Simple Actions with a lot of Depth

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What are some simple actions in games that actually have lots of deph? I’d say Mario’s jump is a good example due to the level of control you have over it. Got any others?

Double Jumping
My goto example a lot of the time. You can jump at many different points during your first jump to get a variety of combined effects, meaning that between both your jumps there is a lot of depth.

Weaving through projectiles (shmups)

Wavedashing (smash)
Different angles give you different lengths, you can jump up through platforms and do it, and as you land. Can also get you off platforms and be done out of shield and other actions.

Edge canceling (smash)
Can be done at any point in a move and off of many moves for varied effect

Strafejumping (Quake and derivatives)
Lots of variance possible on each frame, lots of variance possible in the overall arc and trajectory.

Kick Glitching (Mirror’s Edge)
Is modulated based on input speed, look angle into the wall, and time you kick off the wall. Allows different followups too

Side Boosting (ME)
You get different amounts of speed off it based on how cleanly you do the motion, both turning to set it up, and turning when exiting the boost.

Pointing and shooting while moving (especially rockets)
Pretty obvious, you can aim in a lot of directions, move in a lot of directions. Rockets and other projectiles you need to lead are really interesting too. Aiming is fundamentally tricky and has a lot of possible places your cursor can pass through and become active on.

Skiing (Tribes)
Activating the jetpack and going up and down the right hills to gain speed requires good timing and reading of the environment.

Drifting
Depending on the game this requires good prediction ability for where to start drifting and how long to drift, as well as what direction to hold during it, such as to get the right angle.

A lot of Micro stuff in Starcraft Brood War
Moving units around and having varied results for different formations is fundamentally deep. Like pulling weakened units off the front line and having them assist from the back, or using tighter or wider or shaped formations versus certain other enemy types.

Directional Influence (smash)
I’m kinda cheating with this one, DI is deep because of a lot of assisting mechanics too. Actually trying to control your trajectory in the moment is kind of simple, just point the stick perpendicularly to the angle of knockback.

Tossing objects with gravity.
Getting parabolas right is tricky. Humans have natural physics simulating mechanisms that assist us with this.

Attacking in Chivalry
The sword moves and you can look to control it as it moves. Control over these two simultaneous elements means there’s a lot of different trajectories you can send your sword in. You can delay your swing in place by rotating your view the opposite direction, or spin wildly to slash everywhere and potentially around blocks.

Rebounding off a corner or incline
Judging angles of reflection is tricky, and can go a lot of different ways. Can quickly become too chaotic for humans to easily judge though.

Shooting an object that bounces off surfaces
Same as the above, but an object instead of you.

Staying atop an object moving under you.
Not quite the same as balancing below, this is more about

Balancing
Walking the Slack Line taught me that there’s a lot involved with balancing properly. Even in the Tony Hawk games, trying to balance on a fine line has a fair amount of complexity, even if it’s a simple action overall, and being good at it can be tricky.

Trying to get maximum coverage of many objects with a limited area or set of areas.
This is a pure math thing. It’s the knapsack problem basically. A lot of math problems like this are inherently deep, like the traveling salesman problem. They require the use of heuristics to properly analyze. Actions like placing sentries, towers, or AOEs typically fall under this category.

Getting an object that is attracted to you gravitationally to orbit you, or redirecting it in general.
Lots of variables operate in synchronicity in these cases and you can get a lot of different results out of them with careful movement.

Bashgliding (Ori)
This one is cool primarily because you kind of need to balance the direction you bash with how much velocity you want to get off of it. Also the input is cool, you literally release the stick at the moment you bash. Then you can glide and double jump, and as long as you don’t press the stick, you’ll keep all the bash momentum. It’s possible before you gain the ability to glide to do this, but it’s obviously not as effective, and you definitely need double and triple jumps to really make it useful.

Divekicking (divekick)
All the divekicks and different styles of divekick in that game are so expressive. Like The Baz deserves a special shoutout for both versions of his divekick, the original one where he could jump straight up and then press and hold kick to choose an angle to fire, and he had to draw a line behind him that would be what actually hurt people, as well as the new one where he presses and holds in the air to extend a rope further or shorter, to determine the radius of the arc he will swing in, then he can do this again off the first swing. The fact this works SO WELL with the existing divekick characters is fucking incredible. It has a totally different type of counterplay where you need to basically kick him in the crotch, into his body, rather than at him the same way as the other characters, yet every character counterplays against this great.

