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[starsrift]

Should you let the player break the game?

The commercial world seems to say no; there's any number of games that have had patches to stop players from 'abusing' a set of rules that would make the game easier for them. Yet, when I think back over my time, the most fun I've had with games is when I've been able to 'game' the systems and create something that the game was not designed for, breaking it and proceeding.
Success of ingenuity to somewhat break that directed experience (re: Stanley Parable).

My One Game of 2015 (as alluded to elsewhere) is an RPG. I'm hip-deep in mechanics and ruleset at the moment, and I'm wondering if I want to let the player be able to break the game.
And not only that, but perhaps reward the player for breaking the game. Unlock dialogs, skip options for run-of-the-mill encounters, etc. To me, that seems like a pretty cool idea!
But am I making a misteak? I remember this one guy in university who was severely unimpressed by TES4: Oblivion upon release, since, "all you have to do to win is just turn the difficulty slider down". And I look at the commercial history of patching to block 'broken' mechanics.

Inviting anyone's thoughts...

[rj]

i'm delighted whenever i put time in trying to break a game system and i find the developer knew about it and planned for it but still let me. it's a delight, delightfully

[The Translocator]

Well the game I'm working on in my spare time at the moment is a metroidvania platform shooter with a focus on abusing the level layouts and mechanics to complete the game with as few items as possible. This isn't required to complete the game but the ending to completing the game normally will probably hint strongly at the possibility. The idea is essentially to have a deep, complex puzzle game where the puzzles aren't always clear hidden inside of an otherwise normal action game. So hopefully it's not a bad thing to let the player 'break' the game.

[s0]

i'm delighted whenever i put time in trying to break a game system and i find the developer knew about it and planned for it but still let me. it's a delight, delightfully

same

(singleplayer games only obv)

[valrus]

I quite like RPGSs that let you break them like that, but it's a decision that completely changes the nature of the game.  It often takes the challenge out of "just survive" and puts it into "finding all the crazy stuff you can do", replacing the game you think is going to be there with another kind of game altogether.

If the new game -- the "find the game-breaking possibilities" game -- is richer and more fun than the original game, then I say go for it.  But yeah, I would try to telegraph it and acknowledge it, so that the player understands that these hidden depths aren't mistakes.  Indie designers don't get much benefit-of-the-doubt.

[J-Snake]

Yet, when I think back over my time, the most fun I've had with games is when I've been able to 'game' the systems and create something that the game was not designed for, breaking it and proceeding.

Not to understand me wrong, no one is in the position to dictate what's fun and what's not. There is some personal preference involved in what we like to do. But here is one thing. Have you questioned yourself why you break games in the first place? If the game would offer many and intricate possibilities to be played by design, then you would have less reason to break it. From a design standpoint, if you want to make it breakable, then you are trying to fight a design flaw with another one. It's unlikely to go into a fruitful direction. Consider that a decent game isn't designed to be breakable on purpose. Glitches tend to sneak in automatically during the development, the less you think about avoiding them the more of them you will get. At least that's a rule of thumb for any game or puzzle that exceeds certain complexity.

[Dragonmaw]

There are plenty of good games designed to be broken. There's an entire genre (open-world games) that cater specifically to the player totally fucking everything up and being ludicrous.

As in all things, you should treat it as an extension of the game's. Do you want the player to feel powerful? Add some stuff that trivializes or breaks the game.

[J-Snake]

There are plenty of good games designed to be broken. There's an entire genre (open-world games) that cater specifically to the player totally fucking everything up and being ludicrous.

I doubt flying horses are intended in red dead redemption. That's what I am talking about.

[ericmhunter]

When you look at things like Awesome Games Done Quick, they are littered with older retro games that players are still finding new ways to exploit the code. This is one of the reasons people still return to them. Another note would be Smash Bros. Melee for Evo. This game, although unlatch end and deemed an unbalanced fighter, still finds new and exciting ways to play as characters that were once thought unworthy. If any of these games were patched and updated to stop players from breaking the game, what would they be playing?

[Photon]

I think a big question is what you construe "breaking the game" to mean, because the game context is very important here in my opinion. For instance, playing levels out of order might be considered "breaking the game," but on the other hand this is exactly what happens in most Mega Man games because that option is accounted for. The point here is that both games still, more or less, accomplish the same thing. What exactly about feature XYZ makes it "breaking the game?"

[The Translocator]

I think what makes it breaking the game is the usage of game mechanics or code in ways that almost certainly weren't the intended function. For example: in the original Metroid, doors exist, they reappear after you shoot them, and they're solid when they aren't gone. Each of these makes sense on it's own, because that's what a door is. It's the combination of these things that allow the player to get stuck in the doors and wrap around the level. It's entirely possible the creators of the game did this intentionally- it was mentioned in Nintendo Power, I believe- but it also could have happened without somebody specifically designing it to act that way. It's only when the rules of the game are dynamic enough to allow things to happen that didn't HAVE to be designed that it can be considered breaking the game. For example: playing Megaman in different orders was specifically programmed to happen in that way, and designed to happen in that way. For Super Metroid you have to kill the bosses and there isn't an order specifically programmed but there ARE hard-coded doors that are only supposed to open once you have a specific weapon and use it and there are barriers specifically created to keep you out without a specific weapon or tool. That means that whether they intended going there without those tools or not, you are effectively breaking the game's design by playing it out of the order the game is specifically set up for.

