Things I'd like NOT to see in Deadhaus

[Golden Xan]

Hey everyone,

When we talk about other games, we usually point out things they've done right, experiences that we enjoyed and that we'd like to see replicated or expanded upon. But there is another facet to that, which are the things we did not like in games. I'll take this opportunity to mention aspects I did not enjoy in other games, things that I'd rather DHS avoid, if possible.

These all are, of course, just my opinion. And some may be obvious and you may have all the intention in the world of doing differently, but I want to mention them anyway, just to make sure.

Assuming the character's opinion

It often happens in story-driven games where the players control the character's dialogue that, sometimes, characters will assume positions that the player does not agree with. Even if the player has some agency to choose a response on a given situation, it can happen that the character uses an argument or emotional tone that is incompatible with what the player wants.​

In Deadhaus, I'd like to be able to clearly know what sort of tone and content of a choice entails, and I'd especially rather not have my character take stances without my permission.​

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Immersion-breaking content

It is common to see MMOs add more and more silliness as time goes by and they become more famous, attract more players, and gain more money. People want to express different kinds of feelings and moods, and they like to be able to show off those things with... alternate content, such as rainbow emotes, glittering effects, fluffy mascots, cutesy things and so on. I'd rather see only somberness and horror in Deadhaus than find someone riding a colored creature for gigs.​

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Subscriptions

That is certainly not the case with everyone, but I dislike subscriptions. Even if I commonly use something regularly, even daily, I don't like subscribing to things, and I especially dislike those subscriptions in games when they are related to making some unbearable game mechanic more bearable. Subscriptions are like committing a part of your life to something, something that you may not even be using, needing, or wanting. It is an investment of money, personal energy, focus, and maybe more. And you may even forget about it, or be unable to benefit from you, and it will still be leeching you without your knowing. Everything in a game should be designed to be fun, through and through. Fun things make money, there is no need to force it.​

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Catering to inexperienced players because they cry loudly

Obviously, you guys like feedback. All kinds of people have feedback, even the ones who haven't played the game (after its release). The thing is, sometimes people have the same group thinking only because others seem to think the same, or because they themselves don't understand major concepts. When people get together to scream about something, that does not make them necessarily right. Being scared of a small population of needlessly angry people and giving them what they want have damaged some games beyond what they could afford.​

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Not catering to experienced players who are telling you the main issues with the game

Much in the same regard, when developers don't listen to their core audience with their major concerns, well-founded ones, games slowly start to lose the players they have conquered and eventually die out. How you're going to filter what is what is a whole other story, but this is something I've also seen happening in other games, and it is saddening.​

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Balancing things according to personal preference

When playing asymmetric games, it is only natural that some people prefer certain facets of this asymmetry. When the devs like a specific faction or group and they balance the game according to their own personal experience, things can get ugly. This is something that also feels like a slap in the face of whoever likes to play more with the non-favorite classes and factions. It cannot happen.​

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Stories that never end

Some games, movies, books, etc. keep expanding their story in order to keep milking franchises. This is a mistake, and it breaks the legacy that would otherwise be forged. Good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. What is the exception? When they end and start over another story, a meaningful one that has a reason to exist. This is one reason why I liked the Ages concept. The story can begin, develop, and then end in a good conclusion, until the next Age comes in.​

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Time and energy gates

This is something we already talked about in the Community Roundtable. Time and energy constraints to try and get people to keep coming back to the game, mobile style, are sickening to the experience of the gamer. And I believe it does not do very good to the developers' soul either. ​

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Depending too much on other people on COOP

Naturally, when you play coop you want all players to be necessary and meaningful, but it is not cool to try and find new players to play with and depend on them to execute certain actions or strategies in certain ways in order to continue, because then you can find people who do not play nice and who may want to try and prevent your game from progressing... Unless there are mechanisms to prevent that from happening, or mechanisms that allow you to quit the coop experience without wasting your time (denying the gains, for instance), that would happen, and it's not a good thing to anyone involved.​

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Being forced into a situation that changes your play style

Lots of games have that kind of situation. A mission where you are taken hostage, put on a situation you've never been before, having to fight with whatever it is you can find instead of your regular equipment. While that can be interesting from a challenge or story perspective, it is often done wrongly or done at very inconvenient times when you do not want to have that kind of experience. So, if there is such a thing, it needs to be done carefully and tastefully.​

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"Simulated" combat

It is my understanding that Deadhaus wants to be a realistic action game, given fantasy. What we see in MMOs or many other kinds of games is that combat is simulated, animation-wise, to make pretend that the characters are fighting each other. In WoW, that would be your 2 meter character waving his weapon in the air, fighting against a 80 meter opponent who could stomp him without thinking twice, pretending to get hit in the chest, inclining backwards on the "impact". In Dragon's Dogma, that would be a rogue furiously slashing his daggers repeatedly at a monsters leg, the monster's leg is bizarrely vibrating as if it were under heavy damage... and effectively, there is literally nothing happening, it is all numerical. On Wolverine, you can see your character breaking apart in pieces as you get shot. In Batman, the Arkham series, you feel the weight of your attacks (and that of your enemies). This needs to be conveyed, you can't just make pretend.​

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Ineffective contextual actions

