The “skill-based matchmaking” backlash

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men gaming on personal computers

I came across a Washington Post article from May of this year that presented a nice summary of the simmering backlash against “skill-based matchmaking” (SBMM), and it became a good writing prompt for me to organize my thoughts on the topic.

I think most players will agree that matchmaking is one of the biggest benefits of modern online games – versus local multiplayer (be it physical board games, arcade halls or pre-Internet PC/console games) – the promise of an infinite number of players ready to play with you, and conveniently at (almost) any time and (almost) anywhere. “Skill-based” is simply the common default prioritization of the matchmaking algorithm, and it stems from a very utilitarian argument – all else being equal, and taking the long-term view (assuming that the players want to play the game repeatedly), putting players of approximately equal-skill together in a match will output the most satisfaction / happiness (utility) of all players combined.1

What makes matchmaking not live up to its promise in reality (from players’ eyes) is due to various factors that it cannot fully accommodate:

  • At the extremes of the player-base distribution, the player population is small enough that matchmaking eventually inevitably great concessions to find a match. (Even with widened search parameters, a top-ranked League of Legends player could still wait upwards of an hour to find a game.)
  • The player ratings used for matchmaking may be grossly inaccurate due to fake new accounts (“smurfing”). It’s not just the streamers in the Washington Post article that want to play against lower-skill opponents, so that they can put on flashy plays – many people create new accounts to do exactly this.
  • It’s impossible to know (and account for) player intent in advance – is the player looking to climb the ranked ladder tonight, checking out a newly released hero, or just wanting to let off some steam with friends? There is also the synergy or mismatch of play-styles that could tilt an apparently fair match.
  • Similarly, random events during the game, such as a network spike or ill-timed phone call could easily derail the outcome.

To make matters worse (from the perspective of understanding how skill is measured and represented), it is now common for developers to intentionally distort the ranked ladder system by infusing it with a progression element. The Hearthstone ranked system is a great example of this2: aside from the very highest Legends rank, the system is inflationary in terms of stars output, so with enough games played, most players would naturally be rising up through the ranks. This would be what the Washington Post article referred to as “engagement-optimization”, at the macro-sense: players can make progress through sheer effort, not improved skill, and thus it encouraged more play. Most players would probably agree that this is a worthy trade-off – the added sense of progression feels better, whether they realize what’s going on or not – but it further obfuscates the conversation around “skill” (and thus SBMM).

Unfortunately, the Internet has been great at fostering conspiracy theories on all kinds of topics, and SBMM is no exception. Last year I was quite saddened reading some of the Chinese gamer discourse around League of Legends: Wild Rift (since I worked on it for a number of years) – there was a lot of griefing towards the ranked matchmaking, and players were vividly describing all sorts of scenarios (to avoid) where they were adamant that the system would “reward” you with a soul-crushing lose-streak.

It’s also worth noting the likely general player fatigue with SBMM, now that it is so prevalent. Players know that this is a PVP “treadmill”, and some may be less interested in the grind (and would rather seek more novel experiences).

Thankfully, there are already some design or technical breakthroughs that can break the convention here. For starters, PVP games with asymmetrical designs – PUBG‘s last man standing setup, or Dead by Daylight‘s 1v4 approach – already break the dreaded “50% win-rate” expectation, and the Battle Royale formula has rapidly become a staple game mode across many genres.

A second, and (to some) more controversial approach, is the utilization of bots – as in, pretending that the player is facing other real players, when in fact they are playing against bots – to help with “engagement optimization”. For example, when a player is on a losing streak (and perhaps predicted to be at higher risk of churning), games like Honor of Kings will give players a fake PVP game (all players on the opposing team are bots) to break the streak. The fact that this is obviously a bot game does not seem to bother most players – they might make fun of the game (and in doing so feel smart about themselves, as they can see through the facade), but a win is still a win, and breaking the streak certainly helps with reducing “tilting”/”inting”.

Some developers probably frown at this practice – it feels like lying, and breaking some sort of an implicit promise made to players that the matches will be fair and that of course you are playing against real players. I used to be in this camp – now I’m a lot more relaxed about this topic; I’d say now that this is contextual and there’s probably broad upside in utilizing bots. There are plenty of games where bots are demonstrably better than humans – in go, or chess, bots have long been able to beat even the best human players. So in theory, there should be plenty of opportunity (even if strictly for “engagement optimization”) to widely utilize bots to provide the “perfect” match for human players, with bots as partners or opponents. This has the side benefit of solving the “cold start” or “minimum viable player-base” problem for new games; combined with asymmetrical designs like Battle Royale, even mediocre bots can greatly alleviate the matchmaking needs without breaking the immersion for players3.

  1. Before the advent of matchmaking, players had to somehow manually discover other players to play with, often via waiting in public game lobbies (where one can host/join games). In these circumstances the friction to get a game going was high enough that players gladly overlooked the quality of the match – I’ve sat through many lopsided games of DotA, and my Counterstrike days mostly consisted of rounds of fy_iceworld rather than the “real” defuse mode. ↩
  2. It is by no means the only game that does this – its implementation just happens to be very transparent. ↩
  3. As a thought exercise – the average player in PUBG probably only encounters 1-5 other players in a typical game – given the typically mid-long engagement distance, and the size of the map, players probably couldn’t easily discern bots (unless they had very obvious behavioral patterns) even if there were 90 bots to 10 real players. ↩

Summer travels

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I was on the road for most of August and September in the U.S. and Finland. It was primarily for work, but I snuck in a short vacation as well. It’s the first time since late 2019 that I’ve traveled internationally.

I was not sure what to expect. Before the outbound flight, I had read about how chaotic the summer had been for international travel, so I packed light and strategized about how to fit a 3-week trip to Finland into a carry-on luggage. (It gets easier as I’ve gotten older. Now there are few things I can’t travel without.)

My initial flight was Shanghai to San Francisco, with a curious stoppage in Seoul – the plane was on the ground for ~90 mins, passengers did not disembark, and United changed out the crew. This is one of those precarious Covid travel compromises between China and carriers; I don’t fully understand the rationale/mechanics, but it somehow minimizes or avoids quarantine time in China for carrier crew.

I think the last time I was in San Francisco was 2016. It felt a bit surreal to be back, after reading about the city’s various woes in recent years. After a couple of days in the city, the most dramatic takeaway was how the pandemic has upended the downtown retail landscape. The financial district was eerily quiet on a late Sunday afternoon. On Apple Maps, many retail results were listed as “Permanently Closed”. The empty storefronts and boarded-up windows around Union Square relayed the same impression. I also found several (perhaps all? I gave up after 2 stores) of the Starbucks around Union Square to have no seating at all, which really breaks one of the brand’s core value propositions.

All of this was juxtaposed against the bustling Union Square Apple Store, which was busy as ever. The day I visited, the store had its jaw-dropping 2-story sliding glass doors open (I never realized they could slide!). The sun shone through, and on occasion you could feel a gentle breeze.

The other store that had remarkably long lines was Ross Dress for Less on Market Street – there was both a wait to get in the store, and a 20-minute check-out line. I was bargain-hunting for a piece of replacement luggage, and this was the first time I learnt that Samsonite has various SKU-lines priced below $100 that are exclusively available at Ross. Apparently they have been doing this for a long, long time – maybe a good example of a brand having their (premium) cake and eating it (extending to budget consumers) too?

Both Apple and Ross had SF police presence (apparently daily) out front. And across the street from the Apple store, there was a police mobile command center (permanently?) parked. Some of the police milling about were dramatically dressed in tactical gear.