Effectively: breaking a game is the act of playing a game in a way that goes against the design of the game, not necessarily the designer.

[valrus]

I also count as "breaking-the-game" the finding of strategies/combinations/techniques that have the net effect of throwing balance or progression out the window.

So if you train all your characters as Ninjas (I think) in Final Fantasy Tactics, and then master the skill of turning invisible after taking damage, until you make a move, and then make those characters Dancer but keep that invisibility skill as their secondary skill, and then have them all dance Wiznaibus ("with knives"), and then have them all take minor damage (I tend to smack them with a handbag), you will end up with steady (albeit minor) damage dealers that can just stay invisible the entire fight.  (Starting a dance is considered a move, continuing to dance isn't, so Wiznaibus can attack without cancelling ninja invisibility.)

This isn't a glitch or a sequence break -- it's just a consequence of two unrelated rules that have a funny interaction -- but it "breaks the game" in the sense of it being an unbeatable combo for some fights.  It wouldn't have been hard to "fix", but I quite like that they didn't bother.  FFT is a weird puzzle-box of a game, but I remember it much better than better-balanced games where such rough edges were carefully sanded down.

[Dragonmaw]

That's the problem with "pure balance."

There's a design principle in competitive gaming where you purposefully make parts of the game unbalanced, so as to make theorycrafting and exploitation more interesting activities. Once a game reaches a state of pure, perfect, total balance - like Counter-Strike or Brood War - your average player, and even large portions of the competitive scene, lose interest.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite sequence breaks. In Dawn of Sorrow, if you use the special attack with a dagger, you can trigger door switches from the other side of the door, allowing you to skip huge parts of the game. It "breaks" the game in a traditional sense, but it also opens up new and interesting avenues of exploration.

Balance and "challenge," as with any part of a game, is entirely dependent on your personal preference and goals. I like that games often have either unintended consequences or unbalance purposefully left in. It makes thinking and playing such games more interesting and fulfilling than a perfectly balanced, meticulously designed game.

Flaws make things interesting. A perfect game is boring; games need flaws, and the best flaw is the empowerment of the player by allowing them to break the game in unusual ways.

There are plenty of good games designed to be broken. There's an entire genre (open-world games) that cater specifically to the player totally fucking everything up and being ludicrous.

I doubt flying horses are intended in red dead redemption. That's what I am talking about.

There is a very fine tradition of finding glitches and enjoying them in open-world games. Horses ascending vertical surfaces in Skyrim, or the negative friction change in GTA4, are good examples. Sometimes a violation of rules can improve the experience.

[oahda]

Breaks immersion, tho, so I suppose it depends on the target audience and the design goals of the game.

[Dragonmaw]

exactly.

personally, i think you should have exploitable or otherwise ridiculous mechanics if you have a SP game that is built around combat or platforming of any kind. make it challenging the first time through, but allow people to exploit and violate the traditional difficulty of the game on subsequent playthroughs.

[starsrift]

Thank you all.

Break-ability confirmed!

[DangerMomentum]

There are a ton of games I remember fondly almost entirely because of how breakable they are. Final Fantasy 8 was just ok, but it's one of my favorite FF games just because of how powerful you can become once you figure out how to abuse the game's mechanics. I'm of the opinion that the tighter a hold you have on the player, the less fun they can find on their own. Let them break it wide open and be able to brag that they truly crushed the game, not just completed it.

[~Tidal]

Why not
I mean, if the player manages to break the rules in a clever way it deserves it.

[Photon]

I'd be interested in flipping this around:

So when do you think "breaking the game" is bad or detrimental to the player experience?

[valrus]

For the "RPG-breaking" (like in Skyrim or FFT or FF8 where various tricks let you become way more powerful than you need to be), I think these are when it is deleterious to player experience:

1. When there's not really anything to do except combat, and you can become sufficiently powerful that there's no game left for you.  It's okay if there's a ton of stuff to do that isn't combat, because then only one part of the game changes.  Or if there are nearly infinite, increasingly hard places to explore (like in Disgaea, you can get ridiculously powerful for the main quest, but there will always be a challenge at your level).

2. When the thing you do to break it is itself tedious, like you have to sit there and hit the same button 200 times in a row, or you watch the same animation or cutscene 50 times, or you have to run in a circle for a half hour.  This is especially true if the game is hard anyway or has difficulty spikes, because players might end up thinking they're meant to do it.  "Do they really expect me to do this 100 more times in order to be strong enough to defeat that boss?  What a tedious game!"

3. When there's basically a single route to this dominance, such that the's not really any choice in the matter.  (Or if you can pursue all of the routes to dominance simultaneously, so you don't have to make a choice.)  If there are plenty of ways to break the game and you can't do all of them at once, then there's still meaningful choice available to the player. 

Actually, these are all the same answer: just that whether it's "normal play" or "gamebreaking play", the same things (lack of challenge, lack of variety, lack of choice) are detrimental to the player experience.