Heavy Boots of Lead
I saw Iron Man this weekend, and I’m going to go against the current here: It was pretty good, but had a massive glaring flaw that seriously hampered my enjoyment of it.
Screenplay Writers: Please do not de-power the protagonist before the climax in a superhero wish-fulfillment action movie.
If you spend the entire film telling the complex backstory of how a character came to be powerful, and then in the very moment when we, the audience, want to see those powers exercised to their fullest potential you take them away, I leave the theater wondering why the fuck I watched the first two thirds, since they apparently did not matter.
There is, of course, a lesson here for game design. If you give a player cool powers, you need to make sure they actually get to do cool things. How many times have you been playing a game and received a power-up, only to discover that every piece of content from the moment you get it onwards requires you to use that power-up? “Your damage increases by x2, which is good, because now all the enemies have 2x the hit points!” From the player’s perspective, they didn’t get any new powers — they’re like Alice, running as fast as they can just to keep up. In fact, if the new powers require more player skill to make full use of them, they may actually feel like they’re losing ground.
This isn’t a hard problem to solve. Once you give the player a new gun, a new power, a new way to move, don’t change the content. Not at first, anyway. Let them use their new abilities on the same stuff they were fighting just moments ago. Give them a few minutes to feel like absolute bad asses before you start cranking the difficulty up again.
More importantly, though: you must never ever ever give the player a power and immediately confront him with enemies that are immune to that power. This is the most frustrating experience in the world for a player. In fact, I’ll go one step further. If, in your game, there are more than a handful of enemies who are immune to one of the player’s major abilities, you’re doing it wrong. I’m looking at you, Final Fantasy. If the only way to maintain game balance is to make half the enemies unaffected by a major player power, you should strongly consider removing that power, or seriously weakening it. I’d rather not have the ‘instant-kill spell’ at all if it only affects 5% of the enemies in the world (particularly if, as in most FF games, the potentially affected enemies can be dispatched in bulk with a couple of sword swings).