My crackpot theory on what determines whether someone will like AVWW.

[Professor Paul1290]

Before I say this I should say there is a good chance this is complete bullshit that has no real firm basis in anything, but this is something that occurred to me.

I repeat, this could possibly be complete crap so anyone prone to doing bodily harm to themselves face-palming should look away.

Seriously, this could be really terrible. 



Anyway, I think I might have noticed one of the major factors that determine whether or not someone would enjoy A Valley Without Wind.

Virtually every side-scrolling adventure game or platformer out there relies on a relatively consistent flow of short term rewards. There are long term goals, but they generally stay in the background and are not as prominent as the make-it-up-as-you-go gameplay. Players usually focus on the immediate and current situation or problem. Tasks and rewards tend to work within this short term time frame.

A Valley Without Wind, in its current state, does not work this way. It's tasks and reward systems are more similar to that of a Strategy or 4X game. Most "rewards" come from interaction between various goals in a much longer term context. Some players find it jarring that individual boss battles, items, and other tasks seem to mean so little in A Valley Without Wind. This is because in the world of A Valley Without Wind these aren't as much goals in themselves as they are sub-goals. They are not special as they are simply means to an end in a much larger context.

Whenever I play a conventional platformer or Metroidvania I'm absorbed in the moment, that moment, within the context of a few minutes. I am thinking of the future somewhat, but I'm not really worrying about it. I'm thinking about "I'm trying to get here", or "I'm trying to kill this boss", or "I'm trying to kill this enemy". My mindset is very moment to moment.

Whenever I play A Valley Without Wind, I'm not using the same mindset even though I'm engaging in similar gameplay. I'm not just thinking of the "now" I'm thinking of the 1, 2, 3, maybe even 4 hours from now. Everything I'm doing "now" I don't think of as a task, goal, and reward in itself, but merely the means to an end objective that may not pay off until much farther into the future. I'm thinking of wind shelter placement, of which spells I want to maintain, of where I'm going to deploy that next "seek resources/npc" guardian power, and of how long I should put off taking on a Lieutenant and what I should get first. These are things that often won't happen or I won't get around to for maybe even another hour.
I don't think of short term things like finding items or killing bosses being rewarding in of themselves, and I don't expect them to be. This is because aren't objectives to me, they're merely means to an end as part of much longer term objectives.

I think that might be what really separates AVWW from other games in the genre and what might be putting off some people.



Personally, I play Metroidvanias as well as platformers and shmups. On the other hand, I'm also a huge military sim and tactical shooter fan, I also like flight-sims and space-sims, and I also play slow-paced strategy games.

When I play A Valley Without Wind, I'm often in the mindset of the latter types of games when it comes to making decisions. What I mean by that is that I'm not fussed about the smaller details and moments when it comes to how I'm being rewarded, as they're all just means to a much larger end.

Someone who's used to thinking of and judging platformers with the former mindset is not going to be too enthused about how AVWW rewards players for tasks. AVWW doesn't do much to reward the small stuff, because currently in AVWW's world, they're means to an end and not ends in themselves.


Anyway, there's my probably crappy crackpot theory on this.

[freykin]

That makes a lot of sense to me, as you don't get rewarded in 5 minute intervals in AVWW, it's more on 15-30 minute or longer stretches. I for one am quite happy with that, though, as I get into a flow state on my way to those objectives. I for one really enjoy the combat in this, so all the fighting leading up to whatever objective I'm working on is plenty enough reward for me.

[TheEvilNoob]

I think you're right. Most people like to be rewarded as much as possible as soon as possible (wow the end of that sentence is just wierd). People who like those games will probably be frustrated at the beginning of the game. Personally I get impatient all the time while trying to get new stuff, but I just start killing things and I forget about it

[keith.lamothe]

I would really like to work in more "bubble popping" rewards in the middle, and for a while we did have every monster drop consciousness shards, but that didn't work out in the end.

It's definitely worth thinking more about; there are higher priority things we're dealing with right now, but I'm confident that we can find some kind of solution to this that doesn't break the incentive-balance and collapse into either "must grind every monster!" or "even my projectiles cannot find motivation to hurl themselves at the foe"

[eRe4s3r]

It has imo nothing to do with patience. People want to see what they work for and that to give them rewards. As weird as work sounds in a game ;P There was a study that humans like to "expect" a reward. Which is why humans LOVE random loot. Not getting a "good" reward 5 times out of 10 makes those other 5 times infinitely more rewarding.

