future. Be it as complex as a new
ability or as simple as an upgraded piece of gear, these rewards enable you to
further your goals and unlock more content. Medroidvanias are nearly entirely based on
this philosophy. They deliberately frame inaccessible content early on and then give the player
a substantive reward, a new ability that allows them to access that content that they so
desperately wanted to play before, making all future block aids become exciting possibilities,
encouraging rampant exploration due to this substantive reward structure. Now it is possible to
combine substantive and reflective rewards to create one mega reward, one that is both
challenging to obtain and then permits power but this is extremely delicate to balance. As
seen with Suicide Squad, if you screw with this too much it can be disastrous. Firstly,
their reflective rewards could be considered the skins, most of them are gained from the
Riddler challenges which are honestly pathetic to complete or obtained by the shop so I
guess their main reflective rewards are combined with their substantive ones in the
Infamy weapons? But the issue here is that they're only obtainable by completing its
endgame content not through a challenge but a grind. They attempt to combine these rewards to
make something ultra satisfying but it just begets boredom and resentment because they've
attached them to a percentage chance rather than challenge. Not to say that grinds can't lead to
effective reflective rewards too, just look at World of Warcraft, what it's a good example,
again, well they have mounts that have a stupidly low drop chance, I'm talking about
0.01% chance of dropping, these are so satisfying to get and show off because they are
purely reflective, they're not attached to progression or power whatsoever. If this mount was
also attached to doing optimal damage or locked off potential future content, you
would be screaming every time it didn't drop. And that's what Suicide Squad has done,
they've combined their reflective and substantive rewards into a % chance in an attempt
to keep their players engaged but because of how it was managed, it just pushes
players away. At the end of the day, it's all about the player's journey and respecting their
time. You want to give the players substantive rewards so they can pursue the
reflective ones, that's the loop, that's the carrot, that's how you motivate the player to
progress and keep playing extrinsically but if that loop is just motivating them towards a
game with shitty gameplay, story and level design, well then you're up shit creek without
your plus ten paddle no matter how much loot you throw at them. But what do you think?
What makes acquiring any extrinsic reward rewarding for you? Can you think of an example
of a reflective reward in a game that's stuck with you personally? Let us know down
below because we would love to discuss this with Ah right, you've gotta find a new way
to feel rewarded without being given loot every 10 seconds, Ludo. Can I suggest fighting
games? You'll stick to Dead by Daylight. Right, I've gotta get you off that shit, Ludo,
it's bad for you. Oh god. Right, say goodbye. Alright, well I'll see you in the next
one guys, we're gonna be covering Hello Kitty Online. Uhhh, bye. This video is sponsored by Last Epoch. Uncover the past
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