Design Goals and Endings in Survival Games

[Lumenflower]

There's a bunch of games out at the moment which I would place under the header of 'Survival Games'. They include Minecraft, Rimworld, Nazi Zombies etc. I'm sure there are more but I haven't played them so won't comment. I'm going to talk about Rimworld first because I feel it is the one in which the issue I have is most prominent.

Rimworld sees you building a colony on a far-off planet, rescuing and capturing other people to join your settlement. It is a sandbox game and the user can build pretty much whatever they like, but the goal is always the same: survive against the various threats that face your settlement. Now this is all hunky-dory and the game is brilliant. But you see, it has an 'ending'. The ending involves collecting a lot of valuable resources and using them to build a spaceship which can transport your settlers off the planet. Once all your settlers are loaded into the spaceship and fired off into space, your game ends. The problem is, this isn't really fun. What's fun, in my personal opinion, is watching a colony that is self-sustaining and indestructible thrive. That's when I feel like I've won the game.
What's more, when I reach this stage, sending all my settlers off in a spaceship makes me feel kinda underwhelmed. It's the same outcome as simply quitting the game and going back to the main menu, except that at least allows me to jump back in later and carry on where I left off.

I'm not saying this is a bad design decision by the developers. I may be the only guy in all of creation to feel this way. But it does serve to illustrate a conundrum I am facing with regards to the 'ending' of a game.

A game needs goals - that is fundamental. Without goals, you might as well just turn it off and stare at a wall instead for the next hour. My issue is with creating goals that don't inevitably lead to an ending. Minecraft does this well by allowing the player near-infinite freedom to set their own goals. Once you've built your cliché golden -and-balls, you feel the need to build a pedestal for it to sit on. Now build a garden to go round your pedestal. Now build a castle from which to survey your garden. The point is you play Minecraft because you look forward to seeing your finished creations.

In some games, however, achieving this same sense of ongoing goal-forming is a bit harder. Take Nazi Zombies (The original version from World At War, mind you!). The goal is to survive as many waves as possible. Simple. Does the game get samey? Somewhat. Some of the maps shake things up by having dogs sometimes but by-and-large it's the sort of game where I get bored quickly. Perhaps I can blame that on the fact that I have the attention span of a satsuma.

When I enjoy a game, I don't want to stop playing it. I don't want to be told 'You reached the ending, now turn off the PC and go outside'. I like having the carrot-on-a-stick to keep me playing, but I don't ever want to actually eat the carrot cos then there's no reason to play any more.

For all you fellow satsumas out there, here's the too-long-didn't-read version:

HOW TO CREATE ENGAGING GOALS IN A GAME WITHOUT LEADING THE PLAYER TOWARDS AN ENDING?

~Druid TC

 

[RangerX]

There's another conundrum here. You can't have a goal that isn't an ending itself. A goal is something to attain, to reach. Once its reached, its the end of that goal.
So basically, creating what you're asking there is.... IMPOSSIBLE.

All you can do is create a game which goals can always be renewed (when a goal is reach, you can have/create more goals). Minecraft is such a game.
Other option is creating a goal that make sense but can never be reach.

 

[Alunite]

I'm not sure whether I'm an idiot for thinking there are very simple solutions.

World of Warcraft does a pretty good job at this. If you add content to your game, then new goals are created, not only this, but the old goals are still there to be pursued. There is so much choice of goals in that game nowadays, it would take years of game time to do everything and even then you could never truly be "finished" because it's got competitive multiplayer, becoming the best player is in itself a goal to achieve.

Within other non-competitive or massively multiplayer games? I think simcity got pretty close to an endless goal. The expansion of your city caused more issues to be created (e.g. need more schools, hospitals etc) but your budget didn't necessarily increase to meet all the demands of the city. I used to play 2000 with cheat codes and still lost the bloody game!

So in essence, for a single player game to have an endless goal the act of expansion (or say increasing level in an rpg) causes more problems for the player. In Sim city, the goal might be set by the player (e.g. build my dream city, get the highest pop city), but the actions required to get there, made for a story in itself. The game didn't know my goals, but it added some roleplay to them. Now that must be good design.

In an rpg game, as a completely different example, as you gain levels, you gain notoriety, npcs don't like you being so powerful. You come back to a village you helped to find it under attack simply because you'd helped. Now you as the player have new goals to deal with because of your actions (and some help from game systems).

This has been very ranty but maybe what you need for an endless goal is a sword of damocles scenario for your game. A vague concept, but effectively the risk in the actions you take in the game is proportional to your power. This maintains that every decision you make has impact to your gameplay experience.

 

[spe]

Well, Nazi Zombies has the continuous goal of trying to beat the last highest round. It's not a continuous game like Minecraft, it ends when you die, and you don't end up lasting more than an hour or two playing 'normally'. Of course, if you don't care about beating a previous best, it may not work, but the game is popular because a lot of people like the ever-progressing challenge. The game does a good job of setting no hard limit to how far you can get. People have played hundreds of rounds, to the point where a game will last several days. There's always a new high round to beat, and when you beat it, you can then try to beat that high score. That's why the game continues to be replayable.

 

[Yal]

HOW TO CREATE ENGAGING GOALS IN A GAME WITHOUT LEADING THE PLAYER TOWARDS AN ENDING?

If you don't want to lead the player towards an ending, you could just simply not have an ending... or alternatively have it so early in the game players feel obliged to stay in the postgame forever (e.g. have the game's final boss and credits and stuff in the end of the tutorial and then drop them off in the endless world you've created).

Or maybe you could make an endless narrative of some sort... rather than having an overarching plot, have many small ones the player can run into - every random village would have SOMETHING interesting going on that you could get your nose wet in. If you set up a structure where NPCs' motivations and personality (and capability - peasants can do less than legendary heroes and supervillains) decide what happens, and adapt to players' actions (as in, killing someone important to a narrative would change it towards the other side - killing the main villain is a huge step towards a good resolution, killing the main hero is a huge step towards an evil resolution, and so on), you more or less have infinite narrative to explore. Just be mindful of how easy it is to spot patterns in randomly generated stuff, so it's important to have narratives have as many 'vaults' as possible so the presence of repeats take a while to realize.

 

[Genetix]

I haven't quite finished the ending for my game Rogue Harvest yet (Nearly ready to release out of Steam Early Access) - Rogue Harvest is an open world survival game that fits into this category pretty well. It is different in a way, that it has quite a bit of story to discover (Not linear by any means) - ultimately the player will be able to 'win' the game if they are able to uncover enough of the story elements and survive for a certain amount of time. Doing so will let them experience the ending and uncover the final full twist to the players storyline. (The story is a bit dark!) After that, I plan to let them continue playing in their world for as long as they want to - and keep the story going in various ways, with small new chunks that can be uncovered over time. Some might feel like quitting or starting a new world after seeing the end game, but many will be glad to keep playing and building the world they have spent time in (and at that point survived a harsh Winter in), because the focus of the game isn't all about the story - it does give a feeling of accomplishment and completion once it has been beaten though. Good conversations here!