I saw similar scenery in downtown Seattle, with lots of retail vacancies and reduced business hours for those that remained. My wife said downtown Portland was the hardest hit, of the cities she visited on this trip (she traveled around the US while I went onwards to Finland in late August). She said many of the restaurants we visited in 2017 were either permanently closed or only open a few days a week.

My US friends cautioned me not to read too much into this. Downtown areas with high-density commercial real estate have been precision-hit by pandemic restrictions and the shift to work-from-home. It’s not clear to what extent they will recover or what the new paradigm will be.

This was in contrast to what I saw in Finland. It had been a warm summer there. In late August, Helsinki was tees-and-shorts weather, more so than San Francisco. There were fewer signs of visible retail distress. Perhaps this is related to the size and layout of the city. Helsinki is small and highly walkable, with lots of urban apartments, so even in a work-from-home scenario the impact on retail foot-traffic would be less dramatic than US downtowns where people lived in the suburbs and drove in to work.

The other contrast was in the attitude towards masking. In Helsinki if you wore a mask (either indoor or outdoor) you really stood out. In the 3 weeks I was there, I could count on one hand the number of locals I saw masked – 2 elderly folks in supermarkets, and a passenger on the metro. In San Francisco, I was honestly surprised by the mask rate, even outdoors; and it wasn’t that uncommon to see shops or venues still have mandatory mask requirements.

What felt consistent in the US and Finland was the sense that “life has moved on”. Not necessarily in the sense of “Covid is over” – given the vigilance some displayed towards masking and getting the latest booster shots – but that “we’ve reopened and this is the new normal”. There are some debates still, but the big picture is clear. Most of Asia is headed in this direction too.

The elephant in the room is of course China – I happen to be writing this from my quarantine hotel in Shanghai. I’d say the “Covid-zero” policy was largely a net positive in 2020 and 2021, but its effects in 2022 are questionable (to put it mildly). Unfortunately it’s both a divisive topic and a hard position to navigate away from, so I’m generally not optimistic of big changes soon.

Oh, I almost forgot to write about inflation. Part of the “new normal”, in the US at least, is a complete reset of my price expectations. I struggled to find ramen that was priced below $15 (whereas my old anchor was $10-13). Regular gas was ~$5/gallon in Oregon, and got progressively more expensive as we got closer to San Francisco – the peak was $7.60 outside SFO airport.

The curious case of the game “Sheep a Sheep”

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I’m on a late summer vacation and wanted to get back to writing. Sheep a Sheep provides an easy topic, even though it’s not usually the type of game I would comment on.

The short story: Sheep a Sheep is a hyper-casual match-3 puzzle game, available as a mini-program (roughly HTML5-based) within WeChat. The game has become a controversial viral sensation in China the past week. (Here’s a write-up about the game for more context.)

The controversy stems from a few areas. First, there is the question of whether this game is a copy of other works. The base gameplay is similar to mahjong solitaire. Many people have also pointed to the game 3 Tiles as the source of inspiration – indeed, 3 Tiles itself has shot up to the top of the App Store download charts in China on this unexpected tailwind (so, should they be thankful for getting ripped off?).

Second, the core hook of Sheep a Sheep is ethically shaky, to put it mildly. The game is labeled as an “ultra-hard puzzle game where only 0.1% of gamers can win.” After a quick tutorial level-1 where players are taught the match-3 mechanic, players are immediately presented with a procedurally generated level-2 that in vast majority of cases are mathematically impossible to complete. By watching ads – this is the game’s sole monetization -or sharing links to the game via WeChat, players can access a very limited number of power-ups that can improve their odds slightly – but usually this is not enough to actually win.

The game employs a proven bag-of-tricks to entice players to try for the impossible win. Even winning once is huge bragging rights, which plays right into the game’s viral referrals – “have you won once yet?” Furthermore, there’s a province-based leaderboard right on the game’s home screen, and by winning you contribute to your province’s rankings on this leaderboard. And winning games also gives you currency to buy cosmetic items, which of course are more avenues to show off and brag. All of these are battle-tested mechanics in China’s top games, and immediately familiar to players.

I’ve played maybe 10-20 rounds, and in a couple of tries I felt I was close to a win – but it’s hard to know for sure since the tiles can stack infinitely and thus you never know for sure how many tiles are left. Despite knowing that this game is in many ways a scam / hoax and the odds are hopelessly stacked against me, I felt compelled to play more, to just win once; and I gladly clicked to watch the ads which raised my chances by an infinitesimal amount (99% of the ads shown to me were for Pinduoduo). I guess this is similar psychology to people buying lottery tickets or playing slot machines.

In contrast – 3 Tiles is certainly a better-made game, with superior aesthetics and a traditional free-to-play puzzle-game difficulty curve. Like many other puzzle games, it has hundreds of levels and I cruised through the first dozen levels. My only complaint is the game’s high frequency of ads – an ad is played before every level and there are some UI “dark patterns” during the ads to trick click-throughs.

And this is where this “case” gets interesting for me. Comparing the 2 games, it seems like a no-brainer that players should choose the better-looking game where they can actually finish the puzzles, instead of the deceptive and poorly-made game where 99.9% of the time you are set up to fail. If you were to bet on the outcomes of the 2 games ex ante – say, you are a publisher or an investor looking at these 2 game pitches – it would seem crazy to bet on the latter. And yet, in this case we know the latter is the winning bet by far. What, if anything, should we take away from this case?

Well, “maybe there’s not much to really take away” is a reasonable answer in my opinion. No one expects Sheep a Sheep to have longevity – after realizing the game’s objectively bad (intentionally deceptive?) puzzle design, many people feel tricked and there’s likely a backlash.

At the same time, from a “jobs to be done” perspective, we should realize that 3 Tiles and Sheep a Sheep target entirely different needs (and thus different audiences): 3 Tiles serves the motivations of the traditional puzzle-game demographics, while Sheep a Sheep is about serving a flavor-of-the-month novelty to the Internet at large. The necessary ingredients of such a flavor-of-the-month novelty could be: illusion of skill, high element of randomness/luck, and a subversive x-factor that drives virality (“only 0.1% can do this – can you?”); it is coincidental that the 3 Tiles gameplay could be successfully twisted into this recipe.

For “serious” game devs, perhaps there’s some room to interpret Sheep a Sheep as yet another case for subversive design choices. Making the 2nd level of your game incredibly hard is a subversive decision, and maybe it does make sense in some very rare set of conditions.

[Sep 27 update]

I thought it was worth a minor addendum, one week after the original post above. A couple of things happened:

First, it seems the devs drastically reduced the difficulty of the game – by drastic, I mean that the odds of winning went from 0.1% to 5% (illustrative numbers, but you get my point). The net result is that in absolute numbers there seems to be a lot more players getting a win every day (in the above screenshot, there were already 500k winners during the day), but percentage-wise it still feels like a fool’s errand.

Second, I finally got my personal first win, after maybe 100 tries? Anyway I’ve played for ~10 days and this is the first win. With my win I got a cosmetic (the constructor sheep above). With this win, I also finally realized that the game also emulates Wordle‘s “a puzzle a day” format – once you’ve won a round, you have to wait 24 hours before you can challenge again, in effect setting up an appointment mechanic.

Quick thoughts on the Xbox – Riot deal

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Xbox announced a Game Pass deal with Riot Games (my previous employer, I left in 2019). The deal covers all of the live service games in Riot’s portfolio, across PC and mobile platforms.

