I started replaying Wonderful 101 Remastered recently (I’ve bounced off this game before), and the User Experience (UX) of this game is REALLY REALLY BAD. Here’s a quick introduction to User Experience for people who don’t know. User Experience is a field of design descending from User Interface design that incorporates a lot of different aspects that users run into in the process of trying to interact with a software product or service. In a game, User Experience covers not just the UI, but the presentation of game elements on the screen, the way that rewards are structured, the way new options are unlocked, the color coding of various elements (like enemies, attacks, etc), the presence and intrusiveness of cutscenes, the controller layout, online ranking systems, cosmetics, the tutorialization, and even the structure of the game’s mechanical design itself. Something like the way Gears of War gives new players in online multiplayer a subtle buff for the first 5 matches, so they’re more likely to win and therefore stick around, is UX. UX is ideally informed by research, both on the level of the whole discipline, and for individual games and playtesting to find pain points for new users. Playtesting with new users is inherently UX.

This article helps explain UX in the context of games better: https://medium.com/@player_research/what-is-games-user-experience-ux-and-how-does-it-help-ea35ceaa9f05

Platinum games AS A WHOLE, have extremely bad UX. Wonderful 101 manages to kick it up a notch from the normal badness of Platinum’s UX.

A common Platinum Game UX problem is requiring basic defensive abilities to be unlocked in the store (sometimes through progression). This is in practically every Hideki Kamiya Platinum action game, from Bayonetta (air dodge), to Wonderful 101 (unite guts and unite spring), to Metal Gear Rising (Offensive defense, a dodge. Technically not a Kamiya game). Wonderful 101 is notable here, because Unite Guts and Wonder Spring are your block and dodge, your ONLY defensive abilities. Blocking attacks with Unite Guts is the only easy way to make some enemies vulnerable and the easier of two ways to make them susceptible to juggles. If you do not unlock these abilities, your only way to defend yourself is to run away from attacks, some of which home-in! There is a big tutorial pop-up telling you to buy them when you first visit the shop, but you do not have them for the entire first mission, and the first fight versus bigger enemies in the game. Plus, you won’t see that pop-up unless you go into the store, which you’re not guaranteed to do immediately. Presumably the reason such basic moves are unlocks is so that tutorials don’t need to be front-loaded at the start of the game, and can be spaced out more over the first few missions, and requiring you to buy them makes it obvious what you have versus what you don’t, and you try out the new thing you got. However it would be easy to just have these unlocked from the start and have prompts pop up about them at appropriate points, instead of locking you out of mission critical moves.

The ranking systems in Platinum Games are extremely demotivating to a new player. They function on a triad of time / combo score / damage taken. A new player is guaranteed to score poorly on almost every mission, because they don’t understand the systems, they aren’t familiar with the encounters, they’re practically guaranteed to get hit once per fight, and they get penalized harshly for using continues or items, which these games hand out like candy. This annoys a lot of new players. The ranking systems do exist to give players an incentive to work towards playing the game better/more perfectly, but the combo score component depends on unlocking moves that you do not have from the beginning of the game, and will not unlock until multiple playthroughs through the game. In Wonderful 101, it is not really possible to get a platinum in many fights on the first playthrough because you need to unlock Wonder Rising first. With each weapon no less! My proposal for fixing this problem is to have a completely different grading system for the easy and normal difficulties that is biased towards only giving the highest ranks. Getting a platinum in any of the 3 scores should yield at least a gold rank on the fight, 2 should yield platinum, 3 pure platinum (and if the last is a gold, maybe give pure plat anyway, at least on easy and very easy), REGARDLESS of the other scores. Make it a similar deal with 1 gold yielding at least a silver, 2 gold = gold, 3 gold = platinum, and so on down the ranks. On easy to normal difficulties, make the penalty for using items, low or nil. Same for Continues. Save the real scoring system for the higher difficulties. Fans of action games don’t enjoy clearing out the lower difficulty modes for their score card, in large part because it is so annoying to get a high combo score on the easier difficulties.

