Okay okay here’s a really exciting novel idea that’s sure to surprise and delight: you get money, right? And you *exchange* it for goods and/or services! What a crazy idea - sounds like it could be fun to try out, huh? Would probably get a bit boring after a while though tbh. www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames At this point twitter is just for getting a frontrow seat at Elon’s howard hughes-esque meltdown - also for Architect of Games updates I guess. twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot
How dare you speak negatively about our future*checks notes* our future government efficiency cabinet member. (Steve, is that right? We are talking about the guy who bought Twitter and made the boring company, right?) ok I guess we're fucked.
@@UncleJaken Reference to I think a tumblr post where someone says that cars and houses both have windows but houses don't move so windows aren't the thing that makes cars move and someone replied that it sounds like ancient greek philosophy
@@seamon9732that's actually mentioned in the game. The primary defenstrator actually casts slow fall on the windows they're pushing people out of. She's only looking to disable people long enough to get her desired tasks done, and falling for 30 minutes before they can go do anything is plenty disabling enough for her purposes.
Throwing people out windows never really gets old. In my college D&D campaign, our DM eventually realized that he could never provide sufficiently challenging fights unless he limited the number of available windows.
@thearcanian5921 Meh. It works better on its own imo. There's already an implied "so we shouldn't give them the opportunity" at the end of the initial quote. Adding to it's length for a clarification 99.99% of people won't need just makes it less pithy. You can always go back and clarify when you do encounter that 0.001%
@@stm7810 yeah, but frankly if that's the attitude they're taking, lengthening the quote won't change their minds, it'll just stop them using that one quote
It also helps that Tactical Breach Wizards has such great writing. I think part of the art of stretching out novelty is also distracting the player, not giving them enough time to become consciously aware of the patterns that are being repeated. The story beats are an excellent way to break things up and unlike most tactics games I've played, I didn't find myself wanting to skip over it. It also dared to aim for a clear satisfying ending within a very reasonable playtime, meaning that it didn't need to rely on tricks like procedural generation to stretch out content. Random aside, I somehow missed that the game had a built-in developer commentary mode and I need to go replay it right now before Satisfactory and Factorio come out and consume my life.
Keep in mind, the developer commentary option is only available if you spring for the Special Edition DLC. But, it's well worth it, just to support these excellent developers...
I think "Baba Is You" is a great example of a puzzle game with a novel concept, but keeps your attention by introducing new and novel mechanics with each world in an in-depth and engaging way.
@@AtlessaWell, seeing as how English is a germanic language and both words come from the latin "fenestra", meaning window, I'd wager German had it first.
I think Into the Breach solves the novelty problem with different class loadouts, with each class focused on pushing one mechanic of the entire system to the extreme. The constant feeling of learning something new about the system kept me playing for tons of hours. Funny how all the best tactical games has defenestration as a core mechanic. Hopefully breach-like games will soon become a genre?
@@crazydave.. They're somewhat different but here are some that I like with a similar feel: - The Dungeon Beneath - a kind of turn-based auto-battle game - Alina of the Arena - like a cross between Slay the Spire and into the Breach - The Last Spell - a tactical grid-based game of defending against an endless onslaught of undead monsters
I think defenestration, or more generally, pushing enemies into bad spots, is a very good alternative to just "deal damage" because it forces you to think about your position, the enemy's position and where the hazards are. Also instant killing enemies is very efficient and pushes players towards this more fun style of play (players always pursue efficiency, especially to their detriment).
there is a great talk about "1 million bowls of oatmeal" which talks about the amazing statistics of having a million bowls of oatmeal all with unique lay outs and color, and design. Yet as a user, you just see a million bowls of oat meal and simply dont care
for this kind of things I'd recommend following one of Brandon Sanderson's laws of magic for writing magic systems: "Expand on what you have already, before you add something new." It's way batter to make a game mechanic that gives you plenty of variations and choices that can fit your playstyle than adding 20 different game mechanics that feel new but people end up using only 1 or 2.
First off great to see a fellow Sanderson fan. Second: your comment just reminded me of my DMC5 experience with Dante. Hated him as a playable characters until I forced myself to play with the basic sword and guns and only Trickster style. Then sloooowly expanded, and now I get it. I'm still not a pro, but I get it
What I mean is that it would've been nice to be limited by the game itself (which it technically does with half his weapons being given later in the story AND half his moveset being buyable with in-game currency, but I still felt like it wasn't the right speed)
@@mangelsimonpaniello2256 I think the thing with Dante is that he's been built up across multiple games, so dmc veterans will get bored very quickly if the devs put him all the way back to basics. If you play the whole series you basically do get that slow expansion split across 4 different games (not counting 2 and reboot)
I know a guy who for some unknowable reason collected all the koroks in BOTW... and then TOTK came around, and he played/watched through the tutorial area four separate times with a different friend each time, and he got so sick of it that he didn't even play the rest of the game to this day. God do our monkey brains work in mysterious yet fascinating ways.