When you have buttons that are related to many different actions you can take depending on the circumstance, there needs to be simple ways the players can choose what to do without effort. Mass Effect 3 had that issue in the multiplayer especially, where the Space bar was used to activate objects, take cover, vault, jump, sprint and revive teammates. They've done it so everything could fit on a controller. They've also made people crazy by never addressing the fact that players would often end up having negative experiences because the game would not allow them to do the action they needed and wanted.​

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Needlessly long events, mechanisms or processes

We are at an age where people don't always have time, and the little time they do have they want to spend in immediate action. While there is surely value in contemplative experiences, such as slowly walking through a beautiful environment, people need to be given the option to not do that and get straight to what they want if they have to.​

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Bazillion skills that have no way of being used

In World of Warcraft, in the earlier days at least, you'd keep growing your character and fill a whole bar with icons, each respective to an item, skill, profession or command. You'd go from 1 to = on your keyboard. Then you'd get another bar where you could use Shift+1 to =. Then Alt. Then Ctrl. Then Ctrl and Alt. And even then you'd have extra bars cluttering the screen with things you likely would never even remember to use. I think Deadhaus is going to be very far from that, but I do wanted to point out that having options is good, it's always nice to be able to customize characters the way you want to, but it's not good when options turn out to be simply more ways to do the same things and require you to make mental notes about everything in order to just play a game.​

Not rewarding skill when balancing

If some people who are very skilled get to play with a class a certain way and it is making other people suffer, somewhat, when fighting against them, you have to make sure that if you nerf a class, you only do it to the extent that it actually needs to be nerfed (out of an actual imbalance). It is common for people to say that something is overpowered when they don't know how to fight against it or they don't know how to use their own tools. It is unfair to weaken classes and mechanics because some people have mastered them right. People who take the time to get skilled with a certain play style should not be punished for making good use of what they have available, unless this is somehow breaking the game's logic.​

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Amorphous enemies for no particular reason

This is something that Iain can probably talk more about. I don't believe everyone agrees with that, but I think Warframe is a game that serves as a good example to the point I'm trying to get across. In Warframe, you have enemies that look like a bizarre mixture of synthetic and organic, deformed and pieced together like Frankenstein's monster, but with pieces from a variety of animals. Even the main characters, the chassis or suits you use, all have weird semi-organic forms with pointy ends that make them look like Kaiju. It is said there is a reason why everything looks the way it does, and you could argue that that game has done so to have its own aesthetics. What I get when I watch the game, or try to play it, is that the developers were trying to come up with something different, something maybe unique, and ended up using their first attempt at an abstract painting. It is sometimes best to make things, monsters or whatever, similar to versions which already exist, or inspired on pre-existing concepts, than to try to innovate so much that you can't innovate at all and create something that is more senseless than anything. Perhaps this is a consideration for some of the more wild Houses out there.​

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Repetitive minigames that you are forced to go through if you want to get everything the game has to offer

In my Puzzle Types post, I mentioned minigames. Minigames can be fun, when they are not done to the extreme. Elder Scroll's lockpicking or Fallout 3 and New Vegas hacking puzzle minigames are such examples. They are fun, and I often go straight to a locked container or computer to do them, but they get stale after going by them hundreds. Which is why there are mechanisms that allow you to circumvent those minigames after they become repetitive. A tool that helps you get through them more easily, a skill that you get to develop to the point it becomes superfluous, or even a way to skip them entirely. ​

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Fetch & errand quests

Missions where you talk to one guy for the first time and he wants you to go the jungle and kill 10 bears to bring him back their teeth. Then he asks you to bring the teeth to someone else. You talk to that someone else and they tell you to get them 15 feathers of the ducks at the lake of duckers. You get the feathers and he sends you to someone else. That other person sends you to the other side of the world to pick some rock and then back. They may have a reason to want those things, but you should not have anything to do with that. Fetch quests have lost their impactful presence as people began to get more creative in their quest design, but it is something still present to this day. You want to quests interesting? Make fetch quests that always have a caveat to them. Kill the 10 bears, but turns out they were transformed people. Go get the duck's feather, but find out that the ducks were protected by a sea monster. And sometimes, don't have any caveat, have a mission be something simple, to keep it varied. Better yet, make all quests be unique and meaningful, or just so much fun that you could do them over and over again hundreds of times.​

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Nothing to do with your accumulated resources

In various games, you need resources, such as money, to be able to get better equipment and expand your capabilities. As such, getting resources is something you'll have to focus on doing at some point. But there usually comes a time when you have done so much in the game that you have billions of every resource you may need and you suddenly could buy the entire game's world if you wanted to. There needs to be a late-game money or resource sink in those cases. Something that is perhaps expensive, but that you can do to further improve your characters when there is nothing else to spend those resources on. If the resources are too scarce, it will make acquiring them a pain throughout the game, as farming is generally not a fun process. If they are too many and you can easily gain everything you need, it soon becomes superfluous.​

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Unrealistic movements and momentum

There was a time in which this was considered too complex to handle. Today, it is not. When characters in older games went left to right really fast, they would twitch like a dizzy cockroach in place, making absurd movements that have no semblance to reality or even sense of momentum. Many games have countered that with minor adjustments of acceleration and deceleration. It is important to have at least some degree of concern with this, lest your character feels artificial in the world.​

