by Dr Taliesin Coward
Redundancy and obsolescence are particular problems when it comes to designing offensive weapons and abilities. Often as not, players will find a weapon, spell or ability which simply renders whatever they were using obsolete, meaning that all the developer’s hard work in creating, modeling, and (maybe) balancing any previous items get tossed aside. Now for some games this is not a problem, and is in fact intentional. Looter style games, which shower players with new weapons, armour and goodies as if they were confetti, are an example of this. In fact, a large part of the fun in these games can come from sorting through your loot, selecting the best things, and tossing the rest. That, or selling or melting them down so you can build something even better.
But what about games which don’t operate on this basis? Here, obsolescence can truly be a problem, especially when there is something that is clearly way better than everything else. This is because players will tend to go for the most efficient or effective tool they have, leading to a one-size-fits-all approach to every problem, which in turn leads to boredom. This is something that Soren Johnson (lead designer of Civilization IV) said when he noted developers had to protect gamers from optimising the fun out of everything they play.
One increasingly common solution for this is to give each weapon a particular niche. This weapon is ideal for taking down shields, that one for damaging foes when shields are down, and so on. To be sure, you can still use other weapons, but they won’t do the job anywhere near as well. Doom: Eternal uses this formula brilliantly. However, such an approach, while solving the problem of obsolescence, does so at the cost of a certain amount of player freedom. That is, the game is trying to force the player into a highly reactive mode, where there is clearly one correct way of using the weapons, and everything else becomes inefficient (combat effectively turning into a high-speed puzzle).
An older, and perhaps more intuitive, and less-obviously engineered solution to this problem is economy. This allows developers to include increasingly bigger and better weapons, without making everything else redundant. For example, the most powerful weapon in Wolfenstein 3D is the chaingun. However, players will often find themselves switching back to the less powerful machine-gun. Why? Because all the guns in Wolfenstein 3D draw from the same ammo pool. When ammo is plentiful, using the chaingun is fine, but when it’s scarce the slower, more controllable rate-of-fire of the machine-gun is better: why waste an extra 5-10 bullets that you might need later?
Something similar also happens in Doom (the original games, not the 2016 remake). The plasma-rifle is clearly better than the chaingun, and the BFG 9000 – a monster of a gun which can one-shot nearly every foe on screen – wipes the floor with every other gun ever produced in a video game. And yet, players barely ever use the BFG 9000, and are sparing with the plasma-rifle. This is because ammo for the plasma-rifle is way more scarce than the chaingun’s bullets, and plasma-ammo is shared between the plasma-rifle and the BFG 9000 (with the latter chewing up a large amount of ammo in each shot). This means that players will naturally only use the big gun as a weapon of last resort, and the plasma-rifle only when really needed (such as when facing down a horde of enemies where time is of the essence).
This natural, or intuitive economy found in Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and any of the early Doom clones (as all FPS games were originally known), prevents weapons from becoming obsolete, and players from breaking the game by arriving at a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. To prove this for yourself, fire up one of these older games, and apply the easily found ‘give-me-ammo’ cheats, and compare which weapons you naturally use when there is no need to exercise restraint.
It also explains another feature common to these games: the melee weapon. Requiring no ammo at all, this needed players to get up-close and personal with their foes, in order to deal minimum damage. Yes, Doom did allow players to bring fists to a gun fight. And the likely reason again comes back to economy and scarcity. In these games, it was completely possible to mismanage your ammo so badly (not just by poor decisions, but also by bad aiming), that you ran out. The melee weapon gave you a chance, a slim chance, to get back in the fight and survive long enough to either find or scavenge some much needed ammo.
And this explains why there is no basic melee attack in Doom: Eternal. Scarcity of ammo simply isn’t a problem when your lowly zombie can be turned into an ammo piñata (for those unfamiliar with Doom: Eternal’s combat mechanics, everything, from health, to armour, to ammo, can be ‘harvested’ from foes by attacking them the correct way – and the ammo-producing chainsaw has an infinite supply of fuel). It is literally impossible to find yourself in a situation where there is no ammo to be had.
Curiously, when it comes to weapons that are clearly way better than anything else, Doom: Eternal does revert to economy to manage player behaviour. The game’s super-weapons, the BFG and the Unmakyr, both draw from the same, extremely rare ammo pool which cannot be farmed during combat. However, in Doom: Eternal these weapons feel more like instant-win cheats, to only ever be deployed in extremis, rather than a serious part of the game (as the BFG felt in the original Doom).
Either approach, when used well, can result in highly entertaining games, as both the original Doom, and Doom: Eternal, show. And whether or not designers rely on players’ intuitive sense of economy, or creation of niche specialities for weapons, it’s interesting to see two such wildy different solutions to the same problem: to prevent players from optimising the fun out of the game by using the most powerful weapon around. ■
References
Brown, M. “How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves” (11 Oct, 2017, Game Maker’s Toolkit)
Meier, S., “The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know is Wrong),” (Talk 2010, uploaded 17 Oct 2016, GDC),
Johnson, S., “GD Column 17: Water Finds a Crack” (12 June, 2011, Designer-Notes)