This game opens up so much towards the end. While I was hunting the last few confidence points I really started to understand how busted certain things were. One of Dall's upgrades lets you tele-swap with an ally for no cost, and suddenly any of your moves can be used from the location of any character. Pretty soon my turns started to look stupidly complicated as I swapped every character back and forth to every location trying out moves and putting together a Rube-Goldberg series of attacks, status effects and passive procs (hello support fire). I would get so lost finding good, efficient ways to use everything and wipe as many enemies as possible that I would run out of actions and be shocked to realize it was still turn 1.
I really liked zan's false prophet ability while significantly more point intensive getting that fully upgraded allows a truly silly amount of firepower output where you deploy one, it regains a mana via interaction, then shoots a guy, not to mention when you get his supporting fire ability (which the clones also get)
@@bookreaderman6715 if you get Rion's perk that resets his pull when used on allies you can effectively do infinite damage with the false prophets so long as you can get then in the line of sight, which is pretty easy to do
I do enjoy when games allow the environment to play a factor into defeating enemies. If I'm in a beach area on a boat and kick someone of a beat that's an auto win. Same with lava in a volcano area. That and area boosting where fire is stronger or weaker in a certain area. Or can cause aoe damage in a Forrest to have you really think what to use
I like when games remember that different conditions and areas can affect fights and other kinds of interactions wildly differently. Like dunno, a bunch of spaceships fighting in an asteroid field or in the vicinity of a black hole, or the simple fact that a blown up spaceship's chunks would still, very likely, be left in the area for you to avoid while dealing with other ships, can lead to interesting scenarios to both avoid getting screwed over by and bend over in a way that helps you.
5:43 Awwwwww yessssssss this is so validating. This is the reason I filtered out "roguelite" and "proc-gen" on Steam and haven't looked back since. "Endless replayability" is just a hollow marketing lie, it means "10 minutes of gameplay we expect you to repeat forever."
On the rolling boulders mentioned at around 10:45, you end up saying that's well designed because you get 4 times more novelty from a single idea. That's correct, but I'd say that's not even the main point. The main point is that if you get 4 times more novelty out of a single idea, that single idea starts having some *depth*. Chess is of course the quintessential example, where you have 6 types of pieces with predefined, rather simple movements, but the amount of possibilities combining them and tactics and so on means we are still playing and learning new stuff about the game more than a thousand years later.
yeah but in the back half fights in tight spaces had lots of enemies that are entirely immune to pushback, which just takes away all the fun. Breach Wizards has enemies that are knockback resistant, and tools for overcoming that resistance, but nobody is immune
@@paolomilanicomparetti3702 tbf the Siege Clerics are immune to defenestration (tho not knockback) ( also when you try to defenestrate a turret it just explodes?)
@arakus99 true, but that's one type of enemy that is used fairly sparingly. More importantly, they are not immune to knockback, both for damaging them and for arranging the board in some useful way. In FITS in the later half of the campaign half the enemies seem to be entirely immune to being pushed around, making half your cards and strategies plainly useless.
@@Arakus99Siege clerics are not immune to defenestration tho, it's just that their gas mask makes them harder to drug if you haven't damaged them a bit before, and therefore harder to chuck through a window. But with enough knockback or a few weakening strikes, they fly through one just as well as anybody.
0:32 That game mechanic was in a few indie tactics games from the olden times. I liked it, and I am happy that you found a more mainstream example that you could identify, but it's not unique
He never said throwing people out of windows was unique. He even identified two prior games by the same devs that also used it (known as "the defenestration trilogy" when combined with TBW). I would say that every game I've played with that as an option has implemented it differently; _how_ I throw people out of windows, and thus how I play the game, varies wildly, and the fact that TBW constantly builds/expands on that is cited in the video as why it stays fresh for so long. So unless you want to cite a game where the majority of the surrounding mechanics that support "throwing people out of windows" are the same, I don't really think that you have much of a point besides maybe trying to claim some hipster cred, should you really care about that.
Just finished Act III - I am in love with this game. A lightbulb went off and I realized I could use a grenade to push an enemy into Zan's Foresight - executed it - "Nice!". Hope this game gets a lot of love. edit: and I am quite excited about jumping right back in to try many, many different um... tactics.
Something that was alluded to but not specifically mentioned for novelty & depth of a game is the difficulty. Presenting difficult challenges forces the player to make use of all the game's systems and nuances, and depth is revealed from that. That's why people have fun playing competitive multiplayer games for thousands of hours: beating other players requires more in depth understanding of the game, and playing against more skillful opponents can feel like an entirely different game from when you first start out even though the game rules itself might not change.