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Body blocking

Naturally, I understand that having characters passing through one another is not the best thing for immersion, but it is even worse when you have people sitting at a doorway preventing others from getting past them. Or when they are a large character and they stand on top of a smaller one, preventing others from interacting with the smaller one. If there is any way of doing that, some people will do it, and it will be a bad experience to all other players. There needs to be mechanisms to circumvent that.​

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Gratuitous violence

I realize this is a horror game, and I like gore, destruction and violence in most games, but there is often a purpose to that violence. In DooM, you have violence because it is a deep relationship that your character has with the demons. In Evil Within, you have violence because that contributes to the sense of despair. In GTA, you have violence to show how people are desensitized to actual violence. But some games have violence just because, or to an extreme that feels like they are trying to appeal to something that has little to do with experience. There are different forms of violence, and having guts everywhere because they look cool is not one of them.​

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Difficulty levels that decrease your own capabilities

Normally, difficulty levels make things harder not by making the enemies more resourceful or smart per se, but actually making the player weaker, increasing the quantity of enemies or making the enemies generally stronger. This is an artificial way of increasing difficulty. Difficulty levels should either add more enemy types, add mechanics that make acting more difficult, or make enemies more competent, by reacting better, using better strategies, coordinating, etc., not by having X% more health and damage.​

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Simulated damage output

The best example I have of this is any Call of Duty game. In CoD, enemies don't have to take aim and shoot at you accurately to hit you. All they do is calculate whether or not the player is within their sight, and if so, if they are aware of the player. If they are aware and the player is within sight and range, they "roll a die" to determine whether or not the shots will hit the player. The way this is calculated is so inadequate that you can often see the bullets flying from the tip of their guns in your direction even when the weapons are not aiming to you. When that happens, you could almost imagine that the world is a textureless environment and the enemies are floating balls that somewhat randomly determine whether they are hurting you or not in a given moment. All immersion is gone by realizing how botty everything is. The same can be said of For Honor, where bots have pre-programmed defensive capabilities, instead of reactions, and as such they will always be able to defend against certain strikes even if they are not technically meant to do that. This is a poor way of handling enemies. AIs need to be as close to real opponents as possible.​

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Not trying to help a minority facing technical difficulties

Whether the issues are due to incompatibilities, poor programming, or anything else related to the development of your game, no game developer should ever neglect the issues of players who play their game and who ask for help. I have ceased supporting and buying games from various companies due to their outright neglect when it comes to players facing issues, even if they are uncommon and only happening to a minority. Trying to blame the player for the issues they are facing is a practice that has become more and more common these days and it ruins the developer's (and publishers') reputation, as well as making the players experience worse.​

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EDIT:
Excessive randomness

I have mentioned this before. There are games that use randomness to try and prolong your quest to achieve items of the highest rarity and quality. Randomness can be used to good effect in a properly made procedural generation, but randomness should not be used when it involves rewarding the players, or when determining damage. To some extent, in order to simulate real-life circumstances, you can use it, but the danger lies in pushing it farther and farther from actual chance and making it a die roll. Computers don't know how to roll die, don't know how to calculate randomness. 90% chance of something happening may not be enough for it to ever happen in a game, yet it would naturally happen in the real world.​

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Over time I may add more things in further posts, but I believe these are some of the main aspects that make me not want to play certain games the most. I don't have a reason to believe DHS would do any this, I just wanted to mention them as things that you may try to stay away from, according to your own convictions of course.

I hope this is of good use.

 

[Livin]

Getting rid of things that people like because they are seen as a glitch.

The most recent example being the one in Anthem that caused the loot drops to be more generous. The instance I'll always remember was in Nosgoth where they removed the ability to cancel a Tyrant's jump if you managed to land them on a ledge before arking and coming down. It allowed it to have a dual function as a travel ability and rewarded us when we pulled it off with the ability to immediately do the jump again.

 

[Varik Keldun]

Kill / Gather missions that force you to grind A LOT
some examples being....

Classic WoW - had a quest in a Yeti cave in alterac mountains... you had to kill yetis in a cave till the item dropped... problem was.... it was like a 0.001% chance to drop so you spent the next 5 hours while you tried to chase them down with everyone else trying to do the same (not that we will have the issue of MMO and 40 people trying to attack the same enemies in DHS)

Borderlands 1 -MOXI's arena... i could never finish the Longest challenge...never had the time to complete it. not to mention it got soooo damn repetitive it just got boring after the 30th time hearing "THE GUN WAVE!!"
Borderlands 1 - also had a couple super grindy quest like the yeti cave from Classic WoW -the brains quest chain on the island of Dr. Zed where it would be collect 10 /50 / 100 / 500 / 1000... but then when you were 25 / 10 it took all 25 and had to start at 0 / 50 (yeah that sucked i think the 1st time i did it i gathered like 160 before the 1st turn in) and the claptrap mission where you got to gather the random items.... i think at the end of all that DLC i had only received like 2 drops total...

 

[derula]

Needlessly long events, mechanisms or processes
We are at an age where people don't always have time, and the little time they do have they want to spend in immediate action. While there is surely value in contemplative experiences, such as slowly walking through a beautiful environment, people need to be given the option to not do that and get straight to what they want if they have to.