I have a few thoughts in reaction to this news. The first is the surprisingly large value Riot is putting on the table. This is not a small experiment; Riot didn’t go the safe route of starting with one game and deciding to expand or not based on the metrics. And even if it were just one game, say League of Legends, the monetary value of “All champions unlocked” is not trivial. As a quick “valuation” exercise:

  • Buying them all outright (even though few players do this – you can earn soft currency and unlock champions by playing) is easily hundreds of dollars – you can google for various answers, players have done this math before.
  • An alternative comp is to look at Asia, where “all champions unlocked” is a B2B product that PC cafes in Korea and China pay Riot for. If you assume Riot charges a Korean PC cafe $0.2 for every hour of this service, and on average players play 30 hours per month (both of these are like 10-year-old stats in my head), then “all champions unlocked” is by itself a $6/month service.

However you look at it, it seems that Riot is offering a ton of value here – so much so that, if you are a dedicated fan of Riot’s games, you should sign up immediately for Xbox Game Pass just for the Riot benefits alone.

This sparks an interesting offshoot question – instead of working with Microsoft, why didn’t Riot roll out its own “Riot Games Pass” instead? I would imagine this scenario had to have been part of the internal strategizing. And that would feel more in line with the M.O. of the Riot Games I know circa 2015 – doing it alone, desiring total control of the player experience.

I don’t have any inside knowledge, so I can only venture some guesses based on looking at the exchange of value in this deal:

  • From a player acquisition perspective, it seems more likely that Riot is funneling players to Microsoft – League announced 180M MAU last year, although a significant portion are players from China, which Xbox Game Pass doesn’t officially serve; while Xbox Game Pass last announced 25M subscribers. But Riot does also gain a new channel where new players could flow in, and it may be a previously underserved (more console-oriented) player-base. Thus Riot stands to benefit from all future Xbox Game Pass marketing, as a % of future Game Pass subs could convert to Riot players.
  • Based on the above, I would imagine there’s a sizable monetary component to the deal, flowing from Microsoft to Riot. I’m not a BD person, I don’t have a good sense where to start to try to model this component. It could be a fixed per-year amount. It could be calculated based on actual player engagement (some sort of revenue share / pre-defined payout based on metrics). It could be a combination of the two.
  • To Microsoft, I also think there’s a Game Pass content strategy component to this deal as well – having popular live-service games, like Riot’s portfolio, acts as a natural buffer against AAA seasonality, and probably helps with smoothing out churn.

Another interesting part of this deal is the mobile games included. This has the effect of providing an off-platform (iOS / Google Play) way to monetize a mobile game’s content, though in the past this was usually done by the game’s publisher directly, as opposed to another platform like Microsoft here. It will be curious to see if there’s any response from Apple & Google, especially if Microsoft starts rolling up additional mobile games into Game Pass and could threaten to end-run IAP regulations.

From Riot’s perspective, I can also think of a number of risks to this deal that needs to be managed:

  • The monetary math: does the inflow from Microsoft cover the possible loss of all future champion revenue (to use League of Legends as an example)?
  • The game economy and player behavior implications: during my time at Riot, I felt the long-held internal view was that providing all champions for free (which is what DotA 2 does) has negative effects on players’ onboarding flow, matchmaking quality, sense of ownership and progression. This deal seem to override these concerns.

In summary: this deal took me by surprise, but I think it could make sense for both parties. It would be fascinating to follow how this impacts both companies going forward.

Elden Ring (2022)

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To write about Elden Ring feels almost as daunting as it is to finish it. My first play-through clocked in at around 135 hours, which is the longest of any FromSoftware game I’ve played, and really, any game I remember ever finishing. And so for a few days after that play-through, I sat around thinking about writing, and instead started a second fresh play-through (as opposed to the NG+ route).

As of this writing, I finished the second play-through at 42 hours, and it took me another 7 hours to breeze through NG+ on that save, and get the Platinum trophy the hard-earned way (instead of manually reloading a save file). For the purposes of this write-up, I’m glad I did these 2 extra play-throughs, as it allows me to see through some of the magic (but also appreciating them more).

In terms of my credentials as a fan of FromSoftware’s works, I’m somewhat of a halfway convert. I’ve finished Bloodborne (2015), which was my introduction, and Sekiro (2019); I played Dark Souls III (2016) for maybe 20-30 hours, but never finished it; and I’ve dabbled 10-20 hours in Dark Souls (remastered) and maybe 10 hours in Demon’s Souls (PS5 remake). Suffice to say, I understand the Soulsborne formula, but I’m not a master of its earlier iterations.

Over the years I’ve written a few times about these other FromSoftware games; I’ll try to build on some of the prior analyses below.

The basic loop

The basic loop of Soulsborne game is familiar enough by now:

  • you begin as a fairly weak character, with some very basic gear. From a checkpoint (Sites of Grace in Elden RIng, Bonfires / Idols / Lamps in other FromSoftware titles), you explore the nearby area, killing enemies and collecting loot, until you unlock the next checkpoint, run out of resources (healing potions, which initially you only have a few bottles of), or (very commonly) die.
  • You can rest at any checkpoint to fully recover your health and your potions; but doing so also revives all the enemies (except those that can only be fought one-time, like bosses), and thus in a sense resetting any partial progress.
  • If you die, you respawn at the most recent checkpoint, having lost all of the currency you had; you can recover them if you successfully reach your corpse – but if you die again before then, the currency is lost forever.
  • You can spend your hard-earned currency at any checkpoint to level up, by gaining a point in one of your attributes (vigor, endurance, strength, dexterity, mind etc., fairly typical labels of fantasy RPGs). The level up cost follows a formula that has stood the test of time – literally, as it is the same math used in the original Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Dark Souls III.1
  • Eventually, you will run into some boss fights. Many boss fights are optional – you can simply go explore elsewhere.
  • As you make progress exploring, you will level up, unlock more healing potions and skills, find more and better weapons, and also upgrade those weapons. You are becoming more powerful, but you are also facing harder enemies as you explore deeper; and thus the basic loop perpetuates.

Elden Ring is an attempt to take this basic loop, and stretch and fit it to an open-world game. In their execution, FromSoftware has been able to leverage their traditional strengths in intricate level design, while also adopting design patterns from the open-world genre.

Level design principles

FromSoftware is rightfully renowned for their level design craftsmanship. I’ll try to summarize it in a few principles:

  • Unlockable shortcuts that serve as progression meters. The classic example is a door that is locked from your side, close to a checkpoint. When you eventually reach the other side of the door and open it, the previous checkpoint economically becomes a new “rest point”. Purely from a level layout perspective, this is not the most striking feature, but it ties in heavily with the core loop.
  • Interconnectedness. This was more notable in the original Dark Souls and Bloodborne to a degree. You discover paths that eventually lead you back to a surprising earlier section of the world. These connections serve practical functionality as shortcuts, but they also deliver a strong feeling of awe and immersion in the world.
  • Verticality. Every location seems to be designed with verticality as a cornerstone, with at least 2-3 heights at which gameplay can unfold. For example, a hall where you might first play through the ground level (and find yourself being attacked by enemies on the second floor), and eventually find yourself outside on the roof. And this also becomes a pattern to players – if you are ever in a space with a tall ceiling, odds are that there’s a higher level you can get to, with some secret loot.
  • Economical use of space (and thus assets). A corollary of the above point, but sometimes the designers intentionally flex their spatial prowess – for example a space where you play once normally and then later again upside down.
  • Real world scale. Locations are built to scale, so when you do end up on the top of the castle wall, and look down to the valley of the mountain where you began, you truly appreciate the scale of the design.
  • If the place can spawn an enemy, you can reach it. This invites the player to explore more thoroughly, as levels are filled with secrets, and an “unreachable enemy” is a clue that there are parts you haven’t found yet.
  • Memorable traps. A shiny chest in the middle of the room is often a trap, either with the chest itself (mimics in Dark Souls), or with an enemy waiting in the blindspot of the room. Another example is an enemy with their back towards you, slowly walking away – there is likely another enemy waiting in ambush, again in the blindspot of your 3rd person camera. And then there are the numerous “jump-scare” type ambushes. The thing to note about these patterns is that they can be used very sparingly to great effect – it only takes one good use to make players double-check every time in future 2.

