Game Mechanics Fair Games

[Gedor Games]

How important is it with games being fair when you play them? For me I dont like it when there are places in a game where there is no way of not getting hit or losing a life. I dont like traps where there is no way to avoid them unless you have played the game before and know were there are.
I dont mind really hard games but they should always give you a possibility at least, to much random behaviour from enemies or bosses can make it impossible to avoid certain things.

For example a boss can have a certain pattern and but even if you know his pattern it can still be hard to avoid getting hurt but at least you have a possibility to succed. If the boss however does something completely random without a pattern it can be literally impossible to avoid getting hit, then you just have to be lucky and hope you are in the right place when he does that.

So what do you think? I know that playing a game repeatedly will make you better but I still dont like it when they are being unfair.

 

[L0v3]

True hard games are all fair. The developer must be able to complete everything without getting hit once, and you know you have a balanced game. Random can still be good for difficulty if used correctly, as long as it is telegraphed in time for the player to react to it. The difficult part is teaching the player skills progressivly over time to overcome obstacles when they occur. If you do this poorly, this is when players will percive the game as too hard and unfair.

 

[Nux]

i've always felt randomisation is a good feature since learning an attack pattern enough for you to beat it blindfolded isn't fun (in my opinion), as long as it's not instantaneous and allows a player a time gap to react. sure, they may get hit the first few times but once you figure out how to avoid that random attack it's very rewarding.
on the contrary: if you just blaze through everything because there is no randomisation (attack1 -> attack2 -> attack3 -> back to attack1 -> repeat) it's not as rewarding and makes a game extremely boring.

 

[stainedofmind]

There's also the possibility of a nice middle ground between rigid patterns and randomness. A nice reaction based AI for an enemy (for example), that still has a chance to do seemingly random things keeps things interesting.

 

[Gedor Games]

I do agree with the random factor and I am not at all against it, just make sure the player have time to react to it. A game would be kind of boring if you knew everything that was gonna happen. I guess bad hit detection can be unfair but that has more to do with a bad programmed game more than game mechanics.

 

[RangerX]

To me its plain and simple. Anything that is "not fair" is bad design and there's probably a better way to do it.

 

[Khao]

To me its plain and simple. Anything that is "not fair" is bad design and there's probably a better way to do it.

This.

If it's impossible for a player to clear something without taking damage or losing randomly, you're doing it wrong. If you punish the player even when they don't make any mistakes, you're doing it wrong. Players should get punished only when they make a mistake, or when they made a bad decision. If a player plays perfectly and still ends up losing, the game needs to be redesigned. Plain and simple.

 

[Yal]

I've played a lot of Dark Souls 3 lately, and it has a pretty interesting approach to this... there's a lot of situations where you get ambushed by enemies without warning, but a lot of the time you can actually predict it. Items lying around in the open without anyone guarding them are suspiciously generous, so you should approach them with care, for instance. Enemies waiting to ambush you can always be seen - they don't simply teleport in, they're standing on an overhead ledge or clinging to a wall, and if you spot them before they spot you, you've got ample opportunity to give them a couple arrows to the knees.

The game actually encourages taking it slowly and being on guard, learning about your enemies and the levels as you go along, and the feeling of horror and dread gives way for mastery. After a couple of deaths and retries, you KNOW where all enemies are and how to run past without any of them noticing you, letting you get through areas very quickly - people has beat the whole game in less than one hour by just running past everything (which means you need to master all the bosses to not get completely destroyed by their attacks since you get no upgrades or levelups). Enemies follow the same pattern - someone that burned through half your supply of recovery items might not be able to touch you the second time around when you know how to approach the encounter properly and dodge their attacks.

The game is hard as nails and repeatedly mean to you, but it's mechanically fair. Your experiences makes you a better player, and every death teaches you more about what NOT to do.

 

[Genetix]

Came here expecting a discussion of those cheap mini-games that rip you off at Carnivals & Fairs - On the other hand, those games themselves are not very fair.

 

[seanm]

Traditional roguelikes, (modern examples being: 60 seconds!, and A Curious Expedition), are almost entirely based on randomness. Most RPG games use this idea aswell, ie Pokemon.
The point of the game being to understand as much of the RNG as possible, and strategize around it.
This is the same principle behind basically all board games as well.

Just depends on what you are designing for.

 

[RangerX]

I don't agree that it depends the type of game. Even a game based on randomness can be "fair" or "unfair". In Roguelikes you have abilities, magic, equipements VS what the mobs can do at what moment. The end boss cannot randomly spawn. What CAN spawn at X moment IS a conscious design decision by the game designers and level designer and those decision, mixed with what the characters vs the mobs can do will make that random based game fair or not.

 

[Yal]

I don't agree that it depends the type of game. Even a game based on randomness can be "fair" or "unfair". In Roguelikes you have abilities, magic, equipements VS what the mobs can do at what moment. The end boss cannot randomly spawn. What CAN spawn at X moment IS a conscious design decision by the game designers and level designer and those decision, mixed with what the characters vs the mobs can do will make that random based game fair or not.

