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It’s extremely common. You’ve probably played and loved dozens of games that do it without you knowing. Resident Evil 4 is the famous example, but to its detriment, I could see it working in the Resident Evil 2 remake as well.
Have you ever gotten through an encounter by the skin of your teeth, with just barely enough ammo and health? It’s probably because you had more health than the game told you, or that the last bullet in your magazine does more damage than the rest of them.
But often times, that’s desirable. Not everyone sits down with a game to be thoroughly challenged, and even with the difficulty dynamically adjusting to you, there are often other ways to further tune it up. They don’t make failure impossible, but they try to find that sweet spot for a flow state, which is going to be incredibly difficult to find with unchanging difficulty modes. If you didn’t notice, games used to have astonishingly low completion rates back when they did have unchanging difficulty modes.
It’s not desirable. Building a game that enables people to continually make actual progress is desirable. Allowing people to modularly adjust difficulty if they feel a game is too difficult is desirable.
Removing feedback to make it significantly harder to get better at a game is not desirable. You cannot get better if a game is constantly lying to you about what is good and what is bad. Rubber banding isn’t just “fake progress to get by an encounter”. It actively prevents you from being able to learn because it gives you unreliable mixed signals. It’s fundamentally broken and being forced to rely on it means your actual game design is fundamentally broken.
I think you’re overstating the importance of games as a platform for skill development as opposed to a platform for, you know, having fun. The fact is that the vast majority of players play any game on one of its lowest difficulty settings.
Rubber banding is made for the core of the game’s audience and challenge-seekers are just not large enough to be that core. Some of those rubber banding mechanics can and are disabled at higher difficulty settings. Others are needed at higher difficulty because the AI can’t compete and the investment in dev time to improve the AI just isn’t worth it because, again, very few people actually play the game at those difficulties.
Hard disagree. There’s plenty of games that are little more than dressed up choose your own adventure stories. Plenty that are meant for chill and relaxing gameplay. Plenty that do little more than guide you through horror scenes. And so on.
And even beyond that, most people don’t even play a game long enough to have any real “skill development over time.” I read from the Civ7 director recently that if you’ve ever finished a game of Civ you’re literally in a minority of the player base. And that tracks with what I’ve heard about other games as well.
Most players of any given game never finish it. Most of those quit at the first sign of frustration and most are on the easiest game difficulties. This would indicate to me that the majority’s conception of “fun” has little to no relation to skill development in the game. They’re there for the moment to moment experiences. Rubber band mechanics are there to evoke those fun experiences more often in the majority of the player base.
None of this is conjecture. These practices make their way into games because we can measure the result. The goal of the game designer, usually, isn’t necessarily to make the player better at the game but to help them to have fun. It’s why multiplayer games with matchmaking typically make your first matches against bots disguised as humans. If you lose your first match, there’s about a 60% chance that you’ll never play that game again, because you never got to have that feeling that shows why the game is fun. If you get frustrated with a difficult portion of a campaign or story driven game, you’re more likely to put it down and, among other things, less likely to buy the sequel since you never saw the end of the previous one.
You can’t “measure the result”. Hours played is not game quality, and there is very little overlap between games that stand the test of time and games that are broken by rubberbanding. It is a short term dopamine manipulation that removes the actual satisfaction of actually playing a game. It’s like saying slots are a good game because they form addicts.
If you use rubber banding, you are terrible at what you do.
You can measure how many players finish the game, and you can measure the effect that finishing the previous game has on sales of the sequel. You can measure the review scores, critic and user, for your games with and without the difficulty adjustment. You can measure how many players stick around in a multiplayer game after a loss. You can see what complaints, criticisms, or praise you get in play testing in A/B tests with or without certain parts of these that are lies. Maybe the game with totally fair racing AI shows you how to actually get better at the game, but no one’s going to have any fun if you’re so far ahead of the other racers that it feels like you’re racing on an empty track, and game designers knew that decades ago.
All of those are very bad, short term heuristics for quality. It’s perfectly fine for people not to finish a game.
A player taking a break after a loss is again, not bad by any stretch of the imagination, and not an indication that there is anything wrong with a game.
Yes, people can and do have fun winning when they deserve to win, and they have fun losing when they deserve to lose. If they chose a difficulty where they dominate, they did that for a reason. If they chose a difficulty that beats them to a pulp if they make mistakes, they did that for a reason. Overruling player’s choices to break the game is not fun. It’s addictive. They’re not the same thing.
I don’t think anyone likes it when they can tell the game is lying to them, but you claimed that games that do this don’t stand the test of time, yet people love Mario Kart and Resident Evil 4, the two go-to examples of this concept, and it would be extremely difficult to say that love for those games hasn’t stood the test of time. It’s totally fine for you to seek out a challenge, and I agree with you that a game isn’t necessarily doing anything wrong if people don’t finish it, but these strategies in game development have tended to result in a happier player base. Anecdotally, I know a couple of friends who would sing praises for adaptive difficulty like this.
It’s extremely common. You’ve probably played and loved dozens of games that do it without you knowing. Resident Evil 4 is the famous example, but to its detriment, I could see it working in the Resident Evil 2 remake as well.