Shielding (smash)
It has variable density, depending on how hard you hold down the trigger, which can have variably more pushback/shieldstun/damage taken when you hold it lighter, and it can even be tilted to cover different parts of the body. So truly effective use of the shield can be really nuanced.

Palmbombing (psychonauts)
It’s like the reflection examples and tribes skiing above, you can use the palm bomb to reflect off a surface, then redirect this velocity elsewhere. Helped by the fact that bunnyhopping conserves momentum in psychonauts.

Damage boosting
This one goes back to Quake, but involves a lot of games. There’s many forms of this, from rocket jumping, to grenade jumping, to getting hit by enemies to abuse mercy invincibility, to getting hit by enemies to get boosted forwards faster, to many other things. It can vary by position, by angle, by when you jump, many factors. Usually has incredible depth.

Canceling an animation with variable velocity over the course of the animation to keep the velocity.
There’s a lot of examples of this in different games, but one of my favorites is the DACUS in Smash bros. You can cancel dash attack into grab or up smash and keep the momentum of the dash attack (which for most characters boosts them forward rather quickly).

Dash cancel to keep invincibility (Slayer in Guilty Gear)
You can do this to add iframes to moves like bloodsucking universe to make them function like pseudo DPs. You can combine this with all of your specials and to jump forward invincibly whenever you want.

Divekick canceling (faust in guilty gear)
You can divekick (like dhalsim’s yoga spear) with Faust, then cancel with faultless defense, then do another aerial at any point in your jump to change your jumping trajectory and do aerials lower to the ground. It’s amazing to see in action and gives Faust amazing air to air and air to ground abilities.

Roman Canceling (guilty gear)
You can do this at any point in a move (after it hits) to instantly cancel the move. The Xrd implementation is even more deep because it can be before or after the move hits, vastly opening up the range of options. You can whiff cancel fireballs to act simultaneously to them, you can extend blockstrings at the cost of meter (I love Kusoru at Final Round XV roman canceling two sweeps in a row to set up a tick wild throw, that’s fucking incredibly cool). You can also YRC moves that put you in the air to do quick aerials, like YRC Bandit Bringer, or Millia’s 6K.

Movement on Ice
It’s tricky, you have a few variables going at once, and you need to judge how much movement will be enough to get you to a place, and how much is overboard. Sometimes you need to move fast, sometimes you can afford to move slow. You need to think into the future about the effect of friction to approximate where you will end up. The range of different speeds and attempts to affect your speed more or less create depth.

Tried to keep this limited to single mechanics, but couldn’t in all cases. Left off a lot of things that were obviously combinations of a lot of mechanics working together, or being decided between.

Drawing the Line on Trial and Error

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Is it considered bad game design if it involves some trial and error. For example, on the Koei wiki page on Nioh, “The game is specifically designed for trial and error. Developers expect players to retry segments multiple times.” Is trial and error acceptable if minimal?

I think we need to draw a line here on Trial and Error.

There’s like, I Wanna Be The Guy trial and error, then there’s regular hard game Trial and Error.

Here’s someone who has never played the game before playing IWBTG. This is a trial and error game. It sets you up in situations where it will kill you in a way that you almost never can see coming. (Bonus: The game over music is from guilty gear.)

IWBTG is bullshit. It’s alright in a game where you accept that premise and are willing to invest tons of time into dying over and over again. Nioh and the Souls games are not like IWBTG. They have occasional traps. They have occasional death traps. But they give hints about these traps in advance, and never decide to hit you with anything that cannot be beaten by human reaction time unless you place yourself in that situation. That and a lot of traps in those games will not kill you instantly. They allow you to fail without instant death.

