For a while Ive been thinking about a videogame I wanted to design and build, and while doing it I thought about basic ground rules that I would not supersede for the sake of convenience. Over time this has developed into my commandments of gaming, more precisely, my commandments for modern gaming. Now, we all know the classics like no long unskippable cutscenes before boss fights or no one hit kills versus player on anything but maximum difficulty, but what new rules have risen from the advancement of technology. Here's my list in progress:
1. Never use a cutscene to demonstrate an action that can occur in normal gameplay, barring initial tutorials and/or mind control type events. This as a rule for the modern age, as a game like Final Fantasy 7 may not have been able to render the detail in real time, but now-a-days the level of quality for normal rendered objects is good enough that we don't need to steal control away to show something you can normally do in the game.
Ex. Black Ops, where you walk through the Pentagon. Something they could have to do in game but instead tether you to a couple of dudes and fill it with annoying film effects. Making you feel less like you are there and more like you are watching a movie of what is happening. Just letting you control the movement and maybe a small interaction with the other people would have made it more fun, and certainly made you feel more invested in the character.
2. Never put your character at the mercy of the bad guys and have them survive by a never before seen sense of honor or dumb luck. Exceptions being finely woven plans to keep you alive. Never should your survival in the game be reliant on random mercy given to you in an out of character fashion. Your survival should be your task, and relying on dumb luck to continue the story is immersion breaking and cheap.
Ex. Mass Effect 2 The Arrival DLC. Your player in incapacitated in a supposed to lose fight where you are ambushed by a number of brainwashed humans who knock you out with bullets and such, and if you survive too long you just get incapped by a random energy surge. You wake up 2 days later in a hospital bed next to security controls and you use them to escape. Its painfully bad storytelling when the survival of the main character is a complete accident and all signs pointed to them either killing Shepard or at least restraining him effectively, like in Carbonite.
3. Nobody should be immune to bullets. This is a peeve of mine where games like to give you "choice" but still make it only possible to kill when the time comes that they turn hostile. This is a double-win as it also gets rid of the tired betrayal plot point ever so present by always keeping the option of killing the betraying character early on, forcing the antagonist to be a goal from the start. If you can see someone, they should be mortal, but the real obstacle for killing should not be game mechanics but probable consequences. Deciding between killing an annoying character and the consequences for doing so should be a valuable choice instead of one made for you by the game.
Ex. Dead Space 1. At some point in the medical wing I saw a lady mumbling to herself and swaying side to side at the end of a long corridor. I figured better safe than sorry and pointed my weapons at her but I couldn't shoot her. The bullets went right through and direct shots had Isaac turn his head and aim away. The choice should have been kill her now and suffer emotional trauma or let her live but face her later in the level as an enemy, instead of just sitting there and activating when you got close, which made the lights shut off and her disappear when they turned on again and then she popped out as an enemy.
4. Any Story Driven RPG must offer non-lethal methods for dispatching troops or avoiding them altogether. A personal preference, but it really pains me to see an RPG where you are the good guy and yet you kill upwards of 1000 people in the process, evil or not that's not a benevolent action and certainly doesn't match the "good" dialogue options. An RPG must let you use non-lethal weapons, stealth knockout or just plain coercion to avoid conflict, and they must be tied directly to player statistics outside of dialogue, none of this paragon or renegade crap.
Ex. Alpha Protocol accomplishes this by making the game a stealth game with clear non-lethal methods, tranquilizer pistols and stealth knockouts. It also never forces you to kill a person in the dialogue, and lets you befriend any person you beat in a boss fight to help you later. And yet you still must invest points in maintaining good stealth and keeping your tranq rounds effective throughout the game as well as study opponents about how best to befriend them. A bad example of this is Dragon Age Origins, where over the course of the game you end up killing a massive number of humans/elves/dwarves even if you play as non-violently as possible. And when your goal is to save the world from an enemy army, killing people on your side seems a little stupid. The only coercive skill requires no direct investment in lieu of combat as it is a skill that is exclusive with a number of useless crafting professions, all of which your allies can take for themselves and you have no use for.