The classic example of all the above is a castle (of which there are many in the Soulsborne universe). In Elden Ring, Stormveil Castle is the first notable example. To illustrate the complexity of the level design in this location, we can simply look at Polygon’s map – this map is hard to read, precisely because it is trying to represent a maze-like 3d space through a number of 2d cross-sections:

Source: Polygon

Open world experience

In Elden Ring, the big question was how FromSoftware would extend its principles to a much bigger scale, and I felt the answer was “same principles, with some patches addressing anything super broken”:

  • The 6 key destinations of the world (with intricate labyrinths, loot and bosses) – the proper terminology is Legacy Dungeons – are self-contained components that follow the proven design principles above, and executed to FromSoftware’s usual quality.
  • Ruins, caves, catacombs, smaller castles and various other smaller locations (which are one-and-done consumable content) populate the “open” part of the world. While the majority offer combat challenges, there are a small amount of puzzles.
    • Some of the later catacombs are particularly memorable in how the designer creates a puzzle by re-using the same level layout in different layers of the tomb, inflicting confusion on the player – “I thought I’ve been here already? But why is there a different enemy?”
  • The verticality principle is taken to a grander level – in Elden Ring there are enormous areas of the world that are directly on top of each other, shown in 2 layers of the map. And there are bits of the map where you can only reach by traversing through a section of the other layer first.
  • Restrained handholding. Much has been said online about the map and navigational UI (in comparison to, say, Ubisoft open world games). I think the point is not that Elden Ring offers no directional handholding, but rather, it does the bare minimum and expects players to be able to understand:
    • For example, the actual map is hidden until players collect the map fragment, but in the hidden view there is an icon for the location of the map fragment, which serves as a natural priority destination for the player to work towards.
    • The big pointers on the sites of grace offer a heavy-handed nudge in terms of bigger objectives.
    • While the map does not offer comprehensive UI to highlight the points of interest, the map is quite readable and you can easily spot the places you’d probably want to visit.
  • The gradual unfolding of the map’s true scale was a neat trick that awed players (the map zoomed out as you explored beyond its boundaries), and is contrary to typical open-world map designs which are eager to show you “look how big it is!”.
  • To break up the natural pace of map exploration, there are numerous portals and even a teleport trap that jump you ahead a bit or transplant you to a different part of the world altogether. Once triggered, the logical thing for players to do is to explore the new area until they reach a site of grace, which unlocks future fast travel. There is also a notable “4 bell towers” location mid-game, with several of the towers teleporting you to places adjacent to late/end game zones, greatly foreshadowing what is to come.
  • As a patch against frustrations of travel, the game is much more liberal with providing the sites of grace checkpoints, sometimes comically so. On the whole I think this is a welcome change, but it also does mean going back to older titles will be harder.
  • The mount. As a necessary and proven solution to overcome open world traversal, Elden Ring’s mount is a bit janky but gets the job done. It even has a double-jump to reduce frustration. Mounted combat is restrictive (you have a much limited moveset), while also encouraging cheese – I defeated many tough bosses in the open-world areas by abusing the mount’s speed with hit-and-run attacks. There’s also a weird i-frame when you mount/dismount. Overall I see it as a practical but not elegant patch.
  • Another (perhaps unnecessary) patch are the potion refill mechanic in the open-world, where if you defeat a complete group of enemies, you will gain a few potions back, extending your run before you need to rest. It has some utility, but I dislike this mechanic simply because it’s yet another rule (along with the mount) that only exists in the open-world, but not in Legacy Dungeons and any interior location, which adds to the cognitive overhead of making sense of the laws of physics in this world.

The sum of the above is an experience that feels immediately familiar to Souls veterans, but with an unprecedented volume of content in an unfathomably large map. It is worth noting that a good amount of the content depth is illusory, or at least, opted-in by the player: it is not required (with no practical rewards) to fight the very first Tree Sentinel patrolling the beginning area, and yet, many players will spend their first few hours just fighting and dying to this mini-boss. And generally, there is little value in fighting the enemies roaming the open world, and it is more efficient to just ride past them (or fight the minimal number guarding loot you want), but many a player will probably fight all of them, simply because they are there.

Difficulty and opt-in challenge

It is easy to sink a hundred hours in your first Elden Ring play-through, due to the combination of content volume and progression scaling. The conventional wisdom is that “progression” in Soulsborne games is less about power scaling, and more about player mastery of mechanics (knowledge and execution). This is still a core tenet in this game, but the expanded content scope has meant that enemies are spread against a wider power distribution. A quick proof here is to compare the player level at end-game (especially given the level-up formula is the same): in Bloodborne, it is common to finish the game at around level 70; in Elden Ring, level 120+ would be more common.

It is still possible to complete the game without ever leveling up – just “git gud” – but that is not the typical player experience. To revisit the “difficulty” topic, I feel the optimal (maybe design-intended?) difficulty is where it takes regular enemies 5-7 hits to kill you (and for bosses, 3-5 hits), while you kill regular enemies in 1-3 hits (and bosses in 10-20 hits). Outside of these ranges and the game feels either too easy or too hard/grindy from a numerical standpoint.

From a mechanics standpoint, the game has a wide range of tools (weapons, skills, spells, consumables) for you to approach any challenge. There is a wide range of builds, though organically discovering builds would take a lot of time, and thus reading community guides outside the game are a core part of gameplay. And with each balance update, the community is motivated to discover the latest “meta”, further extending the game’s playtime.

Given the open world nature, Elden Ring is far more generous than previous FromSoftware titles in presenting opt-in challenges. (Indeed, the shortest path to completing the game only takes up maybe 10% of the entire map.) My favorite story here is my experience in a small cave in the dreaded Caelid region. The cave had something I wanted – ironically, now I can’t remember what -but it was filled with scarlet rot swamps, and if you stood in them for too long, you are afflicted with a long debuff that constantly drained your health.

I had a number of options to tackle this terrain: to remove the debuff, I could use a consumable item, but I couldn’t be bothered to farm the crafting materials for it (indeed, crafting seems to be a largely forgettable system in the game). Alternatively I could use a spell, but I would need to get a few more levels to meet the attribute requirements; again, something I didn’t want to wait for. Another path was to try to minimize the time in the swamp, by equipping a quick-step skill – I was greedy and impatient, so this is what I chose.

A few minutes later, I had successfully reached the boss fight area of the cave, and died, dropping a tidy sum of Runes for my level at the time. I remember laughing at the time – do I want to go through this BS again? Or come back when I’m more powerful? I decided to try one more time – since if I died again before reaching my corpse, the Runes would be forever lost, and thus I would have little reason to bash my head against this wall here. Alas, I ended up defeating the boss in this next attempt, and that triumphant feeling of overcoming an unreasonable challenge (while not fully believing in myself) was addictive.

This is very much a core philosophy of Hidetaka Miyazaki – as he said in the excellent New Yorker profile, “hardship is what gives meaning to the experience.”