Nioh and the Souls games have an element of trial and error in that it is not always clear how enemies work, or what is the best way to clear a stage. In the process of beating a stage, you are expected to try many times, because it is hard, and try many different ways. They expect you to try things out, like approaches, like attacks, and die or get hurt trying, because it’s hard, and then try different things. You are given clues, you are shown an adequate amount of information. If you’re good, you can beat whole stages without dying that you’ve never seen before, but that is unlikely. In IWBTG, that is impossible.

And on a broader level, all games consist of trial and error. It’s connected to the nature of games. You mess up, you try again. It’s just not always blind guesswork.

And the other thing to ask is, is the game still fun when all the surprises are revealed? If someone knows about every trick? In the case of IWBTG, it’s still fairly challenging. I don’t think I’d totally call it fun, for much the same reason as super meat boy, but it’s still a functioning game with a decent challenge.

On the subject of trial and error, do you think it’s reasonable for there to always be a sweet spot for, say, a Souls boss, where they’re totally beatable on a first try but still difficult on a tenth? That seems like a tighter balancing act than it’s worth.

Apparently the way Dark Souls bosses are balanced, the best playtester has to beat them without taking damage, then they’re considered fair. I think this is a bit overboard personally. I don’t think you need to go so far to ensure bosses are beatable on the first try honestly. You just need to avoid instantly killing the player for anything that isn’t totally obviously an instant kill (Bed of Chaos obviously breaks this rule).

How to Improve at Mind Games

Celia WagarLeave a comment

How can someone become good at playing mind games with their opponent in fighting games?

By practicing it deliberately.

See Also: How to Read a Book: Reads in Competitive Games

Specifically you should watch your opponent’s patterns. What do they keep doing and how can you exploit that? Watch what they do in each situation, get a feeling for their tempo and reaction time. If their reaction time is better than yours, then you need to beat them by acting on the tempo. If they do not adhere to the tempo, then you need to figure out by how much, and either act first to interrupt their options, or act second to punish them.

Watch for common player behaviors and keep a mental record of those. One example of this is, as Marth, I like to run through my opponent, then run cancel with a crouch, and fsmash back at the opponent I passed by. This is because when you run through, many people think they’re safe and do an option out of shield. However this is not foolproof. Players with good reaction time can grab me out of shield before I run through them. Players who are smart can recognize my pattern and either jump out of shield earlier, or hold onto their shield so my fsmash does nothing. At which point the correct response from me is to notice they are doing this and instead do run through, cactaur dash (run cancel and dash opposite direction), grab, because I’ve conditioned them to stay in shield.

Think about how everything you do conditions a response from your opponent and other things you can do instead that beat that response. If you do something that is exploitable, change it up in expectation of your opponent catching on. Watch what you do before you do an action, because that might give it away. Similarly watch for that in your opponent.

Getting good at mindgames is about studying other people, and finding 50/50 scenarios.

Also read this guide.
http://sonichurricane.com/?page_id=1702

Here’s 3 other guides on it as it applies specifically to smash bros (though you can extend these lessons outside of those games too)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=273tHua4wGc

And here’s a paper on people’s patterns in Rock Paper Scissors and a basic guide to winning:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.5199v1.pdf
(The short is, winners tend to stick with their choice more often, losers tend to switch more often, and continue switching to unused options.)

Think about what the opponent is actually doing. Remember their responses to scenarios, and keep updating to do the thing that will beat their current pattern. If you have found a pattern that keeps winning, keep doing it, or if it’s just a pure mixup, switch after 2-3 reps, because that’s when your opponent is likely to switch, unless they’re bad and don’t understand the counterplay of the different options.

Of course also look for scenarios in which you can cover all or most of your opponent’s options on reaction and just setplay them. Then you don’t need to guess.

The beauty of competitive games is that there’s a complicated web of counters to different options in different scenarios, with one covering many in many cases, and different ones changing in utility based on the scenario. But to exploit these, you really need to think and pay attention, or you’ll get played.

Don’t Get Mad, Get Good.

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of Spherax’ salty rage quit on Rising Thunder? Does he have somewhat of a valid point beside how bitch he sounds?