40seconds into the video and what you just described fits perfectly to Marvel's Midnight Suns. Using Ghost Riders car skill or knockback to throw enemies over the ledge or into hellpit.
@@ArchitectofGames I also liked midnight suns, on the whole, but the writing was hit-and-miss and the obligatory AAA MTX was a turnoff. Pacing was also a bit more stretched out than I would've preferred. The actual combat mechanics were quite fun, though.
I learned about what novelty really means in games when I played clicker/idle games like Egg Inc. Even though I owned more and more different buildings and exponentially increased profits to the quintillions, the gameplay strategy stayed the same and no new ideas are introduced. Every building is functionally identical, just with different orders of magnitude of earning power. Going for the first prestige and starting over allows me to earn a million times more money and progress through the early stages way faster, but after 10 prestiges, it is just the same game but with bigger numbers.
Best game analysis I've heard in years. It's exactly what I've been feeling for a long time, but couldn't quite pin down. It's simply too much content for the sake of it; too little novelty that feels worthwhile.
Using Minecraft as an example of a boring game alongside Starfield is crazy given how popular it is and how much self-driven novelty exists and the thousand hour Redstone and building projects people happily launch into within it.
Very good points. There's also a solution that some indie games use nowadays, which is varying the gameplay genre within the whole game. For instance Speed Limit uses all kinds of retro shooting and racing sections pretty seemlessly, and never makes them longer than a few minutes. That makes it pretty short, but the advantage is replayability, without the need of random generation. Daniel Mullins' games do that too to some extent (Inscryption, Pony Island), although they all tend to become the opposite after a while unfortunately. As long as something new happens at every change of screen, you enjoy the novelty. But when it tries to become a real game those sections overstay their welcome. Indie devs shouldn't shy away from making very short games.
Absolutely stellar script, as always! You always choose the most interesting topics to cover and always have the most seamless explanations to dive into them!
I'm proud to have finally beat a cool seemingly niche game on the very same day you uploaded this video. Tactical Breach Wizards is incredible, and more people need to play it. I also did not know about the developer commentary so thank you so much for letting me know I need to go back. Anyways, BASED video, sorry if that's cringe to say, but I think that the "$1 per hour of gameplay" and other similar metrics are incredibly detrimental for the game industry. I loved my time with viewfinder (even if it felt like it has yet to fully tap the potential) despite beating it in 3 hours at a cost of $25. Most games I have played recently that are "Open World" have felt worse for it, and like they were afraid that having too little content. I've come to find that my favorite games are curated 5-20 hours (at most), and the games I'm left feeling exhausted by are 30-50. That is not a rule, just a trend.
10:15: I feel like this point acts very much like Grant Sanderson's Third Law -- which is about magic systems, but then again, these are both *systems* we are talking about -- which states that you should "Expand what you already have before you add something new."
Dam I fucking love your channel. The way you approach games and their mechancics and idea behind it in a more theory based approach. Leaves for so much potential of interpretation and ideas to flow when listenting to it. I started using some of your advice and points outside of game development. Even in just Worldbuilding or Private Projects. And lets just say they have been awesome in further thriving depth into anything I make. Love you man thx for keeping up the good work and sharing your mind with us.
I really enjoyed playing It Takes Two with my daughter (after explaining what a divorce was) and one of the things I really loved was that you got more or less two new mechanics each level. A mechanic didn't have time to wear out its novelty before it was replaced. I also liked that the characters got different gadgets so that the two players had to cooperate and play differently. As for TBW..... it seems like a laptop game to me and my laptop is a Mac and it doesn't run there :(. My big gaming rig is where I sit down for longer sessions with other types of games. TBW seems to be more of something that I play on the train or when I have a bit of time to kill, which is currently Invisible Inc for me. I love that game. I'll absolutely get it at some point though.
This concept is partially the reason why powercreep exists. It shuffles content. The Elden Ring DLC doesn't have gear novelty, which is good so you don't need to grind, but is bad for making you try new gears.
The satiation of novelty concept was very interesting. You optimise your novelty away even though open world promised unlimited freedom. Absolutely loved this video
7:15 This perfectly encapsulates why I have trouble sticking with No Man's Sky despite how much I have always liked it. I have said for a long time that its patterns change so slowly, if at all, that, despite being an explorer, my high pattern recognition keeps leading to me getting bored enough to be distracted by other games.
I love Heat Signature, and I find myself regularly coming back to play a level or two. Always enjoyed chucking people out of space windows. Thank you for helping feed my addiction!
Part of my soul died a little when you brought up Persona's elemental system even though it is just a derivitive of the main Shin Megami Tensei series systems.
