Articles | "I don't want it to be fair"
Coming off the heels of an hours-long conversation, I find myself in reflection.
AXX is effectively a soul search. It is an attempt to answer the all-important and all-founding question of, “What makes a third-person action game enjoyable to play, if anything?” Indeed, AXX seeks to answer a question for which many men better than I have told me that cannot be answered.
What is it we see when we look at industry-leading products? Dark Souls? A jank mess at the best of times, otherwise a joke not taken seriously by anyone. Fighting games? A constant struggle off loss of control mechanisms and Quick Time Events. Open world? Nothing anyone has ever regarded to be a meaningful contribution to the genre.
Or so I have been hearing until the most recent conversation with Delve, a competitive PvP player who has significant experience in organized content across many products. This is one of the players I consorted with during my brief bout with Black Desert Online, used as a centerpiece for a very similar discussion in the AXX RPR developer series.
Recent times saw us once more reunited and both, oddly enough, playing this product both of us had sworn off.
“BDO has something the other games have all failed to do, which is open world,” he explained during one of his many long-tinded monologues. “At any point, players can come and fuck with you, and suddenly everything changes.”
He shared with me a few stories. How he and several players had unspoken truces on a PvP server farming differing levels of a dungeon, only to unite against randoms that tried to contest their farm. How entire guilds would assemble in fueds against players, bringing hardware like guild ships to bombard islands that they had to then attack. The organic nature also meant, of course, not so glorious conclusions.
“Five or six players will just blow me up. It’s not fair. (…) I don’t want it to be fair.”
I made several recent recording tests of my brief foray back into this product, of whom I only had passing experience with. My PvP experience with the game was limited to two major incidents - once, when leeching from Delve in a mid-range area coined Bashims, in which he flagged to kill anyone who took any of our farm, and another time HKS and I were instantly killed by a player that didn’t even render for us before we were already dead.
Earlier in the day I watched the fights of a JP vs KR competitive 1v1 tournament. Some matches ended in timeouts - over 2 minutes in length. Some ended in under 10 seconds. There was significant skill disparities in many of the matches, with the westaboos firmly asserting dominance over the country who lost its spark when Brood War was kill.
BDO is an MMORPG with ARPG combat. Its roots are more akin to FG’s than the products we conventionally demonstrate in our discussions but I’ve nonetheless used it to extensively discuss the competitive draws of grinding and farming in social environments and how the assets and controls of BDO set the foundation for the allure to repetitive actions by offering satisfactory if not cyclical interactions. The extensive discussion omitted the PvP portion of the game - both due to my inexperience with it and also because of my extreme lack of fondness for high-latency multiplayer.
My earliest experiences with open world PvP were those in Lineage 2 and World of Warcraft, the former being slowly punching someone to death who had attacked me in a cave before they ran away and the latter being constant nonsense in Darkshire with horde harassing the area almost daily. In the latter I virtually never got to threaten the Horde who had 15+ levels on me at the best of times and never got a kill. However, occassional raids of the town and group combat was nonetheless a key point of the game to me at that point, relived at points in Stabbyman during ganks in various zones.
BDO is a game built with much of the world’s economy being out in the world where players grind it. From fishing spots to whaling locations to the various deceptively small mob grinding zones, almost anywhere outside of major towns can see a player flag and kill you. Doing so has a karma cost, but it’s neglible. Portions of the word are influenced by control points called Nodes. Nodes can be owned by guilds, whom can tax them. Nodes are fought over at scheduled periods. There are also castle sieges, though I don’t know much about these systems to really discuss them. The point is, it’s fundamentally a PvP-driven world. Even if you avoid players as best you can, ultimately the content you interact with it being governed by player actions. Resources that are harvested and sold are used to craft items, vehicles, consumables and so on that form the surprisingly widespread interlinking of the game systems to things that ultimately serve to expose players to each other in environments that stand to benefit from competitive interactions.
My two hour cursory leveling video scarcely even scratches the surface of the new player experience in the game.
This second video entails my fledgeling experiences with the Awakening weapon offered to the Sorceress at level 56. Even days after this recording was made I still struggled because the muscle memory for the movesets transitionary elements continued to confound me.
I have unprocessed recordings of silliness in this grinding spot where special events caused me unexpected grief.
While I’ve been intrinsically aware of the games PvP centric nature, a sort of a nod to the roots of the western and korean MMO concepts like those in Lineage 2, I’ve largely avoided it. These are pet projects to me, something I’ve at most used to source recordings for experiments including these two videos and other times as a casual sink during times I am especially mentally unwell such as the last two weeks.
But the discussion with Delve, which had initially begun as conversation regarding ranking and ELO systems, crossed many subjects touched upon in my videos inadvertedly. We both agreed on quite a few things.
Instanced dungeons were a disaster for multiplayer games, especially MMO’s.
Scaling like that Guild Wars 2 employed to neuter the work of leveling/gearing were also a disaster
Matchmaking/instanced pvp just amounted to Team Deathmatch; ergo, FF14, WoW and similar games weren’t any more MMO’s than Diablo 2 was.