Have you ever gotten through an encounter by the skin of your teeth, with just barely enough ammo and health? It’s probably because you had more health than the game told you, or that the last bullet in your magazine does more damage than the rest of them.
I know it’s common. It completely fucking destroys games singlehandedly. There is no acceptable way to do it.
Rubber banding replaces actual progress with illusory progress.
But often times, that’s desirable. Not everyone sits down with a game to be thoroughly challenged, and even with the difficulty dynamically adjusting to you, there are often other ways to further tune it up. They don’t make failure impossible, but they try to find that sweet spot for a flow state, which is going to be incredibly difficult to find with unchanging difficulty modes. If you didn’t notice, games used to have astonishingly low completion rates back when they did have unchanging difficulty modes.
It’s not desirable. Building a game that enables people to continually make actual progress is desirable. Allowing people to modularly adjust difficulty if they feel a game is too difficult is desirable.
Removing feedback to make it significantly harder to get better at a game is not desirable. You cannot get better if a game is constantly lying to you about what is good and what is bad. Rubber banding isn’t just “fake progress to get by an encounter”. It actively prevents you from being able to learn because it gives you unreliable mixed signals. It’s fundamentally broken and being forced to rely on it means your actual game design is fundamentally broken.
I think you’re overstating the importance of games as a platform for skill development as opposed to a platform for, you know, having fun. The fact is that the vast majority of players play any game on one of its lowest difficulty settings.
Rubber banding is made for the core of the game’s audience and challenge-seekers are just not large enough to be that core. Some of those rubber banding mechanics can and are disabled at higher difficulty settings. Others are needed at higher difficulty because the AI can’t compete and the investment in dev time to improve the AI just isn’t worth it because, again, very few people actually play the game at those difficulties.
It’s not possible for a game to be fun without development of skill over time.
That’s the core concept of what a game is: forcing you to make ambiguous decisions in an uncertain environment.
Hard disagree. There’s plenty of games that are little more than dressed up choose your own adventure stories. Plenty that are meant for chill and relaxing gameplay. Plenty that do little more than guide you through horror scenes. And so on.
And even beyond that, most people don’t even play a game long enough to have any real “skill development over time.” I read from the Civ7 director recently that if you’ve ever finished a game of Civ you’re literally in a minority of the player base. And that tracks with what I’ve heard about other games as well.
Most players of any given game never finish it. Most of those quit at the first sign of frustration and most are on the easiest game difficulties. This would indicate to me that the majority’s conception of “fun” has little to no relation to skill development in the game. They’re there for the moment to moment experiences. Rubber band mechanics are there to evoke those fun experiences more often in the majority of the player base.
There’s a wide range of games that are low skill or require no skill that people play and enjoy.
None of this is conjecture. These practices make their way into games because we can measure the result. The goal of the game designer, usually, isn’t necessarily to make the player better at the game but to help them to have fun. It’s why multiplayer games with matchmaking typically make your first matches against bots disguised as humans. If you lose your first match, there’s about a 60% chance that you’ll never play that game again, because you never got to have that feeling that shows why the game is fun. If you get frustrated with a difficult portion of a campaign or story driven game, you’re more likely to put it down and, among other things, less likely to buy the sequel since you never saw the end of the previous one.
You can’t “measure the result”. Hours played is not game quality, and there is very little overlap between games that stand the test of time and games that are broken by rubberbanding. It is a short term dopamine manipulation that removes the actual satisfaction of actually playing a game. It’s like saying slots are a good game because they form addicts.
If you use rubber banding, you are terrible at what you do.
You can measure how many players finish the game, and you can measure the effect that finishing the previous game has on sales of the sequel. You can measure the review scores, critic and user, for your games with and without the difficulty adjustment. You can measure how many players stick around in a multiplayer game after a loss. You can see what complaints, criticisms, or praise you get in play testing in A/B tests with or without certain parts of these that are lies. Maybe the game with totally fair racing AI shows you how to actually get better at the game, but no one’s going to have any fun if you’re so far ahead of the other racers that it feels like you’re racing on an empty track, and game designers knew that decades ago.
All of those are very bad, short term heuristics for quality. It’s perfectly fine for people not to finish a game.
A player taking a break after a loss is again, not bad by any stretch of the imagination, and not an indication that there is anything wrong with a game.
Yes, people can and do have fun winning when they deserve to win, and they have fun losing when they deserve to lose. If they chose a difficulty where they dominate, they did that for a reason. If they chose a difficulty that beats them to a pulp if they make mistakes, they did that for a reason. Overruling player’s choices to break the game is not fun. It’s addictive. They’re not the same thing.
I don’t think anyone likes it when they can tell the game is lying to them, but you claimed that games that do this don’t stand the test of time, yet people love Mario Kart and Resident Evil 4, the two go-to examples of this concept, and it would be extremely difficult to say that love for those games hasn’t stood the test of time. It’s totally fine for you to seek out a challenge, and I agree with you that a game isn’t necessarily doing anything wrong if people don’t finish it, but these strategies in game development have tended to result in a happier player base. Anecdotally, I know a couple of friends who would sing praises for adaptive difficulty like this.