I feel that I work best when the items involve most of the experimentation and thus novelty for me. One example is the game Streets Of Rogue, which gives you an item every time you complete a quest, which of course gives you plenty of options to tackle your objectives, and since items are ether one use or have a limited durability for the most part, you can’t quite abuse the same tactic. I will say that this works better for the more stealth based classes with a few exceptions, and less so with the more combat focused ones, but that may be my bias coming through. Another game that manages to cause novelty more then others. Another good game that does novelty well is system shock. What makes it work is it feels like everything has some sort of use, and due to the oppressive atmosphere I feel a need to see what that case is. Hopefully I explained this well.
One thing I think can be easy to forget about game design is that content only adds as much to the game as the player's relationship with that content. If you introduce a cool idea but don't let the player truly master it through expansion on the original ideas, they don't get to reach the satisfying parts of their relationship with that mechanic no matter how cool it is in principle.
In Baldur's Gate 3, there's a fireworks shop with 3 stories. One particularly tanky character is standing at a ledge. It was immensely satisfying to Eldritch Blast him off the ledge :)
8:30 path of exile is a masterclass on novelty. A decade old game still growing in playerbase even while they're developing their sequel and still breaking records is the way it is for a reason I've been playing poe since 2014 and I can assure you poe is leaps and bounds better at novelty than any other game I know (and yes, I played a lot of games)
I remember when my brother and I were playing the high rise level in Left 4 Dead 2, and a player playing as the Charger charged him straight out the window. It's an instakill with no chance to respawn, but we weren't even mad.
one of my all time favorite games is the puzzle game Carto. It took me 8 hrs to get 100% completion in 1.3 play-thrus (the game lets you replay singe chapters after the first play-thru to discover the easter eggs or try out different solve paths). It has fundamentally simple mechanics that it builds on and only introduces a small handful of truly new things. fits this design ethos perfectly
This balance between too much of the same and too much difference is something I have become aware of in my search of fun Incremental or Unfolding Games. Some games, like Cookie Clicker or AdVenture Capitalist, don't have much in the way of novelty because everything works the exact same way - you have a single resource that you spend it to increase its income. There's a bunch of different options on how to invest it, but their only difference is in their stats. On the other hand, I occasionally come across incremental games that seem to offer an endless barrage of novelty, but when you step back for a moment, you realize there's even less strategic input from you - you're just waiting to push the one button that will make the number go up fast enough to unlock the next button. My favorite incremental games are ones where understanding the game makes it progress faster. In some games, that's understanding which of several resources is bottlenecking your progress and focusing on increasing the income of that resource. In other games, it's figuring out how to optimize your use of a limited resource, like space, or time in loop-based games. Even the best of these games can lose me because a lot of them have a reset mechanic as a core part of the gameplay loop, which allow you to do the same thing from scratch, but slightly faster. Sometimes, however, the reset mechanic will be interesting enough to keep me playing, which usually boils down to changing the rules of the game enough to make it novel again by forcing me to approach it differently, whether that rule change is a boon or a challenge.
Subnautica and Grounded- two classics... I want to submit for consideration both Airborne Kingdom and The Wandering Village for the same sense of novelty. It's the reason I'm waiting for Laysara Summit Kingdom and Timberborn to be accessible.
Balatro did this and got me out of a little gaming slump. Every joker completely changes how you interact with cards and they interact with each others
The third infamous game had four powersets, with you only getting access to the fourth during the literal final boss (and only being allowed to use it). It was a cool way to keep the post game stuff interesting.
Gunpoint is one of my favourite games EVER. It just got fast-paced, free strategizing/decision-making so right. I've been waiting so long for something similar when Heat Signature wasn't for me, I'm so excited.
You touched on Path of Exile's skill tree and, me being long time fan of the game, can't stop myself from commenting. In my opinion, that skill tree can be easily misunderstood - it does have a lot of options and novelty, a lot of setups that define builds and change how they play. However, one shouldn't think about every single node as a meaningful choice. You're meant to choose between notable/keystone nodes - the big ones that have great impact on your builds. The small nodes are more of a travel cost between the big ones. They give some small bonuses, but that's mostly for minmaxing (e.g you're missing 5dex, it might be better to grab that dex node instead of 6% increased dmg). But having a limited amount of those travel points makes you plan, you could pick 5 big notables near each other or go for 2 clusters that are on opposite sides of the tree and you end up wasting so many points to get both. While some game could have a total of 15 bonuses, each costing a different amount of points, I'd say PoE's tree handles it better - cost of various bonuses is defined by the relative distance between them.