Yeah, I agree fully... The Binding Of Isaac (probably the first modern action roguelike) uses a balance system that tweaks item odds so that the more 'good' items you get, the likelier it is to get a 'bad' item (and the other way round as well - having an unlucky streak boosts your odds of getting something really good), but it still spawns random items in all treasure chests.

I guess games having an 'AI Director' kind of thing where randomness is tweaked to provide the best experience can be a good way to balance randomness - don't have it be pure white noise, but take conscious decisions.

 

[Yokcos]

I'll bring some arguments to light in favour of unfair games. A lot of games are technically unfair in favour of the player. Hazards' hitboxes are smaller than they should be, ghost jumping in platformers, subtle things that give the player a much easier time. I'd argue that these situations are entirely unfair, but they're fun and make you feel good so muy bueno I guess.

Alternatively, you have games that are unfair against the player. Useful for troll games or setting the tone to emphasise that you're not where you should be. The rule of thumb is to not unfairly punish the player but as with all art, you can break the rules if you know what you're doing.

 

[RangerX]

I'll bring some arguments to light in favour of unfair games. A lot of games are technically unfair in favour of the player. Hazards' hitboxes are smaller than they should be, ghost jumping in platformers, subtle things that give the player a much easier time. I'd argue that these situations are entirely unfair, but they're fun and make you feel good so muy bueno I guess.

Alternatively, you have games that are unfair against the player. Useful for troll games or setting the tone to emphasise that you're not where you should be. The rule of thumb is to not unfairly punish the player but as with all art, you can break the rules if you know what you're doing.

I like this. But I don't think your perception is good there.
Games are cheating on themselves because its all about creating a fun and FAIR experience. What makes a game fair is how the player FEEL and think its fair. The behind the scene stuff about how this happens is irrelevant. Take movies per example, movies are cheating in order to give you a definite experience. The moving making and cinema tricks to pull it off are irrelevant.

 

[Yokcos]

I think it comes down to semantics at that point. If a game says implicitly "You can only jump whilst on the ground", then lets you jump a tenth of a second after falling off a ledge, that's cheating in my opinion. Player should be dead.
You regard this as not unfair at all, seemingly because you think fairness is in the eye of the beholder, whereas I would say fairness is an innate, beholderless part of any contest.
Regardless of whether it comes under your definition of 'fair' or not, I'll definitely agree that it's a good thing in most situations.

 

[seanm]

Like I said, traditional roguelikes.
They have a lot of similarities to board games. Is it "fair" that you could get bad dice rolls every turn in a board game? My point was that there are some games that simply embrace randomness, where you could play perfectly and still lose.

I'd say that the more involved your game, the less rng you should have. Nothing should be able to randomly kill you in mario, but in D&D it's fine.

 

[Khao]

I think it comes down to semantics at that point. If a game says implicitly "You can only jump whilst on the ground", then lets you jump a tenth of a second after falling off a ledge, that's cheating in my opinion. Player should be dead.
You regard this as not unfair at all, seemingly because you think fairness is in the eye of the beholder, whereas I would say fairness is an innate, beholderless part of any contest.
Regardless of whether it comes under your definition of 'fair' or not, I'll definitely agree that it's a good thing in most situations.

Thing is, in a video game, the one and only beholder is the player, so you should absolutely cater to them. It's not like NPCs will start complaining that the game is unfair to them for giving the player an advantage.

 

[seanm]

There is nothing wrong with randomness, it has been a staple of games for literally millennia.

 

[ParodyKnaveBob]

I'd say that the more involved your game, the less rng you should have. Nothing should be able to randomly kill you in mario, but in D&D it's fine.

?!?!?

 

[seanm]

?!?!?

The more your game requires skill over strategy.

 

[MishMash]

Randomness is fine, so long as there is an element of predictability. In a way, I actually prefer the random nature of games where you need to play reactively to the things happening around you. So long as this randomness isn't the sort of thing that insta kills you, and you have a chance to act upon it.

The true question of fairness has little to do with whether attacks are random or scripted, both can be done well or badly, but it also depends on the nature of a game:

One thing we all really hate is what is commonly referred to as "Cheese". This is often manifested in unavoidable death that just happens and nothing the player could have done would have CONSISTENTLY prevented death. This manifests itself in online games quite a lot. The new battlefront got alot of flack for this as there is a horrendous amount of cheese in that game, for example the heroes are overpowered to no end, and as a regular player, there is very little you can do. So the game ends up in players just sponging into each other.
Another example are that in some CoD games, certain killstreaks are literally unavoidable. I found Modern Warfare 2 to be quite balanced in this regard as it gave you some form of context clues (Whether it be on the mini map or audio sounds) when killstreaks came in, but in others, you would only be able to react once you were dead, which is stupid and frustrating.