This was the MOST HILARIOUS FUCKING THING EVER when it happened. I even told the guy on his twitter to neutral jump the fucking fireballs. Rising thunder was a game that made neutral jumps over fireballs REALLY FUCKING GOOD too! Because all moves were on cooldown, if you neutral jumped a fireball, not only were you not allowed to shoot another until it went offscreen, they had to wait for the whole cooldown to finish!

It also lead to interesting things like if your opponent wasted an anti-air, then you could jump in all you wanted without fear until the cooldown finished.

Also I loved how Chel in that game could cancel sweeps into fireballs. Almost no game does that except Super Turbo.

Like the ironic thing about his whining was, he was playing the best character in the game, Crow. Crow had absolutely ridiculous okizeme pressure, and pressure in general. If he got in close, he could attack, cancel to short ring toss, jump over, crossup, attack high or low, then ring toss again, and so on, then confirm into a combo, into super. Crow was some cool shit, but also evil shit.

In short, No. He does not have a point. All of his whining is completely invalid. He is a bad player who has trouble with a simple low-level playstyle. Chel was not overpowered or broken. Ryu is not overpowered in SF4. Dude got beaten, claims the other player is bad and using a broken character to salvage his ego. It’s as simple as that.

When you get beaten, you need to acknowledge WHY you are getting beaten. You need to understand the faults in YOURSELF. It doesn’t matter if your opponent is using a broken character, you can pick that character too. It doesn’t matter if your opponent is a scrub. You’re a worse scrub for losing to them and being salty about it. If you cannot purge yourself of this mindset then you cannot improve. Developing a mindset like this makes you worse against players you should be beating the most easily.

I played a friend recently who played EXACTLY like this. He’d shoryuken out of everything I did to him after blocking the first hit, be mashing shoryuken in the middle of all my combos in case I dropped. This is a scrubby terrible behavior. I was tired at the time and fucking livid that he was seriously pulling this dumb shit when I was in a mindset where my ability to adapt was slowed down. So I began tapping him once, letting him shoryuken, and doing the crush counter combo. I then did something I don’t do often in SFV and switched characters. I chose a bunch of random characters I never play and beat him with almost all of them (rip zangief). I was annoyed, but I controlled myself enough to not lose to an opponent doing a basic (but bad) strategy.

Zoning is interesting. There’s a lot of ways to zone well, and a lot of ways to get around zoning. If you can’t figure all this out, if you can’t see what’s interesting about it, you’re in a bad mental place.

Should Games Just Abandon Storytelling?

Celia Wagar8 Comments

Since you believe that dissonance between story and gameplay is inevitable. Should games just abandon storytelling?

No, we just shouldn’t care so much about dissonance or the limitations that stories and settings place upon games. We should be free to come up with whatever gameplay mechanics we want to, whatever level structure we want to, without tying it back to consistency with a story, without worrying about it seeming “too videogamey”, without contrivance being disdained so much. We should stop complaining about all this “it doesn’t really work that way” bullshit when we know damn well that there’s a good reason for it and we wouldn’t have a game without it. Like all the complaints about the shrine of Winter. Like someone thinking, “oh, it’s dumb that samus loses her powerups every game, in Other M, lets have them be authorized at specific points in the story instead”

Game constructs are totally made up. They don’t have to relate to anything. We aren’t bound by physical laws when making them like we would be in conventional engineering. We might as well accept that and use it to our benefit.

But should we get rid of stories completely? I don’t think we should do that either. I certainly think we shouldn’t invest as major development resources into them, but they have practical benefits in the form of setting up mental relationships between different objects in the setting, being an inspiration for systems of play, and guiding the player goal-wise. That and like music and graphics, it’s a tangential benefit to the work as a whole.

We just need to stop viewing storytelling as the reason for the medium to exist, since that’s not going to happen.

Axiom Verge Boss Review

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of these bosses from Axiom Verge? I think they’re some of the worst designed bosses I’ve ever seen due to their lack of moves, boring repeditive attack patterns, and bullet spongey nature.

I commented on this when I reviewed axiom verge, these are some seriously disappointing bosses. All of them have you be extremely passive in fighting them, which is lame.

The second boss, Telal, is notable, because you can damage boost through it to get to its opposite side. It cannot turn around, so you can stand behind it and shoot its weakpoint and there’s nothing you can do about it. Also his pattern just has you standing on top of a platform and jumping when projectiles come at you.