The world becomes smaller, as you get wiser

I mentioned earlier that in subsequent play-throughs I could see through some of the magic. Specifically, it was much more apparent that I should skip as much content as possible until I got to the level where I could play the build I had in mind. This means largely just riding through the lands and picking up items, while avoiding combat. I also took a shortcut with some “meta’ power-farming tricks, although they became way too mind-numbing for me after 10-15 minutes.

A friend of mine regretted acquiring this knowledge early (after watching some power-leveling guides), as he felt robbed of the early-game exploration. I understand the sentiment, but I also think the early game is part of the portion of content that has little replay value, and I’d rather “just get to the good part” which is mostly about experiencing different builds. I’ve played almost 200 hours, and really I’ve only played 4-5 builds. At end-game, builds revolve around very specific combinations of weapons and skills/spells, and given the game’s vast amount of weapons/skills/spells, there is a lot of depth here. So much so, it’s easy to lose the bigger picture – we are talking about just the single-player experience easily offering hundreds of hours of gameplay.

Closing thoughts

I wanted to end with some quick notes about production. Let’s start with some quick headcount comparisons from browsing the credits of FromSoftware games since 2015. As a lazy effort, I only did a subtotal tally of programmers, designers and artists – there are lots of many other folks in other role (audio, QA, localization, the management layer etc.), and this is not to diminish their contributions. Without insider knowledge, this also doesn’t reflect how outsourcing or other significant workflow adjustments impact production capabilities.

Source: game credits

Caveats aside, I do feel that these numbers support 1) my previous sentiment that Sekiro was done on a tighter scope, and 2) Elden Ring was a bigger production, but maybe surprisingly not by that much – the bigger growth was in art and design, perhaps with a focus on authoring content using mostly mature internal toolchains. Continuing my quick-and-dirty comparison (from my Sekiro review) of regular enemies count, the list of enemies in Bloodborne vs Sekiro vs Elden Ring stands at 68:45:150 – maybe indicative of good returns on content volume with the additional headcount.

At 13.4M copies sold in the first month, Elden Ring crushed the publisher’s internal forecasts of 4M. This is the nature of the business – in hindsight it’s easy to rationalize, but no one can confidently predict outsized hits. With Elden Ring as a breakout title in terms of mainstream adoption, FromSoftware is now in rarefied air – one of the few elite studios which players will buy upcoming games solely based on trust in the studio brand. This status is attained after over a decade of hard work in a genre of their own creation.

  1. The formula is y = 0.02x^3 + 3.06x^2 + 105.6x – 895, for those curious. ↩
  2. For example the chest teleport trap in the beginning area in Elden Ring, that mischievously takes players to a much harder area with no easy way back. ↩

2021 year in review

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Previous yearly reviews: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015.

Industry stuff

If 2020 was a year where the global games industry got drunk on pandemic growth, 2021 was the hangover. Consumption growth stalled, as expected. Supply chain disruptions have meant a difficult transition for the new console generation. And developers also wrestled with production delays and ongoing uncertainties of office re-openings.

In China, there was even less to cheer for. Game license approvals have again been stalled since August, and thus there were only 755 games approved for the whole year – a 46% decrease from 2020. And there were only 76 imported titles – it’s important to note that any game that’s based on a foreign IP is typically treated as an import title (e.g. Netease making a MOBA with Marvel characters), so the number of licenses issued to games made by developers outside China is even smaller. In comparison, NPD reported over 2,000 premium games released across consoles and Steam in the US in 2021; and there’s about 10k games released on Steam every year, and certainly a lot more on mobile free-to-play. So the license approval in China has become this ironclad gate, where the vast majority of games produced globally every year are not allowed legal entry. It’s not hard to imagine the rent-seeking behavior this creates.

And then there were the newer and stricter regulations. Minors are now limited to a total of 3 hours of gaming a week, designated at specific hours from Friday to Sunday. (If you work in server operations, these kinds of schedules create the worst traffic spikes during your peak hours – and indeed Honor of Kings suffered server outages when millions of youngsters wanted to login at the same time Friday night.) Tencent also voluntarily introduced time restrictions for adults, and thus it’s now a common sight to see streamers swapping accounts to extend their playtime while on air.

And thus Chinese game companies continued their international expansion, looking for greener pastures elsewhere. miHoYo opened a studio in Montreal, following a series of studio openings across North America by Tencent. But there’s also regulatory headwinds, with the US government scrutinizing Chinese services. This is partly what prompted Tencent to unveil a new publishing entity, Level Infinite, headquartered in Amsterdam and Singapore; and likewise miHoYo transferring Genshin Impact’s publishing to its Singapore entity Cognosphere. It’s unclear to me that such attempts to create a legal separation between China onshore and offshore entities would appease regulators outside of China, and the legal gymnastics could eventually become untenable.

Speaking of Genshin Impact, it continues to impress on the global stage, not just in terms of its business performance, but also cultural impact. I think it’s doing a lot to elevate the stature of Chinese games with players globally. Another mobile game worth mentioning is Harry Potter: Magic Awakened, developed by the Netease team that created Onmyoji. This game has set a new bar for launch live-ops in China: players were allowed to download the game, log in to create their characters, and socialize with other players in-game a few days before the official launch date; combined with a creative marketing campaign (a “back to magic school” theme that coincided with the real-life back-to-school season), the game was a viral sensation.

On a separate note, one positive development was the formal end to “996” at most large tech companies in China. Partly spurred by regulatory scrutiny, and partly perhaps due to an attitudinal shift in the new generation of talent, this is one more sign that the hyper-growth years are over.

Oh, and there was the Bubble – metaverse, web3, NFTs, play-to-earn… Even to a disinterested observer like myself, these concepts seemed to have sucked all the air out of public discourse. In China, discourse around NFTs and crypto-gaming have been much more muted, thanks to the ongoing government crackdown against crypto. But the “metaverse” hype cycle was in full force. It’s hard not to be skeptical, when you hear about some blue-blood VC eager to fund a team (which has never made a game before) pitching a cross-platform metaverse MMO. But for now, the music hasn’t stopped playing, and so the game continues.

Finally, Wild Rift – the game I worked on for 2.5 years from late 2016 to mid 2019, and where I was one of the first 3 people on the team – finally launched in China, as the more straightforwardly (and better, IMO) named League of Legends Mobile. Early data seemed to have been very good, at least good enough for the project team to win the prestigious “major business breakthrough” award within Tencent. But of course the jury is still out on whether the game can sustain. In any case, I’m just happy that Chinese players can enjoy it (or unite in complaining about the matchmaking – but that should a post for another day).

Work stuff

2021 was the second full calendar year I worked at Supercell Shanghai. The office was open year round, except for a couple weeks when one colleague was quarantined by the Shanghai government in a contact tracing effort. (In my colleague’s case, apparently the Didi ride they took had transported someone flagged as a close contact of a suspected case, and so my colleague was flagged as well – this is one anecdotal example of how contact tracing had been enforced locally.

It was still far from a normal year for work, since it was a massive undertaking to enter or leave China. So we really missed out on cultural exchanges and collaborations with other Supercell offices. And it also took a heavy toll on our recruiting strategy, since it was practically impossible to hire from overseas.

It’s hard to develop new games and build new teams and establish a new studio’s culture all at once. (Duh!) And thus it was an exciting milestone (and a big sigh of relief?) when my coworkers soft-launched Clash Mini towards the end of the year. I didn’t work on the game, but given how small our studio is, I’ve had a great front-row seat to its trials and tribulations. There’s a Chinese idiom that says a bystander sees more clearly than the person directly involved; I certainly felt this way in the numerous peer 1-1s I’ve had with Mini’s game lead.

As to my own project, there’s not much to talk about publicly, yet.

