Game Design as Alchemy

 

As I continue to go back through Breath of the Wild like an addict that really can quit at any time, I have decided to record the positive outcomes of my perpetual imprisonment. Think of this as my far lighter Gulag Archipelago of captivity. Today we'll be talking about the tight economy of Breath of the Wild and the need for mechanically using every single part of the buffalo. From combat to climbing every single action in Breath of the Wild is a mechanical exchange. This mechanical alchemy is a good thing, and is the center of what makes a game a game: a miniaturization and simplification of the world's processes into something manageable.

We'll start with the most obvious one: base movement, aka walking. This one's pretty simple: you give up time by not doing anything special. If you walk you turn time into distance. It's not the most economical trade-off, which means people don't want to do it.

That's where the game comes in, by the way: trying to figure out how to max out your output.

Anyways.

So you exchange time for distance. The fun comes in trying to cheat that. So you get something with a speed boost and now you have "beaten" the system: you exchange whatever you put in the pot for less time while traveling. An alchemy has occurred. You exchanged something to get something else, and there's a definite feeling that you accomplished something. Breath of the Wild capitalizes on this feeling everywhere in the game.

Yes, that includes combat. And weapon breakage.

So the core of this idea isn't that you get something else with effort, it's that you give up something for a chance of getting something else. You walk in a direction and hope you'll find something worth your time. You swing your weapon, giving up some hardiness, for the chance to kill the monster and farm their remains.  Once again, it's an alchemical exchange: weapon hardiness for materials or time. This keeps the situation changing, and thus requires focus to figure out, and is thusly amusing.

Why do I bring this up?

Because I think this is the heart of a lot of good game design: nothing is wasted. There's no moment when the player feels like their careful attempts to manipulate the system are for nothing. That doesn't mean that players are always succeeding at their intents, only that they affect the game world somehow. If you're using dice "failing forward" is a version of this, as you get your intent, but not how you wanted it: the world dicks you around a bit and you have to work with the new situation you accidentally generated. There's a good reason why "failing forward" should have the failure announced before you roll. Players should feel like they have a good feeling of what's going on. Turn structures also work, in the vein of encounter dice or BDnD's turn orders. You also don't necessarily have to tell someone whether they succeeded or failed,  but I think they should know the likelihood they succeeded or not. Take below, for instance, from the 1e DMG:

Yes I know the image is too large. It's readable now.

I think those odds should be public, or at least findable. Long as the player knows that there are numbers for this sort of thing and trusts the GM to not fudge the rolls then all is well and good. As long as the player knows where his actions might go, all is well and good. What the player did mattered, even if it wasn't what they expected.

It should always feel like player action matters. While mechanical stuff shouldn't be guaranteed, there should always be the feeling that what the player did impacted the game and story, in equal measure. I think that's part of what keeps me coming back to my not addiction: nothing ever feels wasted. The buffalo is always stripped down and there's nothing left.

Ah, crap I need to go play some more.

I mean.

I want to. I can quit anytime I want.

I'm Still Playing Breath of the Wild

I'm currently stuck on getting rid of Seath in Dark Souls. I've been meaning to go get him, and I've been having fun with the game and all that, but I've not been playing recently. Maybe it's because I've been doing a ton of really emotionally intense TTRPGs, particularly The Undertow which, while cathartic, is still a story about a woman coming to terms with the fact that she comes from a system of exploitation, rape, and demonic possession. So maybe I'm not really wanting to run into something which is also the product of exploitation and lies and filth as well? Who knows?

Anyway, I just keep finding myself in Breath of the Wild. I'm not upgrading hearts, at all, so I'm creeping along in a world that can very easily kill me, but that's about the only similarity I'm seeing with Dark Souls. The world is bright, open, and quiet. There's all this cutesy sound effect stuff with cooking, the people you run into are pretty chatty and helpful, by and large, and it's just so friggin' relaxing. It's a similar feeling I get to actually being outside, surrounded by the woods back at my in-law's house. You can't get the exact same thing in a video game as you do out in the real woods, but there's this sense of calm that pervades the world. There's nothing immediately pressing that you need to go do.

But the thing about Breath of the Wild isn't necessarily about how relaxing it is. There's multiple mechanical systems that have interesting little bits and bobs about them. You've got climbing, which uses differing amounts of stamina based off on how you are moving. And yes, rain completely and utterly hoses you at lower stamina levels, but some of my most enjoyable times in the game happened in a rainstorm, when I found myself going into unexplored territory out of sheer necessity. The system allowed me to appreciate the environment that had been crafted. I was interacting with the world.

Combat itself isn't the most interesting thing, but it certainly has enough tidbits to make it fun. Dodging, reflecting, sneaking, all of that works, and it works well. It's simple, intuitive, and keeps things moving. That being said, it's a lot simpler (and more fun!) to find creative ways to use the environment to kill off creatures. Master Mode kind of skews with this by giving the creatures health regeneration, but we'll get into why that isn't necessarily a problem in another blog post. Regardless, my current run is on normal mode. And it's a lot of fun to fight when I have to, but more fun to find ways to not fight at all. Which is clearly the design intent.

I've always loved weapon breakage. Yup, I know, a lot of people hate it, but it goes back to the core of the game: exploring the world. You cannot just wade through the world, killing willy nilly, ignoring exploration, because your weapons break. That and the fact that there are no health regens outside of towns without grabbing food means that you are always pushed back into the environment. You have to note areas that have specific foods and scrounge when you don't have what you need.

And then there are those moments when you just run into sheer beauty.

I mean, wow. Just wow. Playing this game you get immersed in the sheer beauty of it all. And yes, Dark Souls has those moments as well, but they're purposefully rare. Every time I wind back up at Firelink Shrine I stop and bask in just the sheer beauty of that area, in the music, in the view from the top of the Shrine, in the conversations I can actually have with the people there. But the rest of that game is a trudge through darkness. And yeah, I enjoy it, and I really want to go back to it, but right now?

I'm just basking in the beauty of Breath of the Wild. Again.