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[Rxanadu]

Here is my response to Mark Brown's recent Game Maker's Toolkit video, which highlights some interesting design choices in the recently release heist game The Swindle. Mark initially points out some AAA games which he sights to have issues with maintaining a sense of stake in situations even even after the player fails to complete a task. He goes on to highlight what The Swindle does in order to remedy this major issue, and while I was intrigued by the remedy, I found issue with the lack of relevance it had for the aforementioned AAA titles.

If you wish to watch the video, you can view it via this link:



I'm not sure about the lessons/points you've highlighted in this game, which boil down to "be a roguelite with a strong incentive to replay content." This point undermines the question you seemed to asking, which was, "How do you get a AAA game to raise the stakes of a major event even after you fail?"

Some of the points you did raise could be useful in mission-based games like GTA V and the Payday series, where failure could lead to staking out another heist at another location and losing some equipment and weapons. However, even this solution can be a bit wonky for more grounded story-driven games like GTA V.

What happens if Michael is gunned down during a heist and is gone for good? Do we get one of his family members or some other goon to take his place? The former choice would seem silly and untrue to the story Rockstar wanted to tell with the main characters; the latter could eventually make the main story moot if Franklin and Trevor also died during a heist, ultimately leading to the story as GTA Online.

Meanwhile, games like Uncharted may not be able to ever have any high stakes at all, since these stories revolve around the character you're playing as. Assuming you fail to get Drake to the other ship, your choices as a designer are either to have the story continue on with another character a la Heavy Rain or have the player start from the very beginning (similar to most Hardcore modes found in Diablo-esque dungeon crawlers).

The latter one is a no-no given the context; with all else equal, the former choice could lead to branching paths the developers would have to create to tell a story they never intended to be told. Heavy Rain does exist as an example of this design choice, but the story and its scenarios were so pedestrian compared to David Cage's other outlandish stories. Another good example are the more recent Telltale games and their mostly inconsequential choices. Heavy Rain was a reminder to AAA game developers of how expensive it is to make every choice lead to a major ending; meanwhile, the Telltale games were the result of that reminder.

This topic has been talked to death on both traditional game news outlets and game developer forums and blog sites, which is why I find it so disappointing why you reintroduced this concern merely to push it aside to tell me why you think this new game and is game design are interesting to you. You bring up major concerns only to throw them under the bus while you talk about a much simpler topic.

Hopefully, the next one of your videos will be more insightful in it application to ALL kinds of games. Until then, take care.

[Artylo]

My opinion on the topic is that if a game which requires permanence can simply remove the ability to save one's progress.
It may look like a small thing, but restricting the player to check-points or save files leads to players replaying major plot choices in order to get a better playthrough. Most big RPGs have this problem. I've personally had times in Fallout:NV, where in order to save an NPC follower, I've loaded saves, in order to not do that mistake again, resulting in seeing the death of my beloved follower countless times...always loading...always looking into those fading dead eyes...

A good idea for something with more permanence is having food-clocks like in FTL. The Federation fleet is following the rebel ship, restricting visiting old beacons, thus making the player think of which path to take in order to gain the most profit.

A quick game concept comes to mind.
Imagine a dungeon crawler, which is divided into rooms. Upon leaving the room, you loose all the treasures which were not looted, thus loosing the ability to back-track and farm more items. Pushing the player forward.
Think of it as an anti-metroid-vania.

[Alec S.]

I think this video is incredibly insightful, and is probably one of my favorites Game Maker Toolkits so far.  I think building tension, raising stakes, creating risk/reward dynamics, and using mechanics to motivate the player into certain behaviors is at the core of game design, and it's something that's been sorely lacking in too many games these days, especially AAA games.

Addressing for Rxanadu's argument against it:  No "solution" will be applicable to all games.  That's not the point.  The point is that this game builds its mechanics around player motivation and tension, and a lot of games undercut their tension by making actions have no real long-term consequences.  The video isn't "why doesn't Uncharted do what The Swindle does?"  The video is "Let's look at the idea of tension and stakes in games.  Here are some examples of games that have trouble building tension, and here's a game that does a great job of building tension."

To give an example of another game that does a good job of building tension and creating risk/reward situations which uses entirely different mechanics to do so, there's Dark Souls.  Long times between bonfires, only being able to cash in your souls at bonfires, losing your souls upon death, having one chance to recover lost souls, enemies re-spawning when you use a bonfire, and the humanity system all combine to make tension increase the deeper the player goes into an area, especially when they go in for the first time.  There's always the question in the back of their mind of if they should go back to safety and cash in their souls (in which case all the enemies they defeated will respawn), or keep going further in hopes of making progress.

Or a game like XCOM, where you can win a mission, but lose valuable soldiers, or lose the mission, but still recover in the overall game.  

Also, there was a lot more to his analysis on how the Swindle raises tension baseides "Be a roguelike".  It was the ability to fail missions + the limit on the amount of missions you could do before the end of the game + the ability to decide how much you want to try to steal in a mission/how much risk you want to take + the fact that the final mission costs a certain amount of money to attempt and so on.  It was all about risk/reward mechanics.  How much you have on the line vs. how much you could gain, and how much you need to gain.



That being said, I think Monaco was already a great heist game, just for different reasons than this.