That's my list so far, and they mostly apply to story driven RPGs, but its a fun practice to see what you as a game designer would hold dear. Feel free to post any you have and a short explanation with an example of cases where the rule might improve a game, or a case where the rule helped a game be great.
1. Never use a cutscene to demonstrate an action that can occur in normal gameplay, barring initial tutorials and/or mind control type events. This as a rule for the modern age, as a game like Final Fantasy 7 may not have been able to render the detail in real time, but now-a-days the level of quality for normal rendered objects is good enough that we don't need to steal control away to show something you can normally do in the game.
Ex. Black Ops, where you walk through the Pentagon. Something they could have to do in game but instead tether you to a couple of dudes and fill it with annoying film effects. Making you feel less like you are there and more like you are watching a movie of what is happening. Just letting you control the movement and maybe a small interaction with the other people would have made it more fun, and certainly made you feel more invested in the character.
2. Never put your character at the mercy of the bad guys and have them survive by a never before seen sense of honor or dumb luck. Exceptions being finely woven plans to keep you alive. Never should your survival in the game be reliant on random mercy given to you in an out of character fashion. Your survival should be your task, and relying on dumb luck to continue the story is immersion breaking and cheap.
Ex. Mass Effect 2 The Arrival DLC. Your player in incapacitated in a supposed to lose fight where you are ambushed by a number of brainwashed humans who knock you out with bullets and such, and if you survive too long you just get incapped by a random energy surge. You wake up 2 days later in a hospital bed next to security controls and you use them to escape. Its painfully bad storytelling when the survival of the main character is a complete accident and all signs pointed to them either killing Shepard or at least restraining him effectively, like in Carbonite.
3. Nobody should be immune to bullets. This is a peeve of mine where games like to give you "choice" but still make it only possible to kill when the time comes that they turn hostile. This is a double-win as it also gets rid of the tired betrayal plot point ever so present by always keeping the option of killing the betraying character early on, forcing the antagonist to be a goal from the start. If you can see someone, they should be mortal, but the real obstacle for killing should not be game mechanics but probable consequences. Deciding between killing an annoying character and the consequences for doing so should be a valuable choice instead of one made for you by the game.
Ex. Dead Space 1. At some point in the medical wing I saw a lady mumbling to herself and swaying side to side at the end of a long corridor. I figured better safe than sorry and pointed my weapons at her but I couldn't shoot her. The bullets went right through and direct shots had Isaac turn his head and aim away. The choice should have been kill her now and suffer emotional trauma or let her live but face her later in the level as an enemy, instead of just sitting there and activating when you got close, which made the lights shut off and her disappear when they turned on again and then she popped out as an enemy.
4. Any Story Driven RPG must offer non-lethal methods for dispatching troops or avoiding them altogether. A personal preference, but it really pains me to see an RPG where you are the good guy and yet you kill upwards of 1000 people in the process, evil or not that's not a benevolent action and certainly doesn't match the "good" dialogue options. An RPG must let you use non-lethal weapons, stealth knockout or just plain coercion to avoid conflict, and they must be tied directly to player statistics outside of dialogue, none of this paragon or renegade crap.
Ex. Alpha Protocol accomplishes this by making the game a stealth game with clear non-lethal methods, tranquilizer pistols and stealth knockouts. It also never forces you to kill a person in the dialogue, and lets you befriend any person you beat in a boss fight to help you later. And yet you still must invest points in maintaining good stealth and keeping your tranq rounds effective throughout the game as well as study opponents about how best to befriend them. A bad example of this is Dragon Age Origins, where over the course of the game you end up killing a massive number of humans/elves/dwarves even if you play as non-violently as possible. And when your goal is to save the world from an enemy army, killing people on your side seems a little stupid. The only coercive skill requires no direct investment in lieu of combat as it is a skill that is exclusive with a number of useless crafting professions, all of which your allies can take for themselves and you have no use for.
That's my list so far, and they mostly apply to story driven RPGs, but its a fun practice to see what you as a game designer would hold dear. Feel free to post any you have and a short explanation with an example of cases where the rule might improve a game, or a case where the rule helped a game be great.