One book that had a significant influence on how I worked was Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. Whatever its flaws (reviews online are fairly mixed), the discussions of how to run better recruiting and performance evaluation processes prompted me to change my approach on these topics.

Personal stuff

As a family, we still didn’t do much travel in 2021. A large part of this is thanks to the tight travel policies of local schools, which implemented extra restrictions on top of city-wide policies. For example – if my son left Shanghai, at the minimum he will have to submit a negative PCR test result and self quarantine for 48 hours before he can return to school.

For many Chinese families, such requirements haven’t dampened their interest for travel. And some have gotten quite creative at beating the system – for example, if you have multiple mobile lines (which many Chinese do, partly due to the low cost and the restrictive carrier lock-ins), you can leave one SIM inactive at home, and use that number to generate a green report (based on carrier location tracking) that says you have not left the city.

But anyhow, in my family’s case we played it safe. That has meant opportunities to pick up new hobbies. During the pandemic, my son became a huge fan of American Ninja Warrior, so I’ve tried to gently nudge his athletic interests. (He’s definitely starting from behind in this regard, since my wife and I both lack good exercise habits or play any sports still.) I couldn’t find a Ninja Warrior style gym in Shanghai – so we picked up rock climbing (in gyms) instead.

Anecdotally, rock climbing feels like an up-and-coming sport in China. There’s not a huge list of facilities in Shanghai, but it’s been a mini adventure taking my son to a handful of gyms over the past year. There’s usually 2 distinct groups of customers at these venues. The first is kids – parents paying for private lessons for their children, perhaps hoping to get some certifications that help towards high school applications. The second is young people in their early twenties, skewing slightly more female than male. And if I had to guess, I’d say the first group overall outnumber the second – so you could say that the job-to-be-done of climbing gyms in Shanghai is primarily to address the education-system anxieties of Chinese parents.

There are a few lessons I’ve observed from all these trips to climbing gyms. The first is how people overcome their natural instincts through practice. All beginner routes at these gyms use auto-belay devices for safety: they respond to your weight and will lower you at a controlled pace when you fall. So the first thing all new climbers need to learn is to let go of the wall to safely descend. This can be a lot harder than it sounds – I’ve lost track of how many kids I’ve seen that are “stuck” at the top of the wall because they can’t let go. It’s a counter-intuitive move that requires a leap of faith initially. With enough repetition though, you can overcome your natural survival instincts.

Another small lesson is how first-time customers (especially parents taking their kids to try out climbing) misjudge the relative difficulty of bouldering (3-5 meters tall) versus wall climbing (12-15 meters tall). They assume that the taller wall, which requires protective gear, must be harder; whereas gym staff will almost unanimously tell them that bouldering is more technical and harder, especially compared to the beginner climbing wall routes that are effectively ladders. I guess this is another example of how subject-matter literacy is required for informed debates (yes, I’m alluding to the NFT discourse on Twitter that is driving game devs mad).

Media consumed

I played a lot of Hades in the beginning of the year. I was quite hooked, so much so that I was carrying my PS5 controller with me when I traveled for work. Besides getting platinum in achievements (alas, I have almost no friends on Epic Game Store to brag to), I even attempted speed-running and was very proud of myself for setting a personal best of a sub 9-minute run (which is ranked about 300ish on speedrun.com).

Towards the end of the year I binged Wild Rift a lot on China server, probably more than I would have expected. I can now see it’s a bit of an acquired taste – it’s the most competitive and serious real-time PVP game I’ve played on mobile, and the intensity of the experience is a notch higher than pretty much any other mobile game. The literal $B “product-market-fit” question is how many players there are in the world that want this intense an experience on this particular platform. In China it’s a lot – quite a bit smaller than Honor of Kings, for sure, but we are still talking about tens of millions of players at least.

The rest of the year I can’t really recollect what I played. I sampled a bunch of games on Xbox Game Pass, but didn’t play anything deeply. On the indie/AA side of things, I enjoyed Death’s Door and F.I.S.T. enough to write about them, and I was impressed with the latter as a very competent first outing for a Chinese studio.

For film and TV that I watched for the first time last year, Dune (2021), Samurai Rebellion (1967) and Free Solo (2018) were my top 3 feature films; Generation Kill (2008) was my favorite TV series, though the latest seasons of Succession and Ted Lasso are also very close to my heart. Squid Game – by far the biggest surprise hit of the year – was in my opinion another reminder of how fruitless it is to make ex-ante forecasts; we can only make ex-post rationalizations of the show’s success.

Photo by Jonathan J. Castellon on Unsplash

Communications as gameplay

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I recently watched the 2008 HBO mini-series Generation Kill for the first time. Focusing on realistically portraying the grunt’s perspective of war, it’s a great modern combat rendition of themes previously explored in works such as Platoon, Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan. I quite recommend it.

Aside from the brutal horrors of war (and the senseless of it – a core theme of the series), Generation Kill also effectively showcases how the modern US military communicate, and the limitations of their advanced systems. Radios are extensively used – as the primary comms within a platoon, with their upper command, and calling in air strikes & artillery support etc. There also is a version of a BFT system shown, where a digital battlefield map can be seen with near real-time data of tracked friendly and enemy units (similar to the mini-map in RTS games).

Despite these sophisticated systems, the marines featured in Generation Kill often find themselves in states of confusion: at night, they receive friendly fire from a nearby friendly unit passing by; after reconning a town without identifying enemies, they see it bombed, with no idea where the order came from; they see an aerial unit attack a nearby location, but have no immediate way to communicate with the friendly aircraft; and in one ironic scene, they jam their own radio channels so that an incompetent leader cannot send out a wrong (and dangerous) command.

This sparked a thought – what video games employ communications as a central gameplay mechanic? A few different examples came to mind:

  • The fun party game Spaceteam used speech as a primary mechanic. And last year’s phenomenon Among Usobviously leans on speech for a majority of its gameplay content as well.
  • Any team-based multiplayer game that emphasizes real-time coordination as a vector of mastery – whether PVP (like MOBAs or shooters), or PVE such as MMO raids. And in a military shooter like PUBG, the communication have many direct similarities to the military in real life.
  • 4X games (“SLG” in Chinese gaming terms), by virtue of their large and hierarchical guild social structures, create strong needs for layers of communications, not unlike the military chain of command. The senior leaders of a guild will have a private chat channel for strategy formulation and decision making; lower level grunts may only receive commands on a need-to-know basis. And social manipulation / influence is a key part of the gameplay (e.g. trying to bribe an enemy guild’s senior leader to defect, or backstabbing an ally).

Obviously, placing a premium on communications can create nasty negative effects. Toxic communities – in short players being assholes to strangers online – can drive many players away, especially targeted minorities (for example female players in shooters that often encounter a lot of abuse in voice-chat). So there’s also a counter trend of games taking away communication means in-game, and thus pushing players who want these features back to 3rd party tools.

F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch (2021)

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F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch is a Metroidvania game made by Shanghai developer TiGames, and released first on PlayStation recently (coming to PC in future). The team is about 20 people.

With a Metacritic score of 81, this game is in my opinion a good example of a new breed of Chinese games that are successfully establishing a beachhead in the premium console space. And now it’s not so far-fetched to envision a future where Chinese developers can ship successful $70 AAA titles cross-platform, competing with the biggest console franchises.

I’m not heavy into this genre, and during my first hour with F.I.S.T. I was not too impressed. I didn’t like the grimy dieselpunk art style, and the starting weapon, the eponymous giant fist felt too slow. At this particular moment, I felt I was playing the game more due to professional curiosity (and a natural desire to support a Chinese title).