I made a point during the stream regarding slowly moving NPCs you had to follow, but I think it deserves reiterating.

Yakuza 0 had a very agreeable "follow the NPC" mechanic IMHO. Of course, it's not an MMO, so it might not be usable in that case, but I think it's worth pointing out how it worked.

Yakuza 0 had escort missions, and they actually weren't horrible, but this isn't about that. It's more shorter scenes where you'd walk with an NPC from point A to point B, and it was a vehicle for story exposition. You wouldn't know where the NPC would go (unless you already played the game before). Here's how it worked:

1. You could go at your own pace. The NPC would run if you do or walk if you do. He would comment if you're too fast or too slow, but only wait if you're behind. He'd also react if you bumped into him.
2. There was also a button you could hold down to follow the NPC "like normal", at the same speed and dodging obstacles like you would when walking with someone. You would do this if you wanted to hear his dialog without trying to keep the same speed and not bump into him.
3. If you knew where he's going, you can just run there and won't have to listen to him. So speedrunners don't have to slug along and wait for the NPC.

I thought that was a pretty clever solution. Of course, these scenes (usually?) had no combat, so I'm not sure if that applies to situations where there can be combat.

 

[derula]

Excessive randomness
I have mentioned this before. There are games that use randomness to try and prolong your quest to achieve items of the highest rarity and quality. Randomness can be used to good effect in a properly made procedural generation, but randomness should not be used when it involves rewarding the players, or when determining damage. To some extent, in order to simulate real-life circumstances, you can use it, but the danger lies in pushing it farther and farther from actual chance and making it a die roll. Computers don't know how to roll die, don't know how to calculate randomness. 90% chance of something happening may not be enough for it to ever happen in a game, yet it would naturally happen in the real world.

I've worked for a free-to-play publisher, and the most important thing I've learned is that people don't understand real randomness. If you open 10 treasure chests with 90% for a drop each, you expect there to be 9 drops. But that's not how randomness works. If it's true randomness, you can also get anything between 0 and 10 drops.

1. If you get 10 drops, you'll consider yourself lucky and be happy.
2. If you get 0 drops (or anything less than 9 drops), you'll feel cheated and claim that the developer was lying and faking the randomness.

This isn't because players are entitled or stupid, but it's just that our brains are very very bad at understanding true randomness. I can very much feel with the player who spent a lot of premium currency for a crafting thing with 95% probability to succeed, and failed... three times in a row.

An interesting solution to this is to "carry leftover probability". This needs to be considered carefully, but basically, after a failed random event, you can make the next instance of the same type of event slightly more likely than advertised. And whenever you win the roll, your chance gets reset to the advertised value.

If done right, this doesn't change the overall probability of the event, but it reduces the variance. You don't have to do a million rolls to likely get close to the stated probability, but you can observe even with a low number of rolls that the probability makes sense.

Careful: this doesn't mean that after a failed 90% event, the next one must necessarily succeed. Doung it this way would allow people to abuse the system. It must still be uncertain, but "become more likely" as more rolls fail (perceivedly against the probability). This is how the human brain naturally assumes randomness must work, but true randomness doesn't satisfy that constraint.

 

[idprism]

I made a point during the stream regarding slowly moving NPCs you had to follow, but I think it deserves reiterating.

Yakuza 0 had a very agreeable "follow the NPC" mechanic IMHO. Of course, it's not an MMO, so it might not be usable in that case, but I think it's worth pointing out how it worked.

Yakuza 0 had escort missions, and they actually weren't horrible, but this isn't about that. It's more shorter scenes where you'd walk with an NPC from point A to point B, and it was a vehicle for story exposition. You wouldn't know where the NPC would go (unless you already played the game before). Here's how it worked:

1. You could go at your own pace. The NPC would run if you do or walk if you do. He would comment if you're too fast or too slow, but only wait if you're behind. He'd also react if you bumped into him.
2. There was also a button you could hold down to follow the NPC "like normal", at the same speed and dodging obstacles like you would when walking with someone. You would do this if you wanted to hear his dialog without trying to keep the same speed and not bump into him.
3. If you knew where he's going, you can just run there and won't have to listen to him. So speedrunners don't have to slug along and wait for the NPC.

I thought that was a pretty clever solution. Of course, these scenes (usually?) had no combat, so I'm not sure if that applies to situations where there can be combat.

Elder Scrolls Online seems to do some kind of fancy zoning where the character is simultaneously in each location they need to be. It wont matter even if you can teleport to the destination, they will always be there once you are at the correct step in the quest line.

Star Trek online (or whatever it was called) also had the running mechanic. The quest NPC acted more like a party member IIRC, pathing with you, generally, and activating event scripts when you reach the requisite area.

Both pretty enjoyable ways of doing things, and depending on immersion requirements, are perfectly fine.

 

[Elveone]

One thing I would hate the see in the game is the MMO trinity system of Tank-DPS-Healer. Balancing the game for that kind of role-based system actually decreases the build variety in the game and diminishes the player's choice when building their character.

P.S. And one other thing I would actually not like to see - something that might seem quite counter-intuitive - I don't want to see the developers listen to the community too much. I've been part of several early game development processes where the community shaped the game according to what is familiar to them and what is popular at the moment and the games ended up far worse for it - being stripped of everything that made them original. I don't want to see the developers compromising their vision because the community didn't like the first rough iteration of an idea. If something does not work - try to make it work by iterating over it instead of just scrapping it.

