Planning Obsolescence in Game Design
I taught my ten-year-old to play Magic: The Gathering this weekend. This was a little bit of a challenge, as I had to re-acquaint myself with the rules. I'd purchased her one of those pre-made decks the previous weekend, plus some booster packs just for grins. The booster packs were pretty much useless, and I kept trying to explain to her that she did NOT want to mix any of them into her pre-made deck. She also kept asking me which one was the best card. I explained that - at least in theory - there was no "best card." It was all in how you set up your combos.

Teaching her to play and having her play a couple of games was the best way to explain it. She psyched herself up, preparing herself for failure (after all, we'd been playing since before she was born), and I spent some time Sunday putting together what I felt was a fairly strong deck from my library of cards that mostly predate 1996.

I taught her as she played, going a little bit past her bedtime. Then I astonished her when I announced that she'd won. I had her down to one health, and I realized she could kill me on the next turn, with nothing I could do about it.

Naturally, she had a very competitive pre-built deck, but her particular edge came from having creatures that were unblockable by anything but creatures with a special attribute that didn't exist in earlier editions of the game. I had to look it up on the Internet during the middle of our game. Maybe I was just annoyed at my daughter kicking my butt without even knowing what she was doing, but I found myself frustrated. While I might be off in my estimation, it felt like this sort of rule was specifically designed to make older editions obsolete.

The businessman / entrepreneurial part of me said to the rest of me, "Well, DUH! They want you to keep buying cards, dummy!" After all, in most tournaments, older cards are not even allowed - you have to use more recent "blocks." The obsolescence plan has been institutionalized.
Either that, or they figure we old-schoolers have enough of an advantage with at least four Black Lotus cards and Moxes or something that it's not an issue. Ah, well. I'm not sure if its unfair or simply shrewd marketing and business decisions on the part of Wizards of the Coast.

So ... switching gears back to video game design, this made me ponder about a surprise topic you've never heard me mention here before... computer role-playing games! :)

One of the problems that has existed since around 1982 (when Wizardry 2 was released) has been the issue of dealing with sequels and character power. Wizardry 2 was the first commercial CRPG I can think of that allowed you to move characters over from a previous game, but it was far from the only one. The problem is that your characters at the end of one game are usually pretty freaking buff, with killer gear and stuff. So what does the sequel offer when your character is already level 1 billion, and wields the Awesome Sword of Awesomeness? Up the level cap to a trillion and provide an Even Awesomer Sword of Epic Awesomeness? Do you drop the player's characters level down to a capped point and strip them of their best gear? And then what do you do with game three?

The Eschalon: Book 1 folks are probably laboring with these issues even as I type this. Good luck, guys.

Taking a cue from the capitalist minds on the Magic: The Gathering design teams, there could be alternatives to nerfing the carried-over characters or taking the power level to ever more ludicrous levels.

One is introducing new abilities ('technologies") for which the player characters in the sequel have not yet developed a counter. You may be 20th level butt-kickers with insanely powerful equipment, but you are helpless before the arrival of new psionic monsters. You'll have to re-balance your equipment and learn some new anti-psionic abilities to compete. While you retain your same power level, things are somewhat balanced by the exposure of a new "achilles heel."

I remember facing something like this in one of my first games of the original Master of Orion. I had developed some practically invincible giant warships with the most powerful beam technology currently in the game. It would cut through the hulls of enemy battleships effortlessly. Then I encountered a new enemy who attacked me with literally HUNDREDS of tiny space ships. My big, ultra-powerful beam weapons would instantly vaporize these ships - but I could only destroy a few of them at a time, while the rest would annihilate my entire fleet with their sub-par weaponry. I found myself desperately trying to research entirely new technology paths, and building up my own "swarm" fleets to counter this new menace, while losing battle after battle.

"I did not dream far enough, Prospero. When King Numedides lay dead at my feet and I tore the crown from his gory head and set it on my own, I had reached the ultimate border of my dreams. I had prepared myself to take the crown, not to hold it. In the old free days all I wanted was a sharp sword and a straight path to my enemies. Now no paths are straight and my sword is useless."
--- Conan, after becoming king of Aquilonia

Another is to introduce a completely new power track that exists parallel to the one in the previous game. Sure, you may be level 25 as a wizard, but the new game has an entirely new power structure and challenges that wizardry alone won't get you through. Like Conan in the above quote, your character must develop entirely new skills to navigate a different situation. While it is not quite starting over - your character still has the ol' Awesome Sword of Awesomeness - but the winning conditions have changed, and simply cutting through your enemies like butter isn't going to be enough.

Drawing parallels to other computer games, most of us who played it remember how we discovered in X-Com how our best soldiers were often woefully inadequate when it came to psychic potential. While a key value was (if I remember correctly) static once it was discovered, what if it, too, could be trained over time?

We have seen a little of that in some RPGs, via faction systems. As horribly implemented as it was, shooting for the goal of "grinding faction" in EverQuest might not have been exactly entertaining, but it did make you feel like you were making progress.

Now, I'm not saying that these ideas are either preferable to or exclusive of the other solutions. They are certainly different, particularly in a game category that seems to be driven (by mainstream publishers at least) to ever more simplistic models of gameplay resolution. But planning some form of obsolescence in from the get-go might be one way to preserve interesting gameplay in RPG series that use the same characters.

But in the meantime, I'm going to have to figure out how to defeat my ten-year-old the next time we play.

Labels: Game Design, Geek Life

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