FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

Making PvE Games Fair

Because the challenges in PvE games come from the environment rather than from other players, making a fair game involves more than giving all players equal opportunities to succeed. In general, players expect a fair PvE game to exhibit qual­ities enumerated in the following list. Some may not appear to have much to do with balance, but we'll look at them here because they constitute part of a player's notion of fairness.

■ The game should offer the player challenges at a consistent maximum level of difficulty, with no sudden spikes. Players regard sudden spikes in difficulty as unfair. The next section, "Managing Difficulty," is devoted to this important issue.

■ The player should not suddenly lose the game without warning and through no fault of his own. So-called learn-by-dying designs, once commonplace, are now considered unfair. The Immortal, an old Electronic Arts game, notoriously requires the player to learn by dying. Fortunately, it allows players to restart the game indef­initely without having to start over at the beginning, but repeated character death still isn't much fun. You can easily avoid this by providing the player with adequate warnings of dangers ahead.

■ A stalemate should not occur. Stalemates can result from deadlock (see Chapter 10, "Core Mechanics") or from other combinations of circumstances that prevent the player from winning or losing. If a player fails to pick up a critical item in an adventure game and then passes through a one-way door that prevents him from retrieving the item, he's in a stalemate. He hasn't lost the game, but he can't win it
either. Well-designed games don't let the player proceed without the item. Some don't let players put items down once they have picked them up, just to help avoid this problem. Study your mechanics carefully to see if the game can ever enter a state that completely precludes victory but does not meet a loss condition. If it can, you should either change that state to a loss condition or—preferably—redesign the mechanics to prevent the game from ever getting into that state.

■ The game doesn't ask the player to make critical decisions without adequate information. The ZX Spectrum game Monty on the Run by Gremlin Graphics required the player to choose at the beginning of the game exactly five items to take with her as she tried to escape her pursuers. Unfortunately, it gave her no clues about which items she needed; she could find out only by trial and error. Give play­ers the information they need.

■ All the factual knowledge required to win the game should be contained within the game. Players should not have to do research outside the game world to win a game, with the sole exception of trivia games. Chapter 9 discusses this at greater length.

■ The game should not require the player to meet challenges not normally presented in the game's genre (such as a formal logic puzzle in a flight simulator). If the game belongs to a hybrid genre, you must make this clear before the player starts to play.