As more and more games look to be perpetual experiences.
As more games are greenlit with 5 and 10 year plans.
Designers are being faced with a tough question.
How do you keep your design focused, holistic and cohesive,
across a decade long roll-out of content?
Or: should you even try to?
This is the question of accretion.
Also special thanks to Ely, for being a guest artist on this episode. Say hello!
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A generally held maxim for good design is that,
if somethings broken in your game,
If some mechanic or system is out of whack and ruining the experience.
You patch the game until you've fixed it.
Likewise: if a mechanic is already solid, but could be improved further
to create an even more engaging experience, you refine it.
But lately, especially with the slew of free-to-play MMO's that later in their lives
end up getting handed off to studios that had nothing to do with building them in the first place.
We are seeing a different solution.
Accretion.
Accretion is the idea, that instead of fixing mechanics and systems.
Instead of really refining what you have.
You just keep building new mechanics and systems.
And simply bail on anything that doesn't work or can't be easily improved.
Those mechanics and features stay in the game...
...but as you layer more systems and more mechanics on top of them...
...the old systems just start to become obsolete.
Do you have a currency that hit hyperinflation?
Don't try to somehow fix it.
Just introduce a new currency, earned in some weird way, and make sure that...
...all the new gear can only be bought with that new currency.
Everybody will just abandon the old one, so, problem solved!
Do you have a piece of gear that people have found an exploit to farm?
Don't worry about fixing the exploit, just introduce a new piece of gear that renders that first one worthless.
Problem solved!
Now, this approach might sound totally untenable, rediculous, even.
But this spaghetti of systems is not necessarily as unmanageable as you might think.
You see, unlike games which are more elegantly designed,
Where the systems are all intricately intertwined,
And any change or addition you make will impact everything you already have in place,
These less cohesive games just become a cobbled-together jumble of unconnected systems over time,
Which seems bad, but none of these systems rely on anything but the most core gameplay to function.
So there's no delicate balance to be broken,
And systems added later in the game's life don't have to rely on earlier ones.
That new currency you added to solve your inflation problem,
Has nothing to do with the original, hyper-inflated currency, by design
Which is what allows you to safely abandon it.
And sure, you might have never have found a way to balance that gear that players keep farming,
But by introducing a system for, say, socketable equipment upgrades,
You've effectively done an end-run on the problem,
Because that old gear doesn't have any sockets!
It's worthless now, even if the new gear is only marginally more powerful,
Because players want to play with a new design.
It is pretty nuts as a design philosophy,
Because you're kind of just leveling and rebuilding everything,
It's power demolishing,
It's the designers firing rockets "willy-nilly" at their own game to create more design space.
James likes to think of it as "game design by landfill."
By creating that socket system,
You didn't just "precision nerf" that one piece of gear that players were exploiting,
You basically just laid waste to every piece of gear designed before that system was introduced,
Because, remember, in this type of design you're not gonna go back and rework anything,
You are a "design shark," you just keep moving forward to live.
But then it kinda works in your favor,
Because your players, who were bored with their easy method of getting the great, high-end gear,
Are actually ecstatic that they've got something new to grind for.
Your retention rates go up, your turn goes down,
And your players embrace this idea of "disposable game design."
Now, of course, if you go about this wrong, your players will get upset with you,
but if your game is fundamentally about acquiring new things, or facing ever-harder challenges,
That's basically what you're providing by laying waste to your own design.
And there are real advantages to doing this, from a production perspective,
You can churn out content a lot quicker if you don't have to worry about it being perfect.
If you're just gonna out mode it yourself before players figure out how to exploit it anyway,
And, since you're gonna blow up all that new content soon anyway,
It's only gotta be good enough to be exciting and fun to play through for a limited time.
Better still, you don't have to comb back through the entire game,
And make sure there's somebody on your staff
Who understands how every little piece of content fits together whenever you're planning your next thing.
Assuming that your next thing basically has nothing to do with anything else from the game,
Except sharing the most core systems and mechanics.
But, this does also come with a huge cost.
Aside from the inevitable power creep problems,
This approach results in a game with ever-increasing complexity for the player,
And often, it's complexity without a lot of depth.
If your game has 12 different types of currency,
Because you've burned them all one by one,
For a new player, that's gonna be really imposing, confusing, and just look like a mess.
And it doesn't help that this type of "slash and burn" design,
Doesn't tend to bother updating tutorials much to cover new systems.
After all, why spend a bunch of effort teaching systems that are gonna be obsolete in 6 months?
This all basically means that you're sustaining your elder players,
By providing them an incredibly rapid stream of new content,
At the cost of making your game ever-harder for new players to jump into.
Which makes a lot of business sense, if you just picked up an aging MMO on the cheap,
But what does it mean for the rest of the landscape?
I mean, yes, jumping into a game that you know has a huge amount of content
That you could be playing and exploring forever can feel really exciting,
But it can also just as easily feel overwhelming.
But setting aside what this means for MMO-type games,
I think it's even more fascinating to consider what what this design philosophy might mean for serialized games.
Many of our biggest-named titles are now annual releases,
And they all struggle with the same question.
Do they cater to their existing audience, trying to get them to purchase every new release?
Or, do they try to bring in new players,
Replacing the players who have lapsed and expanding their market.
The struggle over this question is evident in so many of these games.
Boot up a modern Madden game,
You're gonna find 20 sub-menus and a dozen different modes,
Each one accreted over time.
Look at Call of Duty Infinite Warfare versus the first Modern Warfare side by side,
And you'll find some of the same effect.
Or, even look at something like Civilization.
Now, I'm not talking about Civ 6, we actually wrote this episode before 6 came out,
But Civ 4, with all of its expansions,
That was one of Jame's favorite unmodded Civilization experiences ever.
But then, when Civ 5 came out, that one felt like a step backwards to him.
Not because he actually thought it was a step backwards, it was a great game,
But Civilization 5 was the entry where Firaxis decided
To scrape off all the accretion that had piled up over the previous 4 games,
In an effort to make the game accessible to new players again.
It only felt like a step backwards to James because he was an elder player who grew up with the series,
And enjoyed just how expansive and intriguing the game could be
With all of the complexity that had been layered on top of it over the years.
For the franchises of the future, I think this is one of the key questions.
How do you balance expanding and adding new things to your game,
Compared to refining the game's core, and making your game accessible to a new audience?
Especially now, when games are on an annual build cycle,
Where even when you have two alternating teams working on their own iterations simultaneously,
The developers have at most 2 years to finish these major release games
Where they might have had 3 and a half years in the past.
And the demand for new features from your existing audience is so high,
The temptation to free up development time by just accreting new things
And leaving old systems, or levels, or mechanics to exist without purpose?
That temptation is very high, and that may not always be the wrong choice.
It's not the game design James learned when he entered the industry,
But games move fast-- a lot has changed since then.
The pressures of yearly releases,
The pressures of having to put forth a five-year plan for your game before it's even built,
The constant demand for content and the increasing price of development,
May push us in that direction.
It's my hope that we can look at this "scorched Earth" design approach,
And think of it as another tool in our designer's toolbelt.
Something that can be used in a way that's awesome,
That can be used to create massive amounts of new content rapidly,
So our audience never gets bored, never runs out of things to do.
But at the same time, I also hope that we realize the inherent dangers of this approach,
And that we don't just use it to meet deadlines.
Time will tell.
See you next week!
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