Meaningful choices

by kapowaz, Sunday, August 25, 2013, 03:35 (4110 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Alright, let's break this down.

Good game design is all about meaningful choices. With that in mind, when you start thinking about how to design your weapon system you have to consider what choices you want the player to have to make, and how the kind of world they're playing in will affect, and be affected by those choices.

An unrestricted, x-slot, n-weapon system gives the player (n^x-n)/x total combinations. For a game with 10 different weapons and 2 slots that means 45 different combinations. For a game with 10 different weapons and 3 slots, that means 330 different combinations. At this point, the number of choices is so large as to present real problems for most players in terms of how they should approach the decision of what to carry, and issues like choice paralysis creep in. Worse, players might feel tempted to seek outside help to validate or assist with their decision. This decision is made all the more difficult in that the situations of gameplay will almost certainly dictate choices in certain moments. Of those 330 combinations, there are bound to be some pretty poor ones: walking around with 3 types of close-range weapon isn't likely to work out that well. For any game designer worth their salt, this is a failure in how the system has been designed.

Applying this specifically to Destiny, the number of weapons available is intended to be very large indeed, but with one big caveat: weapons will exist within a much smaller set of weapon categories, and so really the variations mostly exist within those categories. A combination of three different types of pulse rifle isn't really offering the player much variation in play style, and so that choice isn't really meaningful. This is a problem the Call of Duty games suffer from, where there are only subtle distinctions between most weapons of a given type, making it difficult for the newer or less experienced player to make a meaningful choice about whether to carry rifle X or rifle Y. This in mind, the real choice comes from allowing a player to choose one weapon from one category, one weapon from another category, and another from another category. Mathematically speaking, where there are a, b, and c weapons in each category, the number of possible choices is then simply a × b × c. If we assume there are 5 distinct types of primary weapon, 5 types of special weapon and 5 types of heavy weapon, that still gives you a pretty large 125 possible combinations, but with the added benefit that the player has some certainty that their choice is reasonably effective across a range of gameplay situations.

In actual fact, the number of potential choices is even higher than this, since within any given type of weapon there will exist who knows how many individual weapon, with their own subtleties and nuances. One thing that was apparent from the ViDoc was that some of the weapons are essentially visually identical except for the paint job featured, or the kind of scope attached. This raises the possibility of players being able to customise their weapons according to taste and playstyle, which not only offers opportunity for meaningful choice (it's a lot easier to decide which scope you prefer when you know it's the only variable being changed), but also gives players a mechanism for expressing their character's individuality, something you specifically expressed that this setup would inhibit.