Uruku, the third boss, is easily defeated by simply using the address disruptor to create a platform in front of it. This platform never disappears, then you can position your gun diagonally, and shoot directly at its weak point, and none of its projectiles can harm you. If you don’t realize you can do this, then you can simply stand by some of the higher up platforms and shoot at him when he’s not using the laser.

Gir-tab, the fourth boss, is wrecked by the hypo-atomizer, which shoots forwards and sends extra projectiles out off its main path, so it reaches under him and hits the weak spot very directly. Also you can damage boost through him and deal a ton of damage with the kilver or drill. This boss and Telal really seem like lazy design. They have projectiles shooting in places you have little to no reason to be, and there’s phases you can just shoot at them without worrying about projectiles. A common theme with many of the bosses.

Ukhu Variant is the next boss, and the only one with a cool kill strategy. You can glitch the wasps it releases to become explosives, and they float upwards. If you shoot them when they’re near its mouth when it’s open, you insta kill the boss. This is the only cool thing in the entire game. Boss tracks you too closely on hard mode, makes many of its attacks impossible to avoid.

Similar deal with sentinel after it. The guy in this video just sits in the corner and shoots at it while tanking its projectiles. The fast strat for this guy is to jump up at his center and mash up on the dpad to teleport through it, because your teleport moves really far and does a ton of damage at this point. Either way, lame boss.

The final boss is even more lame, it almost used to be basically impossible to beat him unless you got into a safe corner of the room where the robots can’t shoot you. They’re playing against the patched version of the boss in this video. Those robots also show how a ton of enemies are in this game. They swarm on top of you, and you need to kill them before they can hit you.

The common theme is that it’s like there was no regard given for interplay between how the player would attack the boss and how the boss would attack back. AM2R bosses are just as complex as these bosses, or even simpler, but they all show how to avoid these mistakes. Except for the Omega Metroid, that one was just poorly considered.

Even the Alpha Metroids can be weaved around and opened up more easily than the Omega Metroid.

How should we form values to judge games by?

Celia Wagar2 Comments

How is it possible to establish which values we should hold games up to in order to figure out how good the game is? You can point to the best games and say they have X value, but in order to establish that those games are great, you have to presume a value by which to judge it.

It’s based on people. People tend to like certain things, we notice what those things are, we attempt to establish what values within those things are desirable, we produce new work based on those values, we see if our work is effective, and refine our model.

It’s a big cycle that informs itself. We need to build models, and refine them based on observation and experimentation. Nothing of what exists today came to exist in a vacuum. We’ve gone through millennia of cultural evolution. I think that the base desires that motivate us have stayed relatively consistent on a human level (though this is debatable, and also culturally influenced) and we’ve steadily found things that we respond more strongly to, then we had children, who also responded strongly to those things, either because culture informed them they should, or because it’s a human desire, or both, and the previous generation died. So the next generation is stuck with preexisting works that express preexisting values, and does not begin totally from scratch. We’re born in the middle of a chicken and the egg problem. Objects from the prior generation are already considered valuable by the time we get here, and we need to individually interpret whether that value is true or false. I wasn’t around for the NES, I came to the conclusion NES games were good based on playing them myself.

I’ve selected values based on what I think the most important aspects of games are across observation of a bunch of games, and tried to separate those values from the influence of culture. These might just be what I personally value more than anything else, people have certainly accused me of that in the past, and will again in the future. However I try to separate it from my own value system by acknowledging that not all games I’d consider good are necessarily games that I like, and not all games that I like are necessarily good. I think that the values I’ve chosen tie back to human nature, or exist for practical design reasons. I recognize that human nature varies a bit on an individual level, but I think we’re similar enough as a group to attempt to make general value evaluations.

I think what people get hung up on with your way of thinking is that you think of the word ‘good’ as objective while things you ‘like’ are subjective, whereas to most people they’re both subjective and pretty much the same thing. Why bother ‘liking’ things if you can’t call them ‘good’?