@@collapsiblechair9112 Saying the skill tree offers no complexity, interesting decision making or novelty is wrong though. Each individual node you take isn't interesting, but the larger picture on how your skill tree looks in summary, efficient pathing, the way it can be expanded with various kinds of jewels very much is interesting and incredibly complex.
Your yakuza experience is exactly why I only 100% games that I enjoy the primary gameplay loop. There have been a lot of games that I dropped halfway through for this very reason.
I agree about Tactical Wizards and on some of the examples on the struggle for novelty - but I gotta say, The Unfinished Swan is actually a great example of novelty. It gets an incredible amount of interaction from a single set of verbs over its runtime. They even included some bonus cheats to shake things up on a return playthrough. It’s far more Titanfall 2 than it is COD Ghosts in this respect.
About midway through the game, towards the end of the Kalan arc (Minor spoiler warning): There’s that bit where Dell is like “Hey, we’re gonna work with another team.” Of course you see from a mile away that it’s Kennedy,” and the face off scene is just as hilarious as you’d hope-but then the mission starts and you realize you can PLAY as the Less Lethal Pyromancer and I literally gasped in surprise and delight! 10/10 game.
Love your videos. This one really helped me think about the project I'm working on in a new way. Thanks. Also, these are quarter pipes 10:53 not half pipes :D
I’ve heard someone say this game is closer to a puzzle game with its bonus objectives than a true XCOM-like, and it makes sense the more I think about it
Great video, slightly tangential but I been thinking recently that one of the biggest problems with Procedural generation in a lot of games is not actually the quality of the content it generates (though I do agree it will never be as good as purpose built dev.) but a lack a restraint. If you are looking for recourses in an endless verity of worlds its highly encouraged to do a quick sweep of a place grab the easy stuff, than never go back because that place now has less things than any of the endless other places you can go. So you mechanically encouraged to view each place as shallow, disposable, and worthless. Where as even the same quality world building were their is a finite amount of space in any given playthrough makes places matter more, while still letting future playthroughs be at least moderately varied.
This reminds me of how I like changing up my team composition and equipment in different games just for sake of doing so :O Like I don't like finding one routine and repeating it everytime it works meaning I'm willing to take L to just try out new things. Variety is spice of life and all that
That's the challenge of making games. It's not finding new and novel mechanic but instead expansion or depth of existing mechanics. Even if devs managed to expand or deepen their game's mechanic, it still depend on players to dive and explore it.
This is Genshin Impact's secret sauce, they reuse some mechanics over time, but also add entirely new mechanics to each map added, and weave them together to provide unique play experiences.
I really like your point about the game length being just right in Tactical Breach Wizards. I've grown bored of it right around the final chapter. I think it has a lot do with the fact that it's when your characters' abilities hit some critical mass and you just spam buttons until you win, without any tactics.
I feel like breath of the wild is the best example of this, the game stays novel despite you getting all of your tools in the first 30 minutes of gameplay, its just about being given new environments and ways to use those tools
There's even a wizard with a magic broomstick so she can throw herself out of one window and back in through another. Possibly even knocking someone else through another window in the process.
Okay okay here’s a really exciting novel idea that’s sure to surprise and delight: you get money, right? And you *exchange* it for goods and/or services! What a crazy idea - sounds like it could be fun to try out, huh? Would probably get a bit boring after a while though tbh. www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames
At this point twitter is just for getting a frontrow seat at Elon’s howard hughes-esque meltdown - also for Architect of Games updates I guess. twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot
This idea is so out there that I’m pretty sure you’re certifiably insane!
How dare you speak negatively about our future*checks notes* our future government efficiency cabinet member. (Steve, is that right? We are talking about the guy who bought Twitter and made the boring company, right?) ok I guess we're fucked.
no AoT dont invent capitalism nooooo😭
So, basically...gameplaywise you are saying quantity v quality
so it’s not the windows that makes them move, it’s something else entirely
I see you're also a master of ancient greek philosophy
@@UncleJaken Reference to I think a tumblr post where someone says that cars and houses both have windows but houses don't move so windows aren't the thing that makes cars move and someone replied that it sounds like ancient greek philosophy
@@nevinmyers1245 ohh, i rescind my statement then lol
I mean if i grab the game window and wiggy it around then they'll be wiggied around aswell.
So-
The windows can make them move.
>:D
Such a good reference!
Finally, the mythical spell "Power Word: Defenestrate" is now a functional and practical gameplay mechanic!
Wizard: I'm a very powerful wizard who can make fire
Guy: yeah sure nerd(kicks them out of a window)
Wizard laughs in: Feather Fall, Fly, Dimension Door, Misty Step, Levitate, Wind Walk, Teleport, Arcane Gate, Wall of Force, Shapechange.
imagine being a "powerful wizard" without access to feather fall and flight spells
@@haroldshea3282 While falling: I invested all my XP into "bg booooooooooooom"...