Platinum games are loaded to the brim with cutscenes intermittently throughout missions. These cutscenes are frequently fairly lengthly, being minutes long, but don’t have a lot of real plot development. Some of them are unskippable, and skipping a cutscene means opening a menu, moving the cursor over, and selecting skip. It’s nice that you can pause cutscenes so you can walk away. It’s not nice that the pause has a delay before the menu is active, meaning it takes time to pause and unpause, as well as time to move the cursor over to the skip button. You need to do this a lot or sit through a lot of cutscenes and this can seriously interrupt the gameplay and the learning process. If these cutscenes played out without interrupting your ability to interact and progress, they would be significantly less intrusive. Nier Automata largely learned this lesson by having characters speak about non-critical story elements during battles and exploration.

Collectible consumable items pop up CONSTANTLY, with tutorial popups for what they do. These pop-ups always have a delay before you can dismiss them, to guarantee you’ve reread how they work after you already know. I KNOW HOW MUCH A BLUE RUPEE IS ALREADY! This is highly distracting and disturbing to flow. Collecting batteries factors into your final score, as well as how much energy you can use during each mission (???), adding more distraction during fights and exploration.

The screen is massively cluttered with characters, enemies, and random environmental objects, and zoomed in by default. The color scheme makes it difficult to discern enemies or your character from the background, especially in circumstances where the ring around your character disappears. The submenu can come up for rearranging your team leaders, or giving you a radar, which covers enemies underneath it, and it does not display the prompt to dismiss it anywhere onscreen and it does not go away automatically if you don’t use it. BY DEFAULT, THE PC REMASTER HAS KEYBOARD BUTTON PROMPTS ONLY, AND DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY SWITCH WHEN A CONTROLLER IS DETECTED. YOU NEED TO DIG THROUGH THE MENUS TO FIND THE OPTION FOR THIS, AND IT IS NOT CLEARLY LABELED. Tiny enemies are not clearly color coded when they are attacking, or vulnerable (I have not divined the way their states are color coded yet) and are generally easy to miss when they’re attacking, or there is one left to kill before the mission ends. Enemy attack cues can be extremely subtle and not have a clear cadence like in other action games, allowing even the attacks of large enemies to get lost in the sea of information on-screen.

There is no explanation that you need to use unite guts to deflect blunt attacks, or that it is pierced by spiked attacks. My brother actually got up to the tanks and quit because he couldn’t damage them. I knew you needed Unite Guts already from watching footage of the game, so I didn’t have a problem with them. There is no prompt to zoom the camera in or out, or to dismiss the submenu. You need to unlock wonder stinger and wonder rising WITH EACH WEAPON! These are the only 2 command attacks on each weapon and they need to be reunlocked with each one, from finding secrets and fighting enemies! WHY.

Wonderful 101 overloads you with information, distracts you from what’s useful constantly, hides essential features and information, fails to explain essential information, and presents information in a way that is very difficult to interpret. It is entirely clear why so many people had such a hard time getting into this game. It is made seemingly on purpose to drive people away from it as fast as possible, with the tank enemies in particular being hard barriers, requiring you to use options that you don’t necessarily have and certainly that aren’t explained to you.

I’m eventually going to overcome the new player experience and see how good the game is overall, but in the meantime it massively frustrates me.

What are good criterias to analyze and compare hack’n slashes (Bayonetta, DMC, MGR, NG etc)?

I’d say the big fields are, attack design, enemy design, and defense design. Level design doesn’t tend to be a big factor, though enemy composition could be.

The big things in attack design for me are, how many command attacks are there and how varied in function are they? How many strings are there and how varied in function are they?

Platinum style games really emphasize strings on their characters over command attacks. Only DMC and to a lesser extent God Hand emphasize command attacks. The Platinum design ethos seems to be: here’s a bunch of strings, memorize them and perform longer or shorter strings based on the situation. Dodge enemies in the middle of your strings and use dodge offset to keep the string going so you can get to the wicked weave at the end. And maybe some strings have particular launching effects or something. Performing strings gives you magic points which lets you do powerful command attacks to get a wicked weave without doing a string.