Because the qualities I admire in them don’t outweigh the negative aspects of those things, but are unique to those things. Or I liked them as a kid and still unironically like them even though they’re fucked up or kinda lame. Like Dungeon Keeper 2, even though everyone else seems to prefer Dungeon Keeper 1 and DK2 itself is kinda broken and one dimensional in a lot of ways.

I think most people connect things that are good to some type of objective basis. I think that when you assign something a property, you’re saying that belongs to the object, not to your perception of the object. Rampant subjectivism comes from recognizing that we assign properties to objects based on our perceptions of objects, so it is assumed that especially for non-functional or impractical objects that their properties are indistinguishable from our unique perception of them, which is unmappable to other people’s perception of them. I’ve explained my reasons for disagreeing with this in the past and don’t really want to repeat myself.

That loltaku post you linked on twitter is dumb. no good first year philosophy course will tell you “nothing is objective.” he also equates objectively quality with how the “average person” sees art.

http://loltaku.tumblr.com/post/150517665399/opinion-reviews-can-never-be-objective

I’m pretty sure the implication is that first year philosophy isn’t good, it’s introducing people to basic philosophical concepts, not all of which are in agreement with each other. That and haven’t we gone over before that nobody can be perfectly objective off the bat, but we can use various methods to get closer and closer to objectivity and refine our models until we approach analysis more descriptive of the world as it is and detached from our individual lens?

“Roger Ebert, on more than one occasional, gave movies he personally disliked a thumbs up, and movies he liked a thumbs down, because despite his personal enjoyment he could recognize the quality of the movie and how the average person would feel after seeing each.”
loltaku is coming at this from a pretty standard perspective, where the problem isn’t the methodology of the reviewers, the problem is that they give the wrong scores relative to common consensus, which is why people like older game reviews and dislike modern ones. They perceive that old game reviews were more in line with public opinion, or at minimum that reviewers were more direct and honest.

And the concept of a general audience reaction thing is a type of objectivity, I mean, I’m pursuing a slightly different standard in my own writing, more about the way a game appeals to the base instinct of fun, but both of these are about generalities in relation to people.

That and the important parts of the post to me were,
“yes, reviews can never be purely objective, but if we want to get into intolerable first year philosophy, nothing can really be objective. That doesn’t mean you can’t attempt to judge things with an objective eye.” with that last sentence being the operative part of the paragraph.
and
“The ability to detach yourself from your personal preferences and view things objectively, as well as the ability to articulate why you think something is good/bad are what is SUPPOSED to separate a professional critic from an amateur one”
and
“Roger Ebert, on more than one occasional, gave movies he personally disliked a thumbs up, and movies he liked a thumbs down, because despite his personal enjoyment he could recognize the quality of the movie”

What do you think of weak points?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of enemies with weak points?

I think weak points help focus you on specific things. Like Dracula needs to be hit in the head, a bunch of bloodborne enemies are weaker in the head, many FPS enemies get wrecked by headshots. When you have weak points it can add an element of risk versus reward, time and space your attack well to get bonus damage, or maybe not get damage at all. Weakpoints can put you in harm’s way more, like how to get the most damage on shmup bosses, like touhou bosses that have tiny hitboxes, you need to stay directly beneath them, or close to them, which exposes you to more projectiles.

Weak points can even be used as an optional difficulty thing, like in Megaman ZX, where hitting the enemy weak points will take the boss down faster, but also hurt your grade and consequently the power of the biometal you receive. Some bosses in that games have weak points positioned that are very hard to avoid.

Weak points can be used as a constraint, like Dracula’s Head or Duke’s Dear Freja from Dark Souls 2. There’s a few different ways to hit each of the weak points on these bosses, but if you’re off then you get no damage. In Duke’s Dear Freja’s case, your sword will bounce off the other part of the enemy, even if you would have hit the weak point. This was fun with a greatsword.

The thing to avoid is making the constraints on the weak points so restrictive that they can only be damaged 1 way. This is when you get to Zelda style boss design. To avoid this I’d say, have ways to damage the boss that aren’t the weak point if the weak point isn’t always exposed, or have the weak point always be exposed, or expose itself irregularly during phases where the player also is doing other things. The point is to make the player question whether they can get damage right now, and how much damage they can get right now. This makes it an interesting choice.