 

[Denis Dyack]

Assuming the character's opinion
It often happens in story-driven games where the players control the character's dialogue that, sometimes, characters will assume positions that the player does not agree with. Even if the player has some agency to choose a response on a given situation, it can happen that the character uses an argument or emotional tone that is incompatible with what the player wants.In Deadhaus, I'd like to be able to clearly know what sort of tone and content of a choice entails, and I'd especially rather not have my character take stances without my permission.

Yes, we will always avoid this, if we make a mistake in this area let us know and we will fix it. Your game, your choice, your experience.

Immersion-breaking content
It is common to see MMOs add more and more silliness as time goes by and they become more famous, attract more players, and gain more money. People want to express different kinds of feelings and moods, and they like to be able to show off those things with... alternate content, such as rainbow emotes, glittering effects, fluffy mascots, cutesy things and so on. I'd rather see only somberness and horror in Deadhaus than find someone riding a colored creature for gigs.

Yes, we will work to avoid unicorn mounts and keep everything consistent within the universe.

Subscriptions
That is certainly not the case with everyone, but I dislike subscriptions. Even if I commonly use something regularly, even daily, I don't like subscribing to things, and I especially dislike those subscriptions in games when they are related to making some unbearable game mechanic more bearable. Subscriptions are like committing a part of your life to something, something that you may not even be using, needing, or wanting. It is an investment of money, personal energy, focus, and maybe more. And you may even forget about it, or be unable to benefit from you, and it will still be leeching you without your knowing. Everything in a game should be designed to be fun, through and through. Fun things make money, there is no need to force it.

Never.

Not catering to experienced players who are telling you the main issues with the game
Much in the same regard, when developers don't listen to their core audience with their major concerns, well-founded ones, games slowly start to lose the players they have conquered and eventually die out. How you're going to filter what is what is a whole other story, but this is something I've also seen happening in other games, and it is saddening.

We will do the best we can in this area.

Balancing things according to personal preference
When playing asymmetric games, it is only natural that some people prefer certain facets of this asymmetry. When the devs like a specific faction or group and they balance the game according to their own personal experience, things can get ugly. This is something that also feels like a slap in the face of whoever likes to play more with the non-favorite classes and factions. It cannot happen.

This is difficult because it can be affected by subconscious bias, we will do our best and look to the community for help in this area.

Stories that never end
Some games, movies, books, etc. keep expanding their story in order to keep milking franchises. This is a mistake, and it breaks the legacy that would otherwise be forged. Good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. What is the exception? When they end and start over another story, a meaningful one that has a reason to exist. This is one reason why I liked the Ages concept. The story can begin, develop, and then end in a good conclusion, until the next Age comes in.

Stories will end, characters will die (or be destroyed permanently) never to return regardless of how popular, and hopefully meaningful catharsis will be had.

Time and energy gates
This is something we already talked about in the Community Roundtable. Time and energy constraints to try and get people to keep coming back to the game, mobile style, are sickening to the experience of the gamer. And I believe it does not do very good to the developers' soul either.

We will try to avoid being unethical at all times, and not sure I know all the context I need here, but anything exploitive will always be avoided.

Depending too much on other people on COOP
Naturally, when you play coop you want all players to be necessary and meaningful, but it is not cool to try and find new players to play with and depend on them to execute certain actions or strategies in certain ways in order to continue, because then you can find people who do not play nice and who may want to try and prevent your game from progressing... Unless there are mechanisms to prevent that from happening, or mechanisms that allow you to quit the coop experience without wasting your time (denying the gains, for instance), that would happen, and it's not a good thing to anyone involved.

No co-op will ever be required.

Being forced into a situation that changes your play style
Lots of games have that kind of situation. A mission where you are taken hostage, put on a situation you've never been before, having to fight with whatever it is you can find instead of your regular equipment. While that can be interesting from a challenge or story perspective, it is often done wrongly or done at very inconvenient times when you do not want to have that kind of experience. So, if there is such a thing, it needs to be done carefully and tastefully.

Good designed allow for multiple solutions and playstyles. We will strive to do our best in this area.

Ineffective contextual actions
When you have buttons that are related to many different actions you can take depending on the circumstance, there needs to be simple ways the players can choose what to do without effort. Mass Effect 3 had that issue in the multiplayer especially, where the Space bar was used to activate objects, take cover, vault, jump, sprint and revive teammates. They've done it so everything could fit on a controller. They've also made people crazy by never addressing the fact that players would often end up having negative experiences because the game would not allow them to do the action they needed and wanted.

We will be very different than Mass Effect 3 but we will strive to avoid this type of design.

Needlessly long events, mechanisms or processes
We are at an age where people don't always have time, and the little time they do have they want to spend in immediate action. While there is surely value in contemplative experiences, such as slowly walking through a beautiful environment, people need to be given the option to not do that and get straight to what they want if they have to.

With our procedural generation, we intend to allow players to choose how much time they wish to play for each session.