Western MMO’s are just chat rooms you pay monthly for.
And people who treat PvE seriously and get salty over it only do so because they lack the ability to be successful in competitive environments and compensate for it by using PvE groups and guilds as a means to lord over other people and validate their worthlessness (thanks for the working examples, Slide, Kitarra!)
MMO’s weren’t really my thing, I explained, but one of the biggest reasons I wasn’t fond of them was because everything was academic and solved to the point of nausea - lockouts, timegated progression, Blizzard/ArenaNet’s infamous “drops per hour” bullshit, so on. Everything you did, and the rate at which you could do things, was curated.
Of course, BDO is no exception. But it offers far more expression and doesn’t gate your content like the other products do. In place of that you have the competitive world.
However, what really stuck to me was how Delve described his fondness for the volatility, unpredictability and general chaos of the way PvP injected interaction into his daily activities.
“We play to fight, not to win. Not many guilds do that anymore.”
Like similar stories I’ve heard in League, he recalled how top-ranking players would enter their groups and get shit on because they can’t function in team environments, wouldn’t listen to communication, so on. This was a person whom had been around the block for quite a long time. And he still had an audible sense of enjoyment and passion for coming back to a janky Korean grindfest - and it all boiled down to how other players interacted with him.
Earlier, he had made a comment about how a player started killing him during a grind. He was out of practice due to the years of inactivity and likely some changes in the game since then - and the other player was significantly better geared. However, the other player changed their gear to match his own, and they exchanged kills for some time, before shaking hands and going off their merry way.
“You’d think PvP players would be the toxic ones, but I’m surprised to learn it’s more often the PvE players that are super toxic,” he commented at one point.
I reasoned that particularly in more niche games such as BDO that class imbalance, while also something he complains about at times, is something players often live with or work around. After all, in these games you can switch characters at the flip of a dime (BDO offers a Tag option to apparently even share gear between characters) and many of these players have played long enough to have alts or swap their mains if they wanted. The aged and more solved nature of the game means that most people still competitively playing in it have probably outlasted the salt induced by random deaths, especially to “that one class”. It’s part and parcel for playing on the PvP server Delve mostly farms in, which have much more lax rulesets for the benefit of increased drop rates.
Somehow, I’m reminded of that one Spanish ARAM premade I ran into in League. I didn’t understand half the shit they typed but I got the gist most of it was shit talking of the friendly variety. In my compilation videos many such discourses between groups are exceedingly goofy - and the games unusually competitive despite their banter. Mistakes are laughed out, misplays are cause for commentary, and the unusual turnouts of the games never seemed to salt anyone.
Strike this contrast to the standard games we had where most pubbies immediately left if they died once, or fed.
One of the goals of AXX has always been to try to capture that energy. The feeling that the environment is competitive but losing isn’t “unfun”. When I settled on the Save Point system due to the input of the Drunk Swedishman, I was moving away from the solo attempt design the project initially had. But it felt like that the experience of the system may have awoken him to the reality that this system didn’t work either. The confusion in his commentary made me extremely indecisive, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to change the system or not. This, on top of many other unanswered questions, set the project into its deadlock its been in design-wise for an entire year now.
But somehow, when discussing these things with Delve, it all seems like it really shouldn’t be a hard problem to solve. But how could I possibly replicate these kinds of feelings? How can I make losing feel like it was part of something organic, and the process of coming back to try again not feeling like a chore?
Of course, the cornerstone of the interaction is the multiplayer competition. It’s not easy to view this from AXX’s perspective because there is no precedent in the history of commercial gaming for intelligent, much less dynamic, opponents. “Coming back to try again” is in itself an entirely warped concept when viewed in such a lens. The same interaction is not at all perceived the same way just due to this difference alone. The very process of “coming back” is often different and perceived differently no matter if you spawn at a safe point like you do in BDO or make a corpse run like you do in WoW. And, “trying again” has immensely different connotations when considered for PvP than it does for PvE. In PvP you strategize, seethe, so on. In PvE you consign to needing to perform a QTE better.
Perhaps, as if to sense what I might contemplate in the future, he explicitly brought up environmental effects and using them with organized team fighting in unrelated games.
“You shouldn’t need to tell these things,” he said, when I mentioned I had a developer video discussing the competitive values that humans can find in efficiency of actions, of power expression and so on, and what drew people to grinding and kept them fixated on it for such long periods of time. “I need to tell a lot of things in games, very basic things, and very often,” I belabored. AXX and my responses to discourse on these subjects has been such a prime example. In many ways I felt bewildered and frustrated by the whiplash of the Swedishman’s stance on some of these subjects. As I spoke of earlier in the April video, I think it colored my contemplations unjustly and has served to further stagnate my ability to resolve indecision on how to move forward.
Of course, some things sound utterly silly when spoken out loud. Like they are so obvious it seems absurd to hear them. Yet people still think Dark Souls is a good game, or that Miyazaki is a skilled developer. People still think Elden Ring looks any good, or that Warcraft 3 had an “art style”. These are utterly absurd things to utter, and the counterpoints should never necessitate being uttered in turn. Yet they had to be nonetheless, because the lack of action in doing so was inviting the disaster we find ourselves in today.