But the game does open up over the next few hours, as you unlock new abilities, including traversal abilities like double jump and wall jump that are staples of the genre. (I would argue that perhaps these abilities can be unlocked even earlier – at the cost of a more accelerated learning curve for players new to the genre.) And once you acquire the second weapon (out of 3 total), the game’s combat system fully reveals its deep combo-chaining potential (seemingly inspired by action games and fighting games).

Probably around the 10 hour mark of my playthrough, I was fully hooked on the game. I felt compelled to explore every corner of the map, and practiced every boss fight like how I would approach a Soulsbourne game. The game is quite hard – there were few boss fights that I completed in 1-3 tries, and many took me practicing up to an hour to crack.

I ended my first playthrough at the 26 hour mark. I still didn’t care much about the game’s narrative – but I was completely sold on the combat and level design. There are some really fun and intuitive puzzle elements to the levels – an area focused on puzzle gameplay that unlocks very late in the game is especially memorable – and I was impressed by the mileage that the level design got out of a single mechanic.

What’s most impressive about the game – and I’m paraphrasing a line from a Chinese review I had read – is that I don’t need to go out of my way to hype up this game because it’s made by Chinese devs. The game’s quality speaks for itself, and while it’s maybe not at the very peak of the Metroidvania genre, it is a very competent entry with a super-rich combat system. The production feels very mature and there doesn’t seem to be many rookie mistakes (I will complain about the font-size feeling too small for couch-play).

Death’s Door (2021)

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Death's Door

I played through Death’s Door on Steam this past week. It’s a highly enjoyable action adventure that lasts about 10 hours, and to my surprise it was made by a 2-person studio (Acid Nerve – the full game credits list 8 people).

To me, the game is heavily inspired by Soulsborne and Zelda games, presented in an isometric camera view. The eponymous doors (there’s lots of them) function quite similarly to bonfires, resetting the game world whenever you go through them, and also acts as a teleportation device to switch you to different locations / levels. (The doors also reminded me of Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. franchise.)

Like Dark Souls, the level design has a strong emphasis on “connectivity” – as you explore a new area for the first time, you’ll repeatedly unlock shortcuts that take you back to the beginning area (and close to a strategically placed door). The levels are intentionally maze-like, with lots of winding pathways and verticality – for example, to access the cliff on top of you (where there’s a collectible), you might need to walk around a large section of the level. In addition, sections of the level are completely inaccessible (usually, rooms with juicy secrets) until you’ve unlocked some later abilities to your character – this is clearly meant to make the levels have repeat exploration value, as you come back to hunt for specific collectibles.

With these elements in unison, the game could feel like a chore sometimes – you could be lost (“how do I get there again?”), or just frustratingly trying to figure out how to access a secret area you’ve spotted, with no feedback of whether that goal is currently achievable or not. But these are minor gripes, especially considering that it is trivial to search online the solutions to the game’s secrets & puzzles – indeed, it took great restraint for me to not open YouTube during the majority of my playthrough (at my age, if I can’t figure out the solution to something in a game in 5 minutes, I usually start searching online, as I feel I’m “wasting time”.)

The game’s combat is simple (in mechanics complexity) but quite robust:

  • You have a light and heavy melee attack (the heavy attack can be charged up to be even stronger).
  • Melee attacks charge up your energy bar, which can be consumed as ammo for your 4 ranged abilities (unlocked over the course of the game – you start out with a basic bow / arrow).
  • You have a dodge with invulnerability-frames.
  • You have 4 health (initially, can be upgraded to 6 through collectibles) – each enemy hit always cost 1 health. There’s very limited health regen available in the levels, so there’s the Souls-like tension of trying to push to the next “break” in the level (usually unlocking a shortcut back to the nearest door).
  • Enemies can hurt each other – AOE explosions and projectiles can be utilized against other enemies. You can knock-back projectiles (e.g. a fire bolt aimed at you), and the ping-ponged projectile will damage other enemies. You can also trick enemies into environmental deaths (rolling off a ledge; walking into a laser). This creates a fun mini-game.

There’s about 10-20 types of regular enemies (your usual mix of melee / ranged / elite enemies), and perhaps 6 boss fights. Combat is about learning and reading the telegraphed movesets of each enemy, and taking advantage of their vulnerability windows. Interestingly, the game does not have HP bars for enemies (most enemies die in 1-3 light attacks anyway), but rather communicates damage state visually (blood stains on the ground, red VFX cracks in the enemies’ bodies). This ups the tension in boss-fights as you don’t have full insight on how many additional hits you need to land.

I would say the combat is not difficult (the windows of opportunity are overall quite generous), but they require discipline. I also liked some clever bits of the moveset AI – for example, there’s one fight where the enemy will always use a leap attack when you try to aim a ranged attack. I was a bit frustrated at the final boss fight (not the “True Ending” fight, the boss-fight that leads to the credits scene), I felt it was a tad overlong and felt repetitive (I hadn’t unlocked any health upgrades at the time, and I felt it was a bit punishing on 4 health). It reminded me of an extended platforming sequence in Ori and the Blind Forest (which to be fair was much more rage inducing).

In all, I felt this was a great game made by a surprisingly small team, especially considering how polished the game feels, and how good it looks. It is a good reflection of the state of the industry, where small teams through smart creative decisions (stylized art, re-usable design) and tight scope control can deliver such quality experiences.

Hades (2020)

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I’ve had an interesting relationship with Hades. I purchased in Early Access in late 2019, on the Epic Games Store, when I felt it was already very hyped. I played about 20-30 runs (no clears) on 2 different saves (1 at work and 1 at home – this was before they integrated Epic Game Services for cloud saves), and moved on to other games.

When the game moved out of Early Access in 2020 – I was quite surprised at the big reception it had, perhaps even more so amongst game developers (at least those that show up in my Twitter timeline). This revealed a bias I had developed: I had subconsciously discounted the marketing opportunities of the “real launch” and the subsequent (well-deserved) critical acclaim.

I would though, love to see an updated sales figure, which would help better quantify what portion of lifetime sales are from “Early Access”.

Somewhat related: as of Mar 10, Valheim has sold 5.7M copies in 5 weeks of Early Access on Steam; what are the odds that it will have another massive adoption bump when it removes the “Early Access” label?

In any case – I got back into Hades back in January, with another fresh save. And I was truly hooked. As of this writing, I’ve spent roughly 200 hours, and have completed all achievements (it’s been a long time since I cared about doing that in any game – the last game I aimed for 100% was Red Dead Redemption a decade ago). I’m still doing 1-2 runs per day, mostly trying to beat my speedrun personal best – which, as of Mar 17, is 9m35s (the world record is 5m57s; my very first clear was over 40m).

My personal best time in Hades

Design systems

Let’s talk about the design systems that Hades employs to deliver a 200h gaming experience.