Bazillion skills that have no way of being used
In World of Warcraft, in the earlier days at least, you'd keep growing your character and fill a whole bar with icons, each respective to an item, skill, profession or command. You'd go from 1 to = on your keyboard. Then you'd get another bar where you could use Shift+1 to =. Then Alt. Then Ctrl. Then Ctrl and Alt. And even then you'd have extra bars cluttering the screen with things you likely would never even remember to use. I think Deadhaus is going to be very far from that, but I do wanted to point out that having options is good, it's always nice to be able to customize characters the way you want to, but it's not good when options turn out to be simply more ways to do the same things and require you to make mental notes about everything in order to just play a game.

The design mantra is for each skill to have a specific gameplay effect and we will want to limit the number of skill available to the player to use via class balance.

Not rewarding skill when balancing
If some people who are very skilled get to play with a class a certain way and it is making other people suffer, somewhat, when fighting against them, you have to make sure that if you nerf a class, you only do it to the extent that it actually needs to be nerfed (out of an actual imbalance). It is common for people to say that something is overpowered when they don't know how to fight against it or they don't know how to use their own tools. It is unfair to weaken classes and mechanics because some people have mastered them right. People who take the time to get skilled with a certain play style should not be punished for making good use of what they have available, unless this is somehow breaking the game's logic.

A tough balancing issue but we will strive to always be on top of this.

Amorphous enemies for no particular reason
This is something that Iain can probably talk more about. I don't believe everyone agrees with that, but I think Warframe is a game that serves as a good example to the point I'm trying to get across. In Warframe, you have enemies that look like a bizarre mixture of synthetic and organic, deformed and pieced together like Frankenstein's monster, but with pieces from a variety of animals. Even the main characters, the chassis or suits you use, all have weird semi-organic forms with pointy ends that make them look like Kaiju. It is said there is a reason why everything looks the way it does, and you could argue that that game has done so to have its own aesthetics. What I get when I watch the game, or try to play it, is that the developers were trying to come up with something different, something maybe unique, and ended up using their first attempt at an abstract painting. It is sometimes best to make things, monsters or whatever, similar to versions which already exist, or inspired on pre-existing concepts, than to try to innovate so much that you can't innovate at all and create something that is more senseless than anything. Perhaps this is a consideration for some of the more wild Houses out there.

Each house will have its own style but have a consistent dark fantasy look for the entire game. The art style is in many cases personal taste but I can confidently say we will be less abstract then Warframe in this regard.

Repetitive minigames that you are forced to go through if you want to get everything the game has to offer
In my Puzzle Types post, I mentioned minigames. Minigames can be fun, when they are not done to the extreme. Elder Scroll's lockpicking or Fallout 3 and New Vegas hacking puzzle minigames are such examples. They are fun, and I often go straight to a locked container or computer to do them, but they get stale after going by them hundreds. Which is why there are mechanisms that allow you to circumvent those minigames after they become repetitive. A tool that helps you get through them more easily, a skill that you get to develop to the point it becomes superfluous, or even a way to skip them entirely.

Noted

Fetch & errand quests
Missions where you talk to one guy for the first time and he wants you to go the jungle and kill 10 bears to bring him back their teeth. Then he asks you to bring the teeth to someone else. You talk to that someone else and they tell you to get them 15 feathers of the ducks at the lake of duckers. You get the feathers and he sends you to someone else. That other person sends you to the other side of the world to pick some rock and then back. They may have a reason to want those things, but you should not have anything to do with that. Fetch quests have lost their impactful presence as people began to get more creative in their quest design, but it is something still present to this day. You want to quests interesting? Make fetch quests that always have a caveat to them. Kill the 10 bears, but turns out they were transformed people. Go get the duck's feather, but find out that the ducks were protected by a sea monster. And sometimes, don't have any caveat, have a mission be something simple, to keep it varied. Better yet, make all quests be unique and meaningful, or just so much fun that you could do them over and over again hundreds of times.

Yes, these are the worst. We will move towards narrative to avoid anything like this.

Nothing to do with your accumulated resources
In various games, you need resources, such as money, to be able to get better equipment and expand your capabilities. As such, getting resources is something you'll have to focus on doing at some point. But there usually comes a time when you have done so much in the game that you have billions of every resource you may need and you suddenly could buy the entire game's world if you wanted to. There needs to be a late-game money or resource sink in those cases. Something that is perhaps expensive, but that you can do to further improve your characters when there is nothing else to spend those resources on. If the resources are too scarce, it will make acquiring them a pain throughout the game, as farming is generally not a fun process. If they are too many and you can easily gain everything you need, it soon becomes superfluous.

We will always try to balance the economy so that you have things to spend your resources on.

Unrealistic movements and momentum
There was a time in which this was considered too complex to handle. Today, it is not. When characters in older games went left to right really fast, they would twitch like a dizzy cockroach in place, making absurd movements that have no semblance to reality or even sense of momentum. Many games have countered that with minor adjustments of acceleration and deceleration. It is important to have at least some degree of concern with this, lest your character feels artificial in the world.

Agreed, thanks. Please be aware that the natural state of some of the classes is supernatural and allows for very interesting things.

Body blocking
Naturally, I understand that having characters passing through one another is not the best thing for immersion, but it is even worse when you have people sitting at a doorway preventing others from getting past them. Or when they are a large character and they stand on top of a smaller one, preventing others from interacting with the smaller one. If there is any way of doing that, some people will do it, and it will be a bad experience to all other players. There needs to be mechanisms to circumvent that.