@@seamon9732 If the wizard just becomes intangible, the kicker might just fall out of the window themself
@@seamon9732that's actually mentioned in the game. The primary defenstrator actually casts slow fall on the windows they're pushing people out of.
She's only looking to disable people long enough to get her desired tasks done, and falling for 30 minutes before they can go do anything is plenty disabling enough for her purposes.
1:21 You can even throw someone out of a window by throwing _yourself_ out of a window! REVOLUTIONARY
Throwing people out windows never really gets old. In my college D&D campaign, our DM eventually realized that he could never provide sufficiently challenging fights unless he limited the number of available windows.
Did he ever think of fighting in a dungeon?
what about grappling hooks, flight, first story floors, bulletproof glass, packman walls etc.
15:06 "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." - Soren Johnson
Which should always be paired with: “One of the responsibilities I think we have as designers is to protect the player from themselves.” - Sid Meier
@thearcanian5921 Meh. It works better on its own imo. There's already an implied "so we shouldn't give them the opportunity" at the end of the initial quote. Adding to it's length for a clarification 99.99% of people won't need just makes it less pithy. You can always go back and clarify when you do encounter that 0.001%
@@Albinojackrussel nah, most devs see it as an excuse or defeatism.
@@stm7810 yeah, but frankly if that's the attitude they're taking, lengthening the quote won't change their minds, it'll just stop them using that one quote
It also helps that Tactical Breach Wizards has such great writing. I think part of the art of stretching out novelty is also distracting the player, not giving them enough time to become consciously aware of the patterns that are being repeated. The story beats are an excellent way to break things up and unlike most tactics games I've played, I didn't find myself wanting to skip over it. It also dared to aim for a clear satisfying ending within a very reasonable playtime, meaning that it didn't need to rely on tricks like procedural generation to stretch out content. Random aside, I somehow missed that the game had a built-in developer commentary mode and I need to go replay it right now before Satisfactory and Factorio come out and consume my life.
You can even chuck the dev commentary tapes at someone afterwards for free knockback!
Keep in mind, the developer commentary option is only available if you spring for the Special Edition DLC. But, it's well worth it, just to support these excellent developers...
I think "Baba Is You" is a great example of a puzzle game with a novel concept, but keeps your attention by introducing new and novel mechanics with each world in an in-depth and engaging way.
bro it's insane, the last levels make you use every single braincell and more by combining all the mechanics together
As a L2 english speaker im shocked defenestration is an actual word. it's so specific to me that it's comical
There's a word in Greek, too. Εκπαραθύρωση. "Ο θείος κατόρθωσε πάλι να αυτοεκπαραθυρωθεί είκοσι ορόφους πιο κάτω."
You wouldn't believe how much that word has mattered in European history.
The word exists in German too. "Defenestrieren". Makes you wonder which language had it first...
@@AtlessaWell, seeing as how English is a germanic language and both words come from the latin "fenestra", meaning window, I'd wager German had it first.
@@alexgustavsson5955 Especially in central europe...
I think Into the Breach solves the novelty problem with different class loadouts, with each class focused on pushing one mechanic of the entire system to the extreme. The constant feeling of learning something new about the system kept me playing for tons of hours. Funny how all the best tactical games has defenestration as a core mechanic. Hopefully breach-like games will soon become a genre?
what are some other good games like into the breach?
@@crazydave.. They're somewhat different but here are some that I like with a similar feel:
- The Dungeon Beneath - a kind of turn-based auto-battle game
- Alina of the Arena - like a cross between Slay the Spire and into the Breach
- The Last Spell - a tactical grid-based game of defending against an endless onslaught of undead monsters
@@laylance thank you so much!
I think defenestration, or more generally, pushing enemies into bad spots, is a very good alternative to just "deal damage" because it forces you to think about your position, the enemy's position and where the hazards are. Also instant killing enemies is very efficient and pushes players towards this more fun style of play (players always pursue efficiency, especially to their detriment).
Can you give some examples for me? That sounds really neat!
Everyone has a plan 'til they get launched out of a window.
-Seer Tyson
Everyone has a plan 'til they get launched out of a window.
- Palpatine
xD
there is a great talk about "1 million bowls of oatmeal" which talks about the amazing statistics of having a million bowls of oatmeal all with unique lay outs and color, and design. Yet as a user, you just see a million bowls of oat meal and simply dont care
for this kind of things I'd recommend following one of Brandon Sanderson's laws of magic for writing magic systems: "Expand on what you have already, before you add something new." It's way batter to make a game mechanic that gives you plenty of variations and choices that can fit your playstyle than adding 20 different game mechanics that feel new but people end up using only 1 or 2.
