Dark Cloud and Communicating a Gameplay Loop

There's a somewhat famous quote from Jaime Griesemer, a designer on Halo, talking about game design and construction. In it he describes a game like Halo as "30 seconds of fun" repeated in different scenarios, different configurations for variety/to keep it interesting. It's about as succinct an illustration as you can have of a gameplay loop. Just about every major game works on these loops, these peaks and troughs of action and inaction. Some are more obvious about it, and some have larger loops that contain smaller loops. No matter what, there's always going to be an identifiable cycle of the “fun” game element, whether retrospectively or designed from word one. 

For example, a point and click adventure introduces a new puzzle with clues, and the player explores and observes to resolve it. As puzzles resolve they open new paths to new puzzles, new dialog, new story. RPGs have the smaller combat loop versus the larger quest and character development loops. This is all a pretty simple framing for considering how a game is meant to be paced and what feelings it's meant to evoke. 

The bigger issue that got me thinking today was about getting the player into these loops. The game doesn't start in mid-cycle, so a game has to smoothly draw players into this design. Sometimes, however, the start of these loops just doesn't work. The exhibit I've pulled to showcase this came from research for the PS2 Fossil Record. I was playing Dark Cloud, a game I'll go into more detail at some point later on. It's a 2001 Action RPG and it has... many many problems. The key one I want to hone in on is the first 30 minutes. I'll go into more detail in its essay but Dark Cloud starts with the player dropped into an empty village and told that everything's gone because of monsters, go down into a dungeon and retrieve the town. The macro loop is thus trawling the dungeon to find town parts and returning them. The smaller loops are individual dungeon floors, character customization, and individual fights. 

Unfortunately, the way these loops are set up makes them uniquely difficult to break into. To start with, a floor can only be completed by finding a key that opens the next one. These keys are randomly dropped by felled enemies. Weapons in Dark Cloud are breakable and have a finite amount of weapon HP that must be restored with repair powder. The starting weapon can kill somewhere between 5 and 12 or so enemies before it will run out of weapon HP. Because it's the starter weapon it doesn't disappear, it just becomes useless and loses any upgrades made to it. Essentially, the game becomes about luck of the draw. Did you get the enemy to drop a key before your dagger broke? Did the game decide not to drop any other weapons? Did you get the shopkeep to spawn early on since his and his shop location in the dungeon is random? All of these will have a heavy determining factor on how well the player is able to actually manage the opening areas of this game. Without the shopkeeper, the player cannot buy new weapons to start upgrading. This is a problem because Dark Cloud doesn't have character levels, only weapon upgrades. The default dagger can't be properly upgraded into better weapons because it's unbreakable so the game simply disallows it. Even more obnoxiously, without the shopkeep the player is limited to having one replenishable repair item given to them by the one person still in town at the start. By the third or fourth floor of the opening dungeon this is already not enough to actually keep your default weapon functional long enough to kill all the enemies on a floor. The odds stack worse for the player simply by dint of losing the guarantee they'll even finish a floor before leaving it.

There are a mass of loops occurring here. A number of different ideas are all being shoved at the player at once, none of them totally explained and few of them fully in the player's control. Because of the sheer unfriendliness here I'd imagine many players didn't actually get much further than this. Compelling as rebuilding towns can be, as fun as trawling a dungeon can be, the feeling of making no progress only twenty minutes in is utterly demoralizing. It's not uncommon in the early game to enter a dungeon, enter a new floor, find every piece of the town on that floor, but not have a way to advance forward. So then you retreat, talk to the mayor, repair your weapon, and try again. At some point you run into enemies whose gimmick is that they damage your weapon a lot. You can't ignore them because they have just as good of a chance of holding the next level key. You can't get more weapons and you can't hold multiple repair items because you can't buy anything with all the money these things are dropping. You can't open the shop until you can go further in the dungeon. The only way to reach the point where you're meaningfully playing the game is to keep rolling the dice 10 minutes at a time until a random enemy drops the next key to the next randomly generated floor.

The thing that makes this frustrating is that there's no need for this to have occurred. If you can leave a guy who will give you a single repair powder when you're out on the map at the start, you can leave a guy that sells them. You can give the shopkeep a limited selection until you find his shop. There are a ton of ways to design the opening of this loop to be friendlier to start that wouldn't damage its integrity when the player is already in it. The opening of the loop in a mass market RPG has to be jinxing rolls in the player’s favor in some fashion. Often you'll see this with getting a temporary overpowered ally to ease the player through tough early stretches. Perhaps you'll pregenerate an opening floor or two in your randomly generated dungeon, or guarantee a roll in some fashion. The design of an RPG needs to onboard the player to how its mechanics function, and give enough resources to exploit them. Let me be clear, Dark Cloud's opening isn't a failure because it's hard, it's a failure because it's uninteresting. The game burdens the player with a number of systems but doesn't allow the player to meaningfully interact with them. My argument that they should have included a shopkeeper guaranteed in some way in the first few floors is that it allows the player to actually engage with the systems that are meant to be what makes these loops interesting. As it stands, you just end up with a potentially progress-halting loop. Need to explore dungeon to get more resources, need more resources to properly explore dungeon.

Action RPGs are particularly prone to this issue of entering a game loop. The two fundamental genres underpinning them are both not just complex, but differently complex. There is no real agreed upon standard for how they should be put together. Souls and Kingdom Hearts are both sharing a genre uneasily. Because of this, it's hard to even guarantee the player has experience with your particular sub-genre of Action RPG. Typically, the way around this is to design in such a way that skill or understanding in one half of the genre papers over deficiencies in the other. If I grind enough I can get past this boss even though I don't have the dexterity or understanding to be good at the action. If I am skilled enough I can get past the fact that I have no idea how to build my character or what some of the stats do. If you don't allow the action to cover for the randomness, you get Dark Cloud's problem. Action RPGs where the stats can't take the place of dexterity are inherently less approachable to the new audience that the stats would potentially bring. It's another kind of problem entirely.

None of this is to say that there's no reason to make a game unapproachable. Even, or perhaps especially, making it unapproachable from specific playstyles. Sometimes the systems would have to be changed to make a game approachable and that simply isn't the goal of the project. Dark Cloud, though, was a mass market game published by Sony and developed by a company that would become built around only the massest of market RPGs for the Japanese audience. I think there's ample evidence to assume this is just a gross misfire in terms of design intent versus actual results. An unapproachable game should be designed with that in mind. If you're making something of that nature, you make something like Wizardry IV.

That's actually a key design point. Communicating intent is deeply important in the first section of a game. For those unfamiliar, Wizardry IV is avowed to have been made by people asserting they were making the hardest video game. Exiting the first room may be nearly impossible depending on the party the player generates. This made a game that was essentially only sellable to about seven total human beings, but which appealed to those seven with almost laser precision. The entrance to the gameplay loop of Wizardry IV is thus almost entirely shielded off from players who don't have a very specific mindset. Naturally this was not a profitable path, but it was a path chosen with real intention. You can't really stop players from spending money on things they won't enjoy, but you can do your best to communicate what they're expected to enjoy early. Saving the player time with those immediate clear statements of intent is worth it.

Clear communication to the player is hard, it's why designing the onboarding to the cycles games are built on is so difficult. Being hard is also part of why it's so essential. If extra effort isn't put into that early communication, the game may actually turn away the people it's meant to reach. When the needs of capital are stripped away, that's the real shame that comes with this sort of design flaw.