Within a “run” – leveraging randomization to create a unique experience every time:

  • A full “run” consists of 30+ rooms across 4 biomes1, with 4 boss fights.
  • Randomized room types – a “run” is constructed of a random collection of rooms (with some assembly parameters) :
    • Majority of rooms are combat oriented, with some variation in enemies composition: standard enemies rooms, mini-boss rooms, boss rooms. There are also some special objectives that can be applied, for example “survive 45s” or “compete with Thanatos to see who has more kills”.
    • Non-combat rooms: shops, fountains, story rooms (one per biome in the first 3 biome), Chaos Gates (which gives players the chance to take on some additional risk for some reward).
    • Parameters: typically, biome 1 has 14 rooms; biome 2 is 10 rooms; biome 3 is 12 rooms; the last room per biome is the boss room, while the preceding one is a shop.
  • Crafted room layouts and runtime enemy spawn behavior:
    • Rooms are picked from a handcrafted pool (not procedurally generated).
    • There are a (large) number of spawn points from which enemies can spawn; enemies spawn in waves; and spawn location is influenced by the player’s location.
    • The result is that even when the same room is played repeatedly, the flow of combat is rarely exactly the same.
  • Randomized room rewards – after the player completes a typical room, they are presented with 1-3 choices for the next room, with the corresponding reward (and sometimes indication of room type) displayed:
    • “Boons” are usually the most sought-after, and directly shapes a player’s build each run. There are 8 “standard” Gods that offer roughly 150 Boons in total, including 28 “Duo Boons” (which require any 2 of the 8 Gods as prerequisites, 8*7/2=28). There are also 2 special Gods, Hermes (with a set of Boons unrelated to other Gods), and Chaos (from Chaos Gates, who grants bonuses after inflicting debuffs).
    • “Hammer upgrades” significantly alter your weapon’s effects, providing another layer of build customization.
    • Other items that impact the run: “Poms”, which level up your Boons; gold, which can be spent at the shops in the run; “Centaur Heart” which grants bonus HP.
    • 4 meta-game currencies for permanent progression (which can impact a run, after certain meta upgrades).
  • Heat system – as a significant end-game system, the Heat system offers players a variety of choices to increase the difficulty and modify a run’s experience, for example:
    • Quantity of enemies, their HP, damage, attack speed.
    • Armored enemies have special additional effects.
    • Boss fights are modified and upgraded.

Outside a “run” / permanent progression systems:

  • “Mirror of Night” – this is the main permanent power progression system, with 12 passive ability slots, and 2 choices per slot. These passives unlock a lot of power very early on – for example the 3rd ability Death Defiance grants 1 extra revive per upgrade.
  • “Fated List of Minor Prophecies” – this is a quest system with 50+ unique quests. A typical quest is to acquire each Boon of a God at least once, and as such, quite directly encourages exploration.
  • Weapons and Weapon Aspects – starting out with one weapon, players eventually unlock 6 different weapons, and each weapon has 4 “aspects” (variants with different passives or movesets).
  • Keepsakes and Companions – “Keepsakes” are items that grant passives during a run (for example, the first keepsake listed grants bonus HP). “Companions” are a special type of keepsakes that grant a consumable active (e.g. 5 charges of an big AOE damage spell). Both are gradually unlocked by meeting with the game’s vast cast of NPCs, and progressing the narrative. In the end-game, keepsakes are integral to players crafting their desired builds in a run, as after each biome you can change your equipped keepsake, so there’s a light min-max game with keepsake management.
  • Achievements – this is the distribution platform (Steam / Epic etc.) achievements system. Functionally it overlaps with the quest system above, but provides a different set of goals. In my experience this list was easier to finish than the quest system.

I realize this is a pretty dry list to read through. But there are a few things that jumped out. The first is that these systems are quite independent, and as a result multiplicative in their impact on replayability. The second is that each system is scalable in isolation, and once scaled up in content, gives a nice boost to overall replayability. I suspect this pattern is partly a reflection of the game’s public development in Early Access: new systems were layered on over time, and content per system were also added over time. (I haven’t gone back to check the patch notes to validate this guess.) In any case, this is an elegant set of systems, and collectively the game feels surprisingly content-rich given the small size of the dev team.

Experiential recap

Recapping my 200 hours with Hades so far, the game has consistently given me a smooth experience with clear progression goals to pursue.

In the very beginning, the game is primarily about exploration: pushing deeper into the biomes, overcoming the major bosses for the first time; seeing new Gods and their Boons; trying out different weapons. At the same time, the early meta progression was generous and directly lifting the player’s power, which meant the player was making deeper runs even without necessarily growth in skill (but usually the 2 were organically intertwined).

At some point, I ran into the final boss Hades for the first time (and beat him!). This significantly moves the narrative forward – without giving away too much, this is why I embedded the soundtrack at the top. The narrative momentum compelled me to keep playing – I needed to find out what happens next, and with every full clear, I learnt a bit more. I can’t emphasize enough how surprisingly strong the narrative hook was during this phase.

After beating Hades enough times, the main narrative concluded. At this point, I kept playing because there were still more gameplay content to experience – weapon aspects to unlock and upgrade; and the Heat system which rewarded the rare currencies needed for weapons. There was also a narrative epilogue, that essentially required grinding more conversations with NPCs and increasing the relationship with them.

There were also still quests and achievements to chase, and interestingly, chasing these quests often meant playing sub-optimally, for example picking a Boon option I never played before (to move towards completing a quest), even though there’s a more powerful option.

As an aside, after about 50-100 hours with the game, I switched my input device from keyboard+mouse to ps5 gamepad. I was motivated to do so because I was seriously hurting my wrists playing this game (the game’s frantic spamming is quite excessive). One lesson of this switch-up: at least in my case, understanding of game state mattered a lot more than execution ability, as I did a full clear in my very first gamepad run, despite noticeably fighting the controls as I tried to retrain muscle memory.

Up to this point, I hadn’t really done any theory-crafting, and was not thoughtful about builds. After venturing into some Youtube content, I found myself accidentally diving into speed-running. The 2nd 100 hours was thus spent on a mix of farming Heat levels, pushing high Heat to accomplish a challenge, and dabbling in speed-running. I found that I liked the game enough to always give myself a new immediate goal, just as I was getting tired of the grind.

Speedrunning

A section about speedruns specifically. Hades has an active speedrun community, and the game seems aware of the fact that speedrunning is a key source of community content (UGC). There are some nice nods in-game towards this: for example, right after beating your own fastest time, your character will say “I bet I can go even faster”.

As an aside, I’m the type of player that never theory-crafts builds, and rely on “netdecking” (to borrow a CCG genre term), i.e. referencing the community-discovered meta builds and strategies. So my venture into speedrunning was accidental, out of a desire to understand the meta. Once I tried executing some meta builds, I got some very addictive positive feedback as I saw my clear times dramatically decrease. At least for me, this was a very enjoyable loop, and I see it as a type of engagement lever for a pure PVE experience.

More broadly, I’ve found it interesting how the Hades speedrun community has kept engagement up, by constantly adopting new speedrun formats. What do I mean here? The main Hades speedrun leaderboard is the “Unseeded AnyHeat”, which translated to plain English is a competition to see who has the fastest time for a single clear (based on the in-game clock), at any difficulty, without manipulating the run’s RNG seeding. However, this leaderboard has gotten quite stale, as the meta has largely been solved (there is one particular weapon that is clearly the fastest), and the current best record has already been set to under 6 minutes.

If you are a speedrunner / video content creator, trying to improve your standings on this leaderboard is an effort in diminishing returns. Instead, you could switch your attention to the other leaderboards, for example, the high Heat leaderboards, or “Fresh File” (fastest time to beating Hades for the first time, from a brand new save), or 3 Weapons (3 consecutive clears, with 3 different weapons). These different leaderboards spawn their own unique metas. And it’s not hard to imagine new formats being invented – as long as there is a common interest in playing the game, and competition based on it, the community can make up new rules to play by.

In the grand scheme of things, this community is quite niche. The amount of people who are good enough, and care enough to record and submit their speedrun videos for this game is probably just a few hundred to thousand. But I think there are some useful insights here for game developers making PVE experiences and worried about long-term engagement.

  1. For those familiar with the game, I’m cheating a bit as I’m mentally treating each of the branches in Styx as 1 “room”. ↩