First off great to see a fellow Sanderson fan. Second: your comment just reminded me of my DMC5 experience with Dante.
Hated him as a playable characters until I forced myself to play with the basic sword and guns and only Trickster style. Then sloooowly expanded, and now I get it. I'm still not a pro, but I get it
What I mean is that it would've been nice to be limited by the game itself (which it technically does with half his weapons being given later in the story AND half his moveset being buyable with in-game currency, but I still felt like it wasn't the right speed)
@@mangelsimonpaniello2256 I think the thing with Dante is that he's been built up across multiple games, so dmc veterans will get bored very quickly if the devs put him all the way back to basics. If you play the whole series you basically do get that slow expansion split across 4 different games (not counting 2 and reboot)
I know a guy who for some unknowable reason collected all the koroks in BOTW... and then TOTK came around, and he played/watched through the tutorial area four separate times with a different friend each time, and he got so sick of it that he didn't even play the rest of the game to this day. God do our monkey brains work in mysterious yet fascinating ways.
This game opens up so much towards the end. While I was hunting the last few confidence points I really started to understand how busted certain things were. One of Dall's upgrades lets you tele-swap with an ally for no cost, and suddenly any of your moves can be used from the location of any character.
Pretty soon my turns started to look stupidly complicated as I swapped every character back and forth to every location trying out moves and putting together a Rube-Goldberg series of attacks, status effects and passive procs (hello support fire). I would get so lost finding good, efficient ways to use everything and wipe as many enemies as possible that I would run out of actions and be shocked to realize it was still turn 1.
I really liked zan's false prophet ability while significantly more point intensive getting that fully upgraded allows a truly silly amount of firepower output where you deploy one, it regains a mana via interaction, then shoots a guy, not to mention when you get his supporting fire ability (which the clones also get)
@@bookreaderman6715 if you get Rion's perk that resets his pull when used on allies you can effectively do infinite damage with the false prophets so long as you can get then in the line of sight, which is pretty easy to do
@@Jeffry_Ab YOU COULD, that's amazing
I do enjoy when games allow the environment to play a factor into defeating enemies. If I'm in a beach area on a boat and kick someone of a beat that's an auto win. Same with lava in a volcano area.
That and area boosting where fire is stronger or weaker in a certain area. Or can cause aoe damage in a Forrest to have you really think what to use
I like when games remember that different conditions and areas can affect fights and other kinds of interactions wildly differently.
Like dunno, a bunch of spaceships fighting in an asteroid field or in the vicinity of a black hole, or the simple fact that a blown up spaceship's chunks would still, very likely, be left in the area for you to avoid while dealing with other ships, can lead to interesting scenarios to both avoid getting screwed over by and bend over in a way that helps you.
5:43 Awwwwww yessssssss this is so validating. This is the reason I filtered out "roguelite" and "proc-gen" on Steam and haven't looked back since. "Endless replayability" is just a hollow marketing lie, it means "10 minutes of gameplay we expect you to repeat forever."
On the rolling boulders mentioned at around 10:45, you end up saying that's well designed because you get 4 times more novelty from a single idea. That's correct, but I'd say that's not even the main point. The main point is that if you get 4 times more novelty out of a single idea, that single idea starts having some *depth*. Chess is of course the quintessential example, where you have 6 types of pieces with predefined, rather simple movements, but the amount of possibilities combining them and tactics and so on means we are still playing and learning new stuff about the game more than a thousand years later.
So awesome of you to shout out Austin! I absolutely adore niche videos like that, cool to see you’ve been supporting him for years!
Knocking people out of windows was my favorite feature of Fights In Tight Spaces, too!
yeah but in the back half fights in tight spaces had lots of enemies that are entirely immune to pushback, which just takes away all the fun. Breach Wizards has enemies that are knockback resistant, and tools for overcoming that resistance, but nobody is immune
@@paolomilanicomparetti3702 tbf the Siege Clerics are immune to defenestration (tho not knockback) ( also when you try to defenestrate a turret it just explodes?)
@arakus99 true, but that's one type of enemy that is used fairly sparingly. More importantly, they are not immune to knockback, both for damaging them and for arranging the board in some useful way.
In FITS in the later half of the campaign half the enemies seem to be entirely immune to being pushed around, making half your cards and strategies plainly useless.
@@Arakus99Siege clerics are not immune to defenestration tho, it's just that their gas mask makes them harder to drug if you haven't damaged them a bit before, and therefore harder to chuck through a window. But with enough knockback or a few weakening strikes, they fly through one just as well as anybody.
@@teecee1827 last time I checked they have a condition called Big that says "too big to fit through windows or a Death's Door"
Have they changed it?