Noted!

Gratuitous violence
I realize this is a horror game, and I like gore, destruction and violence in most games, but there is often a purpose to that violence. In DooM, you have violence because it is a deep relationship that your character has with the demons. In Evil Within, you have violence because that contributes to the sense of despair. In GTA, you have violence to show how people are desensitized to actual violence. But some games have violence just because, or to an extreme that feels like they are trying to appeal to something that has little to do with experience. There are different forms of violence, and having guts everywhere because they look cool is not one of them.

Well, to be precise, I think we are Dark Fantasy with horror elements. That being said, we will stay consistent with my past games and the maturity of this game will be more because of the narrative like Eternal Darkness or Kain, rather than explicit gore.

Difficulty levels that decrease your own capabilities
Normally, difficulty levels make things harder not by making the enemies more resourceful or smart per se, but actually making the player weaker, increasing the quantity of enemies or making the enemies generally stronger. This is an artificial way of increasing difficulty. Difficulty levels should either add more enemy types, add mechanics that make acting more difficult, or make enemies more competent, by reacting better, using better strategies, coordinating, etc., not by having X% more health

Agreed.

Simulated damage output
The best example I have of this is any Call of Duty game. In CoD, enemies don't have to take aim and shoot at you accurately to hit you. All they do is calculate whether or not the player is within their sight, and if so, if they are aware of the player. If they are aware and the player is within sight and range, they "roll a die" to determine whether or not the shots will hit the player. The way this is calculated is so inadequate that you can often see the bullets flying from the tip of their guns in your direction even when the weapons are not aiming to you. When that happens, you could almost imagine that the world is a textureless environment and the enemies are floating balls that somewhat randomly determine whether they are hurting you or not in a given moment. All immersion is gone by realizing how botty everything is. The same can be said of For Honor, where bots have pre-programmed defensive capabilities, instead of reactions, and as such they will always be able to defend against certain strikes even if they are not technically meant to do that. This is a poor way of handling enemies. AIs need to be as close to real opponents as possible.

Agreed, these are likely optimizations so the game runs are decent speed. We will avoid these things.

Not trying to help a minority facing technical difficulties
Whether the issues are due to incompatibilities, poor programming, or anything else related to the development of your game, no game developer should ever neglect the issues of players who play their game and who ask for help. I have ceased supporting and buying games from various companies due to their outright neglect when it comes to players facing issues, even if they are uncommon and only happening to a minority. Trying to blame the player for the issues they are facing is a practice that has become more and more common these days and it ruins the developer's (and publishers') reputation, as well as making the players experience worse.

We work for gamers, like yourself and others here. We will never stop trying to solve a problem for gamers or improve the experience for gamers at any turn.

Excessive randomness
I have mentioned this before. There are games that use randomness to try and prolong your quest to achieve items of the highest rarity and quality. Randomness can be used to good effect in a properly made procedural generation, but randomness should not be used when it involves rewarding the players, or when determining damage. To some extent, in order to simulate real-life circumstances, you can use it, but the danger lies in pushing it farther and farther from actual chance and making it a die roll. Computers don't know how to roll die, don't know how to calculate randomness. 90% chance of something happening may not be enough for it to ever happen in a game, yet it would naturally happen in the real world.

​

Yes, we do not plan on doing this, if we mess up, let us know and we will fix it .

Getting rid of things that people like because they are seen as a glitch.

Yes, unless it is game-breaking, things like this can be fun - thinking all the way back to rocket jumping in quake.

It's great to know that solo play will be a viable option! But it's more the ephemeral nature of the Cloud itself that bothers me. I won't likely be able to hook up an ancient console 30 years from now and get stuck into a game of Deadhaus the way I do Kain, LOL. Still, I can't begin to fathom how in depth this thing will become in its own time.

Living, breathing and constantly evolving with persistence. We have some interesting ideas in this area that can only be accomplished in a cloud-first approach. We will do our best in this area and think we can deliver something that is Apocalyptic (yet to be seen )

One thing I would hate the see in the game is the MMO trinity system of Tank-DPS-Healer. Balancing the game for that kind of role-based system actually decreases the build variety in the game and diminishes the player's choice when building their character.

Yes, we do not plan to have a dedicated healer class and are not pursuing this direction. All classes can heal and all thus also always play the game solo.

P.S. And one other thing I would actually not like to see - something that might seem quite counter-intuitive - I don't want to see the developers listen to the community too much. I've been part of several early game development processes where the community shaped the game according to what is familiar to them and what is popular at the moment and the games ended up far worse for it - being stripped of everything that made them original. I don't want to see the developers compromising their vision because the community didn't like the first rough iteration of an idea. If something does not work - try to make it work by iterating over it instead of just scrapping it.

Understood, we are always working hard to get feedback and trying to balance what the information means understanding we are the developer and will always have a different experience and view from our community playing Deadhaus Sonata who we work for.

Wow, that was a lot but a worthy cause to take on. I hope these answers help!

 

[Varik Keldun]

@Denis Dyack Thank you for taking the time to answer all thse questions!