In a way, Delve’s words re-oriented my thoughts in such a manner.
“I don’t want it to be fair.” At first my instinct was, that’s a silly comment to make, but in that instant it all clicked at once. Fairness insinuates a structure exists to govern interaction, to force interaction - which is precisely what he would elaborate on. Forced interaction was the whole point of having an MMO was to avoid - by having a living world driven by interactions. Surely this sounds like a broken record at this point. It was as if he was reading my own script - just for a different product entirely!
Somehow, I felt something stir coming out of the conversation.
“How can I strike that selfsame feeling?”
This is a new question, and a very challenging one. But it’s one I have ideas for already. It sparks recollection of a similar conversation with one of my longtime viewers about Elden Ring, and how open world can only function if it was completely dynamic and alive, as such that things constantly changed and you didn’t experience the same thing just because you restarted or died and revived. That the only way open world could exist at all was that it was alive. I do not doubt that if presented with the idea that the world was heavily influenced via pvp, he might comment this is such a possible fork that might see it viable. Of course, From Software has always been very frightened of meaningful PvP, so the myrid opportunities offered to Souls have always been squandered. It has always been, and always will be, just a mechanism to grief, forever meaningless in the scope of the game itself and best thought of as an unrelated, adjacent product - if not a very humorous one at times.
These contemplations and considerations are no new thing to me. But they are parts that have been scattered, lost and buried by indecision and hesitation. The seeds sown ages past in the barren fields of doubt. Rediscovering them now does me little good, but each piece I reclaim a new brings me ever so slightly closer to having something worth assessing a bit more seriously.
Overcoming challenges is the single most key thing to playing a game. It is the foundation by which the very term “game” is based upon. There are yet ways to challenge players we have not seen in the single player world. Surely there’s a way to bring them here.
The sad thing is, Dark Souls effectively has the framework for such a system but decided never to use it in the entire history of the franchise - Phantom invasions. Invading players as a phantom is effectively a different kind of a game, and an interesting mutation of the concept. It’s also entirely “unfair” in the context of the game itself. Most of the invasions I dealt with in my LP’s, for example, consisted of me dying before having a chance to even understand what was happening. The majority of invaders in Dark Souls use gimmick builds, abuse latency, or try to tickle you down from afar. Chivalrous invaders, those reddit users, are actually playing the game in an unintended way.
Somehow, this doesn’t line up with Delve’s proposal of what made BDO interesting to him. After all, Dark Souls is a dead, static world. There’s no setting, no lore, nothing that establishes you in the game world and nothing that changes by extent of your interactions with it. Dying in a zone once, a thousand times, involving invaders, or not involving invaders, it makes no difference. The only communication you have with invaders is the Point At Ground emote.
Yet the fact there is PvP at all separates Dark Souls from the majority of ARPG’s. No such thing exists in DMC, God of War, or any of the other shitty products I’ve covered in the years. Dark Souls and its introduction of the PvP mechanic being a disaster doesn’t speak to the legitimacy of the idea, just the execution.
One of the major shortcomings of the products is that single player does not make use of the system at all. Red NPC phantoms only spawn at predesignated areas and move to predesignated points. They are simply other mobs in the game world with inflated and usually grossly so stats. Rather than invading the player’s world and at least loosely interacting with it, the mobs are just there to pretend the system exists when it really doesn’t.
Building such a system as an actually functional component to AXX would not be the tallest task. The most difficult part would really be determining how I want the equivalent to the phantoms to act - the so-called “opposing force”. It could be “hero” units for the various factions, it could be Dark Stars who are hostile to all, it could be some mix of the two. Yet having randomized and rare invasions doesn’t necessarily inject much into the game world unless it feels dynamic and alive. These units should have objectives in the world. In Dark Souls this is simply killing - or supporting, in the case of co-op summons - the host. BDO is significantly more complex in this regard, because generally speaking the PvP we’re discussing is fighting over resources. Even if it escalates to full-blown group vs group vs group it usually was instigated by something related to the game world itself.
Hunting the player, hunting conquest fragments, hunting leylines or similar things, these are all possible objectives “opposing force” units could have.
Spawning rules are another thing to consider. If they perpetually spawn they would become an annoyance. Their possibility to spawn could also be tied to something - thus, another potential map objective is possible.
I’d feel that such units spawning should not be delegated entirely to randomness. Spawn logic would likely have some degree of unpredictability but it should be based on something. The types of units, and intensity of spawns, could be based on events in the map, such as fighting intensity, duration of the mission, map phases, so on.
This off-commentary on an unrelated series of subjects somehow has given me a genuine idea on how to repurpose and functionally implement and existing concept I hadn’t considered because its conventional execution is so poorly done. Perhaps the problem has always been that I had been given commentary that had serves to sabatoge such discovery up to this point. Unfortunately, it does little to help me address the larger issue with the project’s design, but it’s certainly something I intend to revisit conceptually in the future.