Defining some fundamental design elements, and comparing two of the best games in the world.
Our community and its trust is — and will always be — the most important thing to us. Therefore, we want to share something that few other gaming companies do, hoping that it will depict a fair and transparent impression that builds credibility and appreciation. This is me, telling the story of my profession.
As game designers, some of the work we typically do may not be clear or transparent to everyone. Many seem to think that it’s a lot of guesswork. I’d like to take the opportunity to share some of my techniques in game design analysis and development. This article will depict a high-level overview of some instruments I use, and will act as the first in a series of articles with me analyzing other successful games. I am specialized in competitive gaming, and work exclusively with hardcore games.
What Makes a Competitive Game Awesome?
This is obviously the million-dollar question. For every League of Legends out there, there are 1000 failed games that are very similar to LoL, but they lack that “oomph”. To reach the state of success that LoL has reached, you obviously need a combination of perfect game design, good marketing, growth-oriented creators and a world-class workforce. But a game can be considered successful without becoming the best game in the world, and a good game design helps to take it there. In this chapter, I’m going to discuss game design elements in general, and the things that I think contribute the most to a successful game.
From Average to Good to Awesome
The biggest difference between average games and good games is how well they incorporate the Fundamental Game Appeals. I will talk at length about this in a future article (EDIT: Here is the article), but a quick explanation would be that these appeals are different ways in which games utilize human psychology to create satisfaction. One fundamental game appeal that is commonly appreciated is Construction — people like to build things because it is satisfactory. Therefore, many games revolve around building things. There is a multitude of these appeals, five of which (the strongest ones) we will discuss in the future. But for this article, we will not be focusing on “just good” games.
When looking at more advanced quality-increasing traits, the next one I’d like to discuss is “the feel”. As abstract as that may sound, there are some definable components. To mention a few examples, a first person shooter (FPS) revolves around the sensation of “being one” with your character — having satisfying movement and controls, and it can’t feel “clunky”. A Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) needs accurate ability aiming tools and proper flow between abilities, and a Real Time Strategy game (RTS) needs adequate shortcut functionalities and proper unit pathing to enable good control of entire armies. There are a million other variables contributing to the general feeling of a game, some of which are hard to pinpoint. And many games fail to achieve the right feeling — some genres are harder than others. Fortunately, for autobattlers such as ZiberBugs, where you don’t control your units, the general feeling of the gameplay plays a much smaller role, and revolves more around how satisfying it feels to watch than to play.
What I think is the biggest differentiator between good games and awesome games is a good core element of satisfaction. Almost every top-tier competitive game has one (or a few) very distinguished, and just the right amount of difficult in-game goal(s), that makes you do jumping jacks when reached. League of Legends has its multi-kills (the biggest of which is the Pentakill), Hearthstone has those perfect card combinations that make you flood the board with units and attacks that crush your opponent. Teamfight Tactics has managing to build that three-star triple-item max-synergy carry and watch it wipe out the entire enemy team, Rocket League has boosting yourself up in the air, landing that perfect aerial goal. I find that competitive players often tend to select their favorite game(s) based on how satisfying they find these core elements of satisfaction, which of course is entirely subjective. Some prefer games where you get them often, some prefer games where it’s very hard but very rewarding.
The Synergy
Another big differentiator between good games and awesome games is what I like to refer to as “The Synergy”. I see strong correlations between games’ successfulness and how good this synergy is. There are a few exceptions, one of which we will discuss below.
A very successful competitive game needs to have:
- A fun-at-its-core base game
- An adequate number of fun meta-games (ie games within the game that aren’t necessary for the game to function, but they make it more fun and add depth)
- At least one sufficiently hard-to-achieve core element of satisfaction
- A straight-forward game objective
When you have all these in your game, you also need to have a good synergy between them. This creates a good core game design for any competitive game, that not only grants fun gameplay on all levels, but enables endless opportunities for further development.
A Good Example: Overwatch
The base game of Overwatch (and most other FPS games) is to shoot and kill your opponents. The meta-games of Overwatch include selecting the right hero, using abilities, cooperating with your team and trying to create “wombo-combos”. The core element of satisfaction is to land those multi-kills, usually done with your Ultimate ability. And the game objective is map-specific, for instance to get the payload to its destination.