 

[Denis Dyack]

@Denis Dyack Thank you for taking the time to answer all thse questions!

My pleasure - least I could do. Thanks for all the support, it is great to get this type of feedback.

 

[DukeVaeVictis]

Love all the answered you provided Denis!

 

[Denis Dyack]

Love all the answered you provided Denis!

Thank you - these are excellent questions that generally plague games I have played in the past and would hate to have them trouble ours. When I first read these, they seemed more than random questions but more specifically ask, "what are Apocalypse principles?" and so I felt compelled to answer them in an attempt to communicate our principles to the community. Our guiding principles are to be ethical and transparent, remember who we work for (you), and understand the community will help us make a better game. As we move forward, we will always strive to keep these fundamentals while at the same time provide entertainment space where gamers can become immersed and escape. I expect us to make mistakes and but we will always strive for these ideals to make the proper corrections regardless of how successful the game becomes.

 

[Roband]

Hey everyone,

When we talk about other games, we usually point out things they've done right, experiences that we enjoyed and that we'd like to see replicated or expanded upon. But there is another facet to that, which are the things we did not like in games. I'll take this opportunity to mention aspects I did not enjoy in other games, things that I'd rather DHS avoid, if possible.

These all are, of course, just my opinion. And some may be obvious and you may have all the intention in the world of doing differently, but I want to mention them anyway, just to make sure.

Assuming the character's opinion

It often happens in story-driven games where the players control the character's dialogue that, sometimes, characters will assume positions that the player does not agree with. Even if the player has some agency to choose a response on a given situation, it can happen that the character uses an argument or emotional tone that is incompatible with what the player wants.​

In Deadhaus, I'd like to be able to clearly know what sort of tone and content of a choice entails, and I'd especially rather not have my character take stances without my permission.​

​

It's not strictly relevant to what you wrote (since you are talking about the character dialogues) but i asked on the forum among other things i the character somehow reacts in the game if they see or hear something that attracs their attention (a dialog, an event, arriving in a new place ecc) but i don't think they answered (i'm pretty behind with the streams so i may be wrong)
Personally i would'n mind if a character talks outside dialogs as long as they don't get in the way of the player freedom of choice (i actually think it would feel more immersive): nothing too heavy
but for example fighting using a revenant raging and full of hatred, vampire making cruel/arrogant remarks, lich sounding cold/looking to everything like guinea pigs ecc., ghouls looking at everything like food ecc. i think it would give more "color" to the various undeads and it would give somehow a different taste to the gameplay every time you swap character
If they can make this work in dialogues too even better, like in Vampire:Bloodlines for example (you could by all means play a Ventrue like a street thug but the fun thing for me was to play every clan basing my style to the clans history/motives/powers)
It has been done right in the past and i think the developers have the talent make it right too. We will see i guess, just my suggestion.

And i also hope we get a maniacal laugh "Kain syle" during combat

 

[Varik Keldun]

@Roband - the whole thing about assuming character's opinions is more based off on responses to questions that NPCs give you. there have been some games out there that will have YES / NO / ALTERNATE A / ALTERNATE B. and we will say that one of these options sounds like a "i dont want to fight option" and when you click it the player dialogue reflects something completely different than what is stated in the choice.

 

[Elveone]

I think I've seen this mostly in Mass Effect - you happen upon a situation when a group of NPCs is beating on another NPC that you need and one of the options says "Stop now!", you select it and your character blurts out "Hey, dumb mongrels, I will show you what a real beating is!" and punches the leader of the group in the face and you start a fight. You technically stopped them but nothing about the selection option suggested that kind of response from your character.

 

[radiospirit]

Lots and lots of gamespace with no content; big maps are cool but a wasteland with no detail may as well only serve to increase travel time

 

[VaeVictusAnimus]

Circumstances around large groups playing.
As amazing as this community is and expansive as the world is already shaping up to be, these styles of games some times have way too heavy a reliance on large groups playing together. Perhaps some sort of easy set up for smaller groups like maybe just 2 or 3 party members to get together and experience the world as equally as any full fledged guild, perhaps?

 

[Varik Keldun]

Circumstances around large groups playing.
As amazing as this community is and expansive as the world is already shaping up to be, these styles of games some times have way too heavy a reliance on large groups playing together. Perhaps some sort of easy set up for smaller groups like maybe just 2 or 3 party members to get together and experience the world as equally as any full fledged guild, perhaps?

Deadhaus is being designed for 1-6 players. it will not be like an MMO (WoW, Guild wars. ect) it will be more along the lines of games like Path of exile, diablo series, warframe.

 

[Roband]

@Roband - the whole thing about assuming character's opinions is more based off on responses to questions that NPCs give you. there have been some games out there that will have YES / NO / ALTERNATE A / ALTERNATE B. and we will say that one of these options sounds like a "i dont want to fight option" and when you click it the player dialogue reflects something completely different than what is stated in the choice.

Yes, i know Golden Xan was making a point more of "i chose A but character behaves not quite what you would expect", i just wanted to add a couple ideas about charctarization of the various "classes" even not related to direct dialogues with NPCs

 

[Temuldjin]

The only thing worse than " Fetch & errand quests " is escort quests, especially those where the NPC walk to fast for the normal walk speed, but walks way to slow compared to the normal run speed...