Yet Exploration gives very large rewards, and combat none. This makes people go where they can get large rewards with little combat (scrapyard houses) and upgrade as few spells as needed to dominate (essentially, just 2 spells + shield are needed to challenge an overlord)

I would go so far as to say that current the game can be .. cheesed by sniping the assist mobs of overlords, doing only the relevant missions to get 2 spells, hunt for shield ingredients and go to overlord.

If you think about it that is the meat of the game. The goal of exploration is to find stuff to be able to challenge the overlord. Yet there is so much to explore that you are never really looking for stuff, you just find it. It's the Skyrim problem , except in Skyrim thats the whole POINT of the game (and incredibly fun because of random loot/random and sometimes very challenging enemies)

This is also why I cringed when the settlement simulation was removed. That really was the whole point of the game for me. I explore and do stuff to build my settlement. BUt it is so detached now that I can't care anymore.

[Martyn van Buren]

I gotta say I don't feel that way about it; I think I play just cause I like wandering around Environ. I've been finding as the game gets more complex I achieve less and less of my goals and enjoy it more and more.  Or just sort of random situational goals like "get across this nasty bit of terrain without double jump." I actually think AVWW has worked out very nicely as a sandbox game even as it was redesigned to be a bit less sandboxy.

[x4000]

My theory is that the people who get sucked in will most likely be the people like the woman from Kotaku.  My wife also falls prey to this whenever she fires up AVWW.  And it's basically that same "one more turn" phenomenon that makes Civilization and AI War so addictive, for certain types of personalities, too.

And that boils to being almost complete with some goal or sub-goal at all times.  You have long range, middle-term, and short-term goals.  You're always almost done with some of the short term ones, but as soon as you're done with that there's another one that's right there.  And pretty sure you just passed a middle-term goal and that feels satisfying, so you keep playing a bit and so forth.  And that's how "5 more minutes" suddenly turns into 4 hours.

At Arcen, I would say we are exceptionally good at creating this sort of experience in all our games.  Not in a crass and calculated sort of fashion, but it just tends to happen based on what sort of games we like to play plus how we think about design.  Giving the player a lot of granular agency to make their own choices kind of leads to this naturally, in a lot of ways.

What we are less good at, in a lot of respects, is that sort of "bubble wrap popping" fun.  Or that "constant flow of very exciting things" that many shorter games use.  If the entirety of Metroid takes 4-7 hours to play, well, you're getting a heck of a lot of new stuff in that time and things are always changing.  In Civilization, by contrast, things don't change on remotely that time scale but at the same time you do always have a lot of irons in the fire and so that's what drives you to move on.  There are hours-long stretches in Civilization where not much changes but you're making very incremental progress toward some goal, and then when you have that moment of victory it's really satisfying.

I don't think that AVWW is as niche as that in how long it asks you to wait, because there is at least a bit of bubble-wrap-type fun with popping bats and headshotting enemies and so on.  Similar in a lot of respects to that feel you get from jumping on goomba heads or using an SMG on the 500th identical space marine in an FPS game.

I think that some games are focused and intricately crafted and just pulling the players along in a state of elation the entire time.  These are your summer blockbuster films.  Then there are games that are longer and more thoughtful, but filled with lots of exposition and side thoughts and so on.  These are your long-form novels.  How Tom Clancy and Stephen King (both of whom I really like) ever got to be #1 bestsellers is a bit of a mystery to me.  Not as a slam against them, but there's no two ways about it: their books are long.  Long, meandering, and overly detailed.  They don't tend to really hook me until the last third most of the time, and by then you've often read 500-700 pages.  But then that last third just zips, and it's awesome how everything comes together.

My mom really likes both of those authors as well, and her theory is that most people just "skip to the good part."  I'm less sure on that.  I think that there might just be an untapped potential for people who patiently wait for big payoffs in their entertainment.  In the case of AVWW it's not a narrative masterstroke that's waiting in the wings from us, it's the (hopefully) masterstroke that you yourself have been devising as you upgrade your character into the perfect fighting machine to kill that darn overlord.  It's working at something and then seeing the fruits of your labors borne out.

And... of course that's a crackpot theory, too.  From the fan mail, some people are coming for the atmosphere and the nostalgia, and staying for that reason.  Anyone who grew up playing the NES and SNES Metroid and Castlevania games seems to go gaga over this one.  Which is awesome, and an incredible compliment here.

So I think there's multiple reasons that people come to this game, ultimately, and you can't boil it down to any one reason.  But for players who just want to play for a couple of hours and basically get tons of constant rewards and then win... that doesn't really describe any game that Arcen has ever made or is likely to make.  We can do some things to help satisfy more on that level I imagine, but fundamentally that's just a different sort of game.