What do you think of escort missions?

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What do you think of escort missions?

Everyone knows to avoid making them by now basically because it’s irritating to make mission completion dependent on an entity which you have no control over. Like you can’t realistically make this other entity avoid damage. This is more a matter of technology and user perception than an actual mechanical issue with the concept of escort missions. The issue is that players don’t feel a strong connection between their decisions and outcomes.

The annoyance of escort missions is mitigated as the behavior of the entity to be protected is more consistent and predictable. Escorting something that moves on a totally fixed and unchanging path is usually less aggravating than other possible cases, where the escorted target can wander off on its own, get stuck on geometry, engage enemies it should avoid and get itself killed, etc.

Also irritating is if you’re not allowed to move too far ahead of your escorted target, and generally if it does a shitty job keeping up with you. Emil is like this in that one isometric dungeon in Nier. Many games mitigate this by teleporting the escort to you if you’re too far ahead, though this can sidestep the point of an escort mission.

The abstract idea behind the escort mission makes sense, target separate from you that can take damage, it pairs up with a lot of story concepts, like protecting things, fighting alongside a buddy, etc, it just usually doesn’t work out for an assortment of technical reasons, or poorly considered design.

This page lists a bunch of examples, and happens to be nice enough to categorize them by what’s annoying about that particular escort mission.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EscortMission

What do you think of checkpoints?

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What do you think of checkpoints?

Checkpoints and death are about creating context and building consistency.

When you screw something up, you repeat it. In a broader sense of fun, fun comes from succeeding at things intermittently, and succeeding more frequently over time (building consistency). So when something is screwed up, you repeat it to build the skill. Through iteration, you learn to overcome it. Guilty Gear Xrd’s missions are a great example of this in effect. They have you perform a simple task that builds a skill for a situation, like performing a specific combo, confirming whether the enemy is hit or blocked, performing a reversal from knockdown, surviving an enemy wave of attacks when you cannot attack. They then have you repeat this ten times, whether you succeed or fail, and judge you based on how many times out of ten you succeeded. All 10 is an S rank. You can repeat these missions whenever you want to.

Death just means sending the player back to a prior point. This can be a checkpoint, the beginning of a level, a mission select screen, or the beginning of the entire game. When you send the player back further, when you space checkpoints further apart, you are creating a context that bridges all the things that happen inbetween. This is especially true if there is health, or other semi-persistent variables that go up or down as you progress. When you have say 10 challenges in a row, and 5 hitpoints, you’re saying that you need to complete all 10 of these challenges, and only allowed to fail 4. Hitpoints allow you to fail in a small way and create this longer bridging context between encounters. Healthbars allow you to have bigger failures or smaller failures, so you can have different types of enemy attacks that are easier or harder to avoid and create challenges of mitigating damage instead of strictly avoiding it.

The key thing is though that when you have widely spaced checkpoints, you ask players to be generally consistent across a set of challenges rather than able to succeed at one. If you have checkpoints directly in front of and after every challenge, players can succeed at that challenge once and continue, if you have checkpoints placed further apart, then they might need to succeed at that challenge many times before they can continue. Across repeated playthroughs of a segment, players might die in many different places in many different ways, because they might have a general consistency at any one challenge, but when asked to do multiple in a row, they need to achieve a higher level of consistency to succeed overall. This is the path to mastery.

A corollary to this is, if there is a checkpoint directly after anything, the player is not expected to master that thing. Bosses have checkpoints after them because they are difficulty spikes to be overcome once, not basic challenges to become consistent at overcoming.

Please play Rolling Thunder on NES. It sort of has the lagging checkpoint system you described. When you beat a stage, you get a password for THAT stage, so when you continue you have to beat it again. Basically you have to beat two stages in a row to make progress.

HAH! That’s funny! I guess it makes sense that it comes from the password era, they did a lot of weird checkpointing things back then if I recall correctly. Dunno if I want to play it just to see how the staggered checkpoints work though, it looks kind of simple. Isn’t Code Name Viper better known for this type of gameplay?