Why Character Progression is Interesting
Almost all CP decisions have a positive and permanent impact on some stat or your abilities. These are more or less the defining characteristics of a CP decision. For example, in Brutal Legend you can upgrade Eddie Riggs’ axe for an upfront cost and give it snazzy lighting damage, or fire damage. In Devil May Cry 3, you pay blood orbs to give Dante another move or upgrade his weapon damage.
In RPGs, CP decisions are usually very transparent about the exact details of their effects – 10% to spell damage, 20% to all fire spell damage, +100 mana, so on and so forth. For the most part, they give you the raw math that you need to understand which ones are good and which ones aren't so good.
So there’s a skill to deciphering the CP system in RPGs – you know the relative power of your fire spell to your ice spell, so you know that you want your character to take the fire damage increase. Deciphering the system an RPG lays out for you is usually a key part of the core gameplay. You're tinkering with the system; you're trying to find the combination of stats and abilities that the developers didn't quite balance, the math that produces the highest number.
Why Character Progression Doesn't Always Work
However, making CP decisions transparent in action games like Devil May Cry 3 or Brutal Legend is much harder to do, because there is so much more relevant information and that information is so much more obscure. When was the last time you ever saw an enemy’s health as a number in an action game? Or the numbers behind your damage? Typically, action games don’t show you the math behind the system.
Why Character Progression Doesn't Always Work
However, making CP decisions transparent in action games like Devil May Cry 3 or Brutal Legend is much harder to do, because there is so much more relevant information and that information is so much more obscure. When was the last time you ever saw an enemy’s health as a number in an action game? Or the numbers behind your damage? Typically, action games don’t show you the math behind the system.
So, logically, most action games simply don't tell you the math behind the CP decisions you're making either, because the fundamental system itself is opaque – you wouldn’t know what +10 damage was because you wouldn’t even know how much damage you deal regularly, much less the health of your opponents.
Consequently, CP decisions in action games are much more about luck than your ability to decipher the system. For stat boosts and items, this is definitely true whether the lighting axe does 5% extra damage or 10% extra damage could be the difference between it being worthless and it being completely overpowered, but it doesn’t tell you.
It's even more luck-based when CP decisions involve learning new abilities in action games. Each ability has a dozen relevant stats – speed of animation, damage, how fast it moves you, whether or not it has invincibility frames, exact range, exactly what effect it has on you, etc etc. It's nearly impossible to tell which moves will end up being useful in these games just by looking at them on the CP decision screen. In some ways, action games are stuck here. Even if these stats were displayed, the player wouldn't understand what they actually represented – because action games have no intuitive way of giving the system to the player without filling the game with clutter.
Consequently, CP decisions in action games are much more about luck than your ability to decipher the system. For stat boosts and items, this is definitely true whether the lighting axe does 5% extra damage or 10% extra damage could be the difference between it being worthless and it being completely overpowered, but it doesn’t tell you.
It's even more luck-based when CP decisions involve learning new abilities in action games. Each ability has a dozen relevant stats – speed of animation, damage, how fast it moves you, whether or not it has invincibility frames, exact range, exactly what effect it has on you, etc etc. It's nearly impossible to tell which moves will end up being useful in these games just by looking at them on the CP decision screen. In some ways, action games are stuck here. Even if these stats were displayed, the player wouldn't understand what they actually represented – because action games have no intuitive way of giving the system to the player without filling the game with clutter.
Fighting games are similar to action games in this sense – they don't give you the math. However, when players get serious about playing, they spend a lot of time testing every single move and giving their results a number, and then comparing it to other moves and deciding whether it’s useful or useless. When serious players do this, they have an understanding of what the numbers mean – they created the number for health, so they know damage in the context of health, and they know how many frames a second the game runs at, so they know what an attack being 120 frames means. Range is less intuitive, but it’s often a reverse-engineered attribute, so they know what the difference between 700 and 600 range is because they made those numbers up to reflect their actual testing in the game. They reverse engineer the system themselves instead of the game giving it to them, so the numbers make sense to them because they created the context.
And it's this raw data that ultimately drives the players' final decisions. Every move in a fighting game is presumably “useful,” in the sense that there was a use intended for it, but only a few are actually worth using. That’s because it doesn’t matter that one attack is “long and slow” and one attack is “short and fast,” what really matter is exactly how long it is and exactly how slow it is.
The Problem of Permanence
Even in single player action games, players are often serious enough to reverse engineer the system in the same way – you'll often see numbers attached to gamefaqs guides on more hardcore action games. So why would reverse engineering the system work for moves in fighting games but not CP decisions in action games? The key difference is that CP decisions are permanent – so the process of figuring out the exact differences between attacks in order to make the right CP decision requires making the CP decision that allows you to test out the attacks in the first place. To contrast, you can really like a character's low kick in a fighting game, but realize that it's worthless against good players once you start getting better. At that point, you stop using it, no harm no foul.
However, that's not inherently bad. In most action games, it's a source of frustration – you're not going to redo 2 hours of a game once you realize that your initial decision to put points into the lighting axe was probably a poor one. But roguelikes have elegantly integrated the trial and error of figuring out the system into the core game itself. In my experience, the reason why it works for roguelikes but doesn't work for action games is mostly in how they present it. In Brutal Legend, the game is content first, action gameplay second, and the character progression system as a nice little aside. You would never save and load over and over in Brutal Legend to figure out which axe is best because that's not the "point" of the game. But roguelikes make it very clear – the content is the system.
The Problem of Permanence
Even in single player action games, players are often serious enough to reverse engineer the system in the same way – you'll often see numbers attached to gamefaqs guides on more hardcore action games. So why would reverse engineering the system work for moves in fighting games but not CP decisions in action games? The key difference is that CP decisions are permanent – so the process of figuring out the exact differences between attacks in order to make the right CP decision requires making the CP decision that allows you to test out the attacks in the first place. To contrast, you can really like a character's low kick in a fighting game, but realize that it's worthless against good players once you start getting better. At that point, you stop using it, no harm no foul.
However, that's not inherently bad. In most action games, it's a source of frustration – you're not going to redo 2 hours of a game once you realize that your initial decision to put points into the lighting axe was probably a poor one. But roguelikes have elegantly integrated the trial and error of figuring out the system into the core game itself. In my experience, the reason why it works for roguelikes but doesn't work for action games is mostly in how they present it. In Brutal Legend, the game is content first, action gameplay second, and the character progression system as a nice little aside. You would never save and load over and over in Brutal Legend to figure out which axe is best because that's not the "point" of the game. But roguelikes make it very clear – the content is the system.
1 comment:
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