[x4000]

I gotta say I don't feel that way about it; I think I play just cause I like wandering around Environ. I've been finding as the game gets more complex I achieve less and less of my goals and enjoy it more and more.  Or just sort of random situational goals like "get across this nasty bit of terrain without double jump." I actually think AVWW has worked out very nicely as a sandbox game even as it was redesigned to be a bit less sandboxy.

That's really interesting to hear.  I've had some other comments to that effect, too (and frankly the Kotaku article seemed to imply as much).  I probably spent at least 6-8 months of this project just working on building this world, not even the game to go in the world.  And all that time investment was largely because, at the very core, I wanted the game to be an interesting place to go and explore and do various interesting things.  A lot of the new complexity with more missions and so forth comes into making the world feel more textured and interesting to explore, I think.

There's always lots more that can be done on that front as well, but I think we're off to a decent start with it.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

There's a reason why I don't craft theories about why people like/dislike AVWW.  Its all about taste and what certain people like.  I like tower defense, other people hate em. *shrug*.

As far as AVWW is concerned, this game is strange to me why I enjoy it so much, but I do.  The variety and world is interesting to me. Why others do or don't like it has never particularly concerned me.

King

[Martyn van Buren]

For me the terrain generation revamp was the best thing that happened to the game.  Getting those strange gaps and cliff faces made wandering into a region looking for something really fun.  I am still hoping to see more one day, especially mountains.

[Drjones013]

It has imo nothing to do with patience. People want to see what they work for and that to give them rewards. As weird as work sounds in a game ;P There was a study that humans like to "expect" a reward. Which is why humans LOVE random loot. Not getting a "good" reward 5 times out of 10 makes those other 5 times infinitely more rewarding.

Just wanted to comment on this because I'm writing an endocrinology paper right now: this is the effect of dopamine on behavior. Robert Sapolsky has a few lectures on YouTube that explain how dopamine levels determine behavior. A guaranteed reward triggers less of an effect than a random reward for a predetermined behavior. WoW has had a LOT of studies done on it (though the dopamine factors were found in EverQuest, if I remember correctly). If you were trying to go for higher dopamine levels then you'd have bosses drop random enchantments or the like, some of which were 'rare,' meaning that the chance of seeing that kind of enchantment was only x%; this would cause players who determine that enchantments are rewards to grind the living **** out of the game until they got them.

[eRe4s3r]

Only thing I remembered of that is that humans don't see an expected reward as worthwhile to pursue when they have the option for an random reward. And it's not just humans, even applies for many animals.

This is why I think currently exploration, loot, combat, progression has it all backwards. We are told what rewards to expect when we do X (the only "good" function would be the enchant system) when to be fun we should only be told that there MAY be "rewards" to be expected when we do X, but not which ones.

Or put plainly, unexpected rewards are worth ten times more than expected rewards. It can literally make the difference of someone playing a game or not. (Because there are obviously other games with that hook people WILL play instead)

It actually baffles me we have to even say this because AI War had this system in place, and it works wonderfully there! Why is it not in AVWW ?

[Quaix]

I remember there was a study done on monkeys. They determined that a monkey worked hardest when the reward probability was 50%. I think the graph looked like a normal distribution centered at 50%. (effort vs probability of reward)

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Only thing I remembered of that is that humans don't see an expected reward as worthwhile to pursue when they have the option for an random reward. And it's not just humans, even applies for many animals.

This is why I think currently exploration, loot, combat, progression has it all backwards. We are told what rewards to expect when we do X (the only "good" function would be the enchant system) when to be fun we should only be told that there MAY be "rewards" to be expected when we do X, but not which ones.

Or put plainly, unexpected rewards are worth ten times more than expected rewards. It can literally make the difference of someone playing a game or not. (Because there are obviously other games with that hook people WILL play instead)

It actually baffles me we have to even say this because AI War had this system in place, and it works wonderfully there! Why is it not in AVWW ?

Well, the obvious answer is that AI War is a much different game/genre than AVWW and as such what works there, might not necessarily work here. But I digress.

What system are you referring to in AIW? because I'm not sure what you mean.

King

[Pollypally]

I love Civ and in Civ you are always looking towards the future, but there are still exciting things happening in the present, and rewards like goodie huts and loot from plundering cities and building up an empire slowly, looking towards the day when you have achieved what you want.

So it has a good balance, but still when you achieve what you want it is still very downhill from there.

In this game I seem to wander aimlessly and the levels I've seen so far are pretty much the same flat levels with random houses and are a bit boring really.

+ the graphics are constantly assaulting my eyes lol.

One positive I can say about the graphics is that the game started up at max resolution, but it still hurts my eyes