DMC meanwhile has a ton of moves you can use at any time, and they have different area coverage, damage output, and combo potential, so their use can differ a lot based on the enemies you’re facing and the current situation.

God Hand sort of strikes a medium by having the customizable combo that acts as filler between everything else, and you also can bind moves that launch in various ways, guard break, dodge highs, hop lows, or other wacky effects.

NG has a lot of strings. I don’t really know why. Most don’t seem very useful really. You can get long combos by doing the right strings to launch and throwing shuriken at the right point in the combo to keep the juggle going.

In terms of defense design, DMC wants you to commit to moves, not allowing attacks to be canceled into defensive options generally. Also you generally jump for defense, though you can roll or trickster dodge too.

Bayonetta wants you to dodge and do it at the last moment for a big bonus, and it makes everything but wicked weaves cancelable, so nothing feels like it has much commitment except wicked weaves. They want you to juggle between doing combos and dodging at the same time without picking one or the other.

Ninja Gaiden uses a block, but the block can be broken, so you really want to block and then dodge out of block usually. And similar to DMC, attacks cannot be canceled, so an attack or string is a commitment you need to weigh carefully. There’s factors that help differentiate block from dodge so each are useful and exclusively dodging will usually get you killed.

MGR really wants you to parry correctly in the right direction the enemy is coming from and then forward dodge and BM cancel out of the parry block. Plus it had ninja run versus bullet attacks.

God Hand lets you dodge out of any attack like Bayonetta, but its dodges are much more constrained, giving a higher feeling of commitment. Plus there’s the differentiation between sidestep, weave, and backflip dodges.

In terms of enemy design, enemies can be more aggressive or passive. More mobile or static, they can be melee or ranged oriented. They can control space or time.

Enemies in DMC tend not to control space very well, being purely about timing really. DMC1 did something really clever and gave all the enemies a mix of close range and long range attacks, making up for the inability to combine enemy types together in the same room. DMC3 enemies especially were very one-note frequently, only having 1 or 2 attacks.

My gut tells me Bayonetta enemies are good, but honestly I haven’t played in long enough to really remember. I’m honestly blanking on NG enemies too. I remember them varying between clean solid design and being gimmicky bullshit a lot. Both games have extremely aggressive enemies however, which is generally nice considering how mobile the protagonists of these games tend to be.

MGR enemies were okay. Camera issues hurt some of them like mastiffs, who are great except for getting obscured off camera especially during their jumping attacks. Generic soldier enemies were a bit weak design-wise.

God Hand enemies are excellent for their ability to threaten different spatial zones, making each of your dodges differently effective versus each enemy type and their various attacks. They also used team tactics and had special quick but escapable throw moves that could vary the pacing of combat a lot. They used things like projectiles, whips, AOE attacks, multihitters, vertical and horizontal swipes, and lunging attacks to seriously vary what tactics were effective against each of them.

Nioh’s not technically in the canon, but I think it did an excellent job of combining all these factors, having a wide variety of moves, interesting and varied defense, and great enemy design.

Also I object to the name hack and slash, because that tends to describe Diablo style games more frequently, and not all stylish action games even feature swords, such as God Hand, or Bayonetta, which is primarily punching and kicking.

What do you think of Pin ball?

Pinball is really interesting from a historical perspective. The original pinball machines were more like pachinko, no flippers, no spring, just put the balls in and let them roll downwards. They were more like gambling than the game we know today, and on the original machines, the only way to influence the ball’s movement was to tilt and bump the machine.

http://www.bmigaming.com/pinballhistory.htm

Later machines included tilt and bump sensors to detect if people were physically tilting them to cheat, usually tuned so there was a little tolerance, so players could still bump it, but not too much or the sensor would give you a warning, or eventually disable your flippers if you ran out of warnings. If you’ve ever seen old cartoons with the pinball gag, then this is where it comes from.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PinballGag Continue reading →