Looking back at platformers, I hate games which just throw in annoying death sections which you are almost always going to die in the first time you go through, just for the sake of prolonging gameplay. As its cheesed in difficulty, nothing about that existing makes the game require more skill to play, it just requires people to remember that they died there, and I think straight-up memory should not constitute difficulty, unless the thing you are trying to beat requires a certain amount of skill to beat.

The flipside of this, is that some games appear to have cheese aspects at the start, until you learn that you can counter, or avoid certain things. For example in Overwatch, you get alot of contextual clues for when someone is about to use their ultimate (based on timing, duration since last ultimate, how they are probably changing up their style of approach). For example the Reaper ultimate is pretty powerful, but normally a Reaper wouldnt just wraith into a large group of enemies unless he was about to ultimate, so you can use this knowledge to either instantly shut him down, or get out of the way.

The final comment to make is on random luck games where items dictate your success in the rest of the game. I like these games, though I like them even more when there is a level of skill you can attain. I feel RoR is well designed as no matter what items get, if you time things right, and have a bit of skill, you can generally turn any run into a winning run

 

[RangerX]

Careful there though. Memorizing IS a skill and there's no good reasons it shouldn't be used in fun ways.

 

[Strawbry_jam]

The most important part is consistency. If a game is inconsistent, more unexpected stuff happens that cause the player to blame the game. If a game is consistent, even if technically unfair, the player will expect the "unfairness" and blame themselves for not predicting it. As long as the player is blaming themselves and not the game, the game will be fun. Whenever the game is at fault, the game is not fun. Now there is a limit as well. Certain unfair elements are going to be simply not fun and should be avoided. For instance, you should not have leaps of faith everywhere. There shouldn't be traps that kill the player and the next time, they are in a different spot. The player should be able to learn and progress. Death in general should not be quick without save points. But some players want that. If it's at least consistent and the player knows what they're going up against, it comes across as a very hard game that if they beat, will be very rewarding. Eveyone has their own opinions and there are different audiences to appeal to.

 

[Lumenflower]

This topic may have gone a bit stale recently but I was actually thinking about the topic of fairness at work today. I'm currently working on a horror game and I think it may be one genre in which I can justify unfairness (sort of). You control a bunch of characters surviving in a forest, and sometimes while exploring they will come across corpses riddled with The Contagion (Name is a work-in-progress). These corpses sometimes hold treasures that can give you an advantage, but sometimes will explode, infecting any nearby characters with The Contagion as well. Since this game is one that's intended to be played over and over, the player getting better each time, I want my players to learn from experience rather than from explicit information. The first time they encounter a corpse, they will investigate and it may explode. There are no clues to suggest whether or not a corpse may explode - no way of predicting it - which I think technically makes the mechanic unfair.

That said, I don't feel like it detracts from the experience I'm trying to create. I think that the unfairness and unpredictability of events is what will keep players cautious as they explore the game world. The first few times they play the game, they will encounter many things which they don't understand, and will have to investigate them to understand what the potential rewards and risks are. I guess my question is: is it ok to surprise players with bad things in their first few goes at a game, so that they learn what needs to be avoided in later playthroughs?

 

[RangerX]

Actually, most greatly designed game should teach the player about its rules by the "show don't tell" principle. Having a tutorial with text is the cheap escape.
You totally can surprise the player, I would say "teach em" what the rules are. That's the job of your level design. You probably can find a satisfying way for the player to learn what he has to learn.

Just throwing an example. You arrive in some clearance and the crew spots 3 thieves that are already there stealing from dead corpses. Just a little cut-scene showing that to the player before giving them back the control and maybe fighting with the thieves? Anyways, when it shows the 3 thieves investigating the corpses, one of them explodes and 1 out of 3 thieves are contaminated when you fight them.

 

[Yal]

When it comes to horror games and teaching the player stuff, I just can't not bring up Dark Souls' level design as an example. The way item orbs and ambushes are laid out, you quickly start getting suspicious when an item is clearly visible somewhere with no apparent threats in the vicinity. Most 'real' items are placed in hard-to-reach places, and anything that's just lying out in the open is likely to be bait to get you in an easily ambushed spot... or make you fail to notice a hole or trap if you just make a beeline for it.

Here's one of my favorite examples of this type of design. See anything wrong here?

This particular trap is actually an optical illusion. The corridor has a drop into the floor below it near the end, and the corpse is on a different ledge. From the start of the corridor, it looks like they're interconnected and on the same height, but they aren't. If you just blindly rush to get the item, chances are you won't notice in time, and take some fall damage AND end up in a room full of enemies without a chance to get your bearings. Ironically, you can't make the jump to the item ledge WITHOUT rushing, since you need to pick up enough speed to jump across the hole in the floor.

 

[Adrien Dittrick]

my opinion is that an unfair game is something that forces you to replay entire portions of the game because of a mistake you couldn't possibly predict.
Of course, dying and retrying usually doesn't count in that manner, because if you know where the enemies are after getting killed once you can easily skip the section by going directly for the enemy.

An unfair game would be a game that knows you know where the enemies are, and either places them in an entirely new spot or makes them systematically spawn behind you by teleporting.