- The meta-games help you get kills and participate in the base game — Good!
- The core element of satisfaction means participating in the base game at the highest level — Good!
- The core element of satisfaction is usually done by utilizing a meta-game (Ultimate abilities)— Good!
- The game objective forces the base game, because the payload will not move if there are enemies on it — Good!
All-in-all, I’d say that Overwatch looks like an excellent game design. So far, so good. Some may have noticed that these elements are mainly true for the damage role of the game. One of the biggest failing aspects of Overwatch is that for most people, it is much less rewarding to play tank and support. Why? As a support, the base game and the core element of satisfaction are different. They revolve around protecting and healing your teammates rather than killing — a game trait that is not only much less common to appreciate, it also synergizes less with the game objective. And as for tanks (the least popular role), they have a much harder time to achieve any element of satisfaction at all, due to their limited damage potential and often utility-focused Ultimates.
A Less-Than-Perfect Example: Apex Legends
The base game is the same as with most other FPS games — shoot and kill your enemies. The meta-games are several in this game. First and foremost, the looting game. Secondly, your abilities (that play a less significant role than in Overwatch). Thirdly, your inventory items, such as heals, grenades and survival items, that bring a depth to the battles. The core element of satisfaction is arguably the same as the game objective: To be the last man standing.
- The core element of satisfaction and the game objective are the same thing — Excellent!
- The meta-games help you both kill (ie the base game) and survive (ie the game objective) — Good!
- The game objective is best accomplished by playing safe and avoiding the base game — Bad! The most efficient way of staying alive until the very end is to stay out of trouble. Many people abuse this and gain high ranking by simply not participating in the game. To combat this, they have added rules that reward you ranking points for not only being the last man standing, but for killing enemies as well, but only up to 6 of them. This adds a very weird dynamic where you sometimes have to choose between playing safe and getting those kills to maximize your chance of success.
Here, we are facing the biggest problem with trying to make Battle Royale games competitive: Since wins are so rare, it doesn’t make sense to only reward wins. But tampering with the ranked system and starting to hardcode in rewards that are outside of the game objective is bad game design. Such design choices always create problems. Here are a couple:
- It creates an unintuitive reward mechanic, that you have to read about to understand.
- It creates weird game dynamics where the optimal gameplay varies based on your scoreboard.
- It also assumes that the game can successfully determine who deserves to be rewarded for certain side accomplishments. This is often not the case. If I end up in a gun fight and I get my enemy down to just a few remaining hit points, and he starts running, my teammate can chase him down, shoot him once and receive all the rewards. And I get nothing.
Why It Works Anyway
While it is true that Apex Legends is a more popular game than Overwatch right now, the reasons do not lie within the fundamental game design. It has more to do with Battle Royale being a newer game genre, Apex being much younger and Overwatch just not having an as good “feeling” as Apex does. This also largely has to do with Apex containing more of the Fundamental Game Appeals. You can also argue that the core element of satisfaction in Battle Royale games (i.e winning) gives such a strong emotional release that it just can’t compete with a multi-kill.
How to Fix It
If I were to “redesign” Apex Legends (important note: you can never fundamentally change an existing game without the greater part of the community quitting it, but if I were to design a similar game), I would make it important enough to kill enemies that if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to progress towards the game objective. I’m imagining a Battle Royale with 3–4 “layers” (dimensions, if you will). Everyone starts at the first layer, and the only way to get to the next layer is to kill an enemy squad. The fire circle closes the fastest in the first layer. You have to get to the final layer to gain points.
When you design a game “in synergy”, you will start noticing positive side effects instead of negative ones. In this game I just invented, you’ll notice that the annoying and somewhat unfair element of being third-partied (ie when a third team randomly happens to be nearby and intercepts your fight) now has an additional new and exciting defense mechanism — if you quickly kill the team you’re battling, you will transition away from the intercepting team to a new layer/dimension, where they can no longer attack you.
Conclusion
I have shared some fundamentals of how I work with game design and gone over examples of how it applies to two world-class competitive games. Hopefully my analysis has been insightful enough that we can now feel confident in applying it in our discussion about games closer to home. In my next game design article, we’ll be taking a look at Teamfight Tactics — the game from which ZiberBugs fetched most of its inspiration.
See you soon!
//Simon
