Welcome back to design club, A show in which we analyze the design of a
particular game level or mechanic and this time we're diving deep. We thought
it'd be fun to do something similar to what James does when he gives design
workshops for developers so for the next five days we're gonna pick apart the
first floor of the Durlag's tower dungeon from Baldur's gate
Yep, just the first level. We're gonna go room by room and look at exactly how
every piece fits together to create the player experience.
Why do five entire episodes just for one dungeon floor you might ask? Well because
to this day Durlag's tower stands as one of the finest examples of dungeon
design in all of gaming. This media may have changed a great deal since 1999 but
the design principles used here are timeless, whether you're building
dungeons for a 2D game or a 3D game, a modern RPG or a retro throwback. But we
can't just jump right into the first floor of the dungeon below Durlag's
tower just like that. No no no no. Frst we got to talk about how you get to Durlag's tower.
Because we're a dungeon is located and how you're guided to it is a big part of
how we experience the dungeon itself first let's look at where Durlag's
tower is located in the world of Baldur's gate. Right over here. Now this
is important because Durlag's tower is part of an expansion and while most of
the expansion content is way off on the other side of the map, the designers made
a conscious choice to place this tower pretty solidly between your starting
location and two of your first main objectives, and because of the way zones
are linked in Baldur's gate you're pretty likely to stumble upon it early
in the game.
This is important for two reasons first because the way in which the player
discovers a dungeon affect their experience of it. Now a lot of games
would probably give the player a quest or an objective to guide them to the
dungeon and that's a perfectly fine approach but maybe not the best one.
Hand holding the player right to the front door doesn't exactly create a sense of wonder.
Instead if the player can be made to stumble upon it on their own so that they
have this moment of finding something unexpected and incredible in your world,
or if they can be made to feel like they've discovered this mysterious place
by piecing together vague hints and clues, the mere discovery of the place
will be a much more powerful experience, the trick is to design in such a way
that almost a hundred percent of your players will stumble
across your dungeon without the hand-holding. That's why
Durlag's tower is placed here.
The second thing you'll note about the placement is that, since the player's
likely to discover this place early on, they'll be pretty low-level when they do.
Now the dungeon itself is actually one of the most challenging locations in the
entire game and at first blush it might seem like it would make a bit more sense
to put the tower maybe over here near the other late game content. But as an
experience that would feel a little gamey. The world feels a bit more
holistic if there are difficult areas scattered all around the world, rather
than all clumped in one location.
Additionally placing Durlag's tower near early-game locations makes the
tower aspirational. You discover it and it seems pretty cool, and you try going
in and you probably get totally wrecked and you think to yourself:
Hmm, I bet that there's some cool stuff in there, I can't wait to come back and
thrash this place later. And when you do come back 5 levels stronger it feels
just great taking down enemies that were terrifying threats a few levels ago.
Imagine if you hadn't discovered this place until later in the game when you
are already strong enough to tackle it.
These guys would just feel like normal enemies then. Now of course the reason
that most games don't do this is because having the player died to something they
had no idea they weren't ready for often feels unfair, like the game is cheating.
This begs the question why doesn't it feel unfair when Durlag's tower does it.
Well to answer that let's jump to the map entrance. Immediately upon entering
the zone you meet this guy right here, and pretty much all of his dialogue
tells you that this place is bad news.
Notice how this guy also happens to serve as a merchant. There's a reason for
that. For any lengthy dungeon, especially if your game limits the amount of
stuff the player can carry, it's essential to find a way to give the
player easy access to a shop keep. This will radically reduce the amount of time
spent fiddling with the inventory, and radically increase the time spent
actually playing the dungeon. And actually playing the dungeon is what
everybody wants, player and designer alike.
Next we have what I call an anticipation space. The player has just been warned by
that friendly merchant don't go this way or you'll die, but then nothing...
This builds the tension and then BAM!
The bouncers of Durlag's tower show up. You know those you must be this tall to
ride signs? These guys are that. In fact these two enemies are far more difficult
than what your initially going to encounter in the tower itself. Now this
is the opposite of how we usually build the game's difficulty curve, but it's
actually a perfect choice in this specific case. Because if you're gonna
put a challenging area in a low level section of your game, it's super
important that you prevent the player from spending hours frustratedly trying
to beat a challenge that's simply impossible for them. These two incredibly
difficult enemies act as gatekeepers by putting them out front, the designers
know that if the player gets past these guys, whatever level the player might be,
they're ready. They are skilled enough to enjoy the rest of the dungeon.
After these gatekeepers we have a long, narrow, seemingly empty path with nothing at all.
At first this might seem like wasted space, but it too has a purpose. See the
designers know that some clever players are going to try to attempt to just run
past those gatekeeper monsters instead of fighting them. And that would be a
problem, because like i said earlier it's super important that the designers know
with absolute certainty that the player can actually defeat the gatekeepers
before they take on the tower. So this space is designed to trap the player and
make sure that even with Baldur's Gate plunky pathfinding, the enemies have
ample time to kill most of the player's party if they try to just run past. Now
note that there actually is one trivial enemy along this pat, right here. This
enemy is not meant to be a challenge.
He's here simply to run interference, to slow down any underleveled players who
might be trying to run past the gatekeepers. Also note the enemy type
it's a doppelganger. Even with this throwaway enemy, the designers didn't
miss an opportunity to do a little foreshadowing. The entire design of the
outside of the tower functions as one big gate. If you can get past all this,
you're ready. Now i should note that there is one minor quest in the game
that's meant to lead you right to the tower if you're one of the players who
bought the expansion after you already beat most of the game, but it's clear
that the designers were anticipating that many future players would stumble
on the tower in the course of normal play, so I'm just gonna move along just
note. that even though they tried to make sure that 80-plus percent of their
players would find Durlag's tower on their own they, did include a minor
hand-holding quest well after the point in the game that players should have
found the tower, just to make sure that the other twenty percent players didn't
miss out.
And now at last we reach the tower itself from here we can go either up or
down, and if i had infinite time to make these I talk about the upper levels of
Durlag's tower and how they are used to build the players curiosity about
just what happened in this strange tower and why the place now lies abandoned, but
there is just so much designed to dig into in the dungeons lower levels I'm
just gonna dive right in.
Join us next time as we get to the real meat of their legs tower and discuss how
encounters are built how traps are placed and how treasure is stored.
See you next time!
(Subtitles automatically generated by Google Speech-to-Text, with fixes by Jan Hasebos and punctuation by the Scribe.)