0:32 That game mechanic was in a few indie tactics games from the olden times. I liked it, and I am happy that you found a more mainstream example that you could identify, but it's not unique
It's also in baldurs gate 3
He never said throwing people out of windows was unique. He even identified two prior games by the same devs that also used it (known as "the defenestration trilogy" when combined with TBW).
I would say that every game I've played with that as an option has implemented it differently; _how_ I throw people out of windows, and thus how I play the game, varies wildly, and the fact that TBW constantly builds/expands on that is cited in the video as why it stays fresh for so long.
So unless you want to cite a game where the majority of the surrounding mechanics that support "throwing people out of windows" are the same, I don't really think that you have much of a point besides maybe trying to claim some hipster cred, should you really care about that.
Just finished Act III - I am in love with this game. A lightbulb went off and I realized I could use a grenade to push an enemy into Zan's Foresight - executed it - "Nice!". Hope this game gets a lot of love. edit: and I am quite excited about jumping right back in to try many, many different um... tactics.
Something that was alluded to but not specifically mentioned for novelty & depth of a game is the difficulty. Presenting difficult challenges forces the player to make use of all the game's systems and nuances, and depth is revealed from that. That's why people have fun playing competitive multiplayer games for thousands of hours: beating other players requires more in depth understanding of the game, and playing against more skillful opponents can feel like an entirely different game from when you first start out even though the game rules itself might not change.
YESSS A TACTICAL BREACH WIZARDS VIDEO SGFHSJDJ THIS GAME NEEDS MORE ATTENTION
40seconds into the video and what you just described fits perfectly to Marvel's Midnight Suns. Using Ghost Riders car skill or knockback to throw enemies over the ledge or into hellpit.
oh my god the only other person on the planet who likes midnight suns! I finally found you!
@@ArchitectofGames I also liked midnight suns, on the whole, but the writing was hit-and-miss and the obligatory AAA MTX was a turnoff. Pacing was also a bit more stretched out than I would've preferred. The actual combat mechanics were quite fun, though.
@@ArchitectofGames i liked midnight suns, it wasn't as good as firaxis' other games but it was a solid 8/10
What a timely upload :D I just finished this game on hard yesterday with all achievements. Enjoyed it quite a lot.
I learned about what novelty really means in games when I played clicker/idle games like Egg Inc. Even though I owned more and more different buildings and exponentially increased profits to the quintillions, the gameplay strategy stayed the same and no new ideas are introduced. Every building is functionally identical, just with different orders of magnitude of earning power. Going for the first prestige and starting over allows me to earn a million times more money and progress through the early stages way faster, but after 10 prestiges, it is just the same game but with bigger numbers.
Good idle games will introduce new layers or mechanics to not keep it the same all the way through.
Best game analysis I've heard in years. It's exactly what I've been feeling for a long time, but couldn't quite pin down. It's simply too much content for the sake of it; too little novelty that feels worthwhile.
This endless drive for novelty is what fucks up modern gaming.
Using Minecraft as an example of a boring game alongside Starfield is crazy given how popular it is and how much self-driven novelty exists and the thousand hour Redstone and building projects people happily launch into within it.
Very good points. There's also a solution that some indie games use nowadays, which is varying the gameplay genre within the whole game. For instance Speed Limit uses all kinds of retro shooting and racing sections pretty seemlessly, and never makes them longer than a few minutes. That makes it pretty short, but the advantage is replayability, without the need of random generation. Daniel Mullins' games do that too to some extent (Inscryption, Pony Island), although they all tend to become the opposite after a while unfortunately. As long as something new happens at every change of screen, you enjoy the novelty. But when it tries to become a real game those sections overstay their welcome. Indie devs shouldn't shy away from making very short games.
23:25 Those words coming out of a gaming youtuber that isn't Yahtzee sounded so threatening
Absolutely stellar script, as always! You always choose the most interesting topics to cover and always have the most seamless explanations to dive into them!
I'm proud to have finally beat a cool seemingly niche game on the very same day you uploaded this video. Tactical Breach Wizards is incredible, and more people need to play it. I also did not know about the developer commentary so thank you so much for letting me know I need to go back. Anyways, BASED video, sorry if that's cringe to say, but I think that the "$1 per hour of gameplay" and other similar metrics are incredibly detrimental for the game industry. I loved my time with viewfinder (even if it felt like it has yet to fully tap the potential) despite beating it in 3 hours at a cost of $25. Most games I have played recently that are "Open World" have felt worse for it, and like they were afraid that having too little content. I've come to find that my favorite games are curated 5-20 hours (at most), and the games I'm left feeling exhausted by are 30-50. That is not a rule, just a trend.
10:15: I feel like this point acts very much like Grant Sanderson's Third Law -- which is about magic systems, but then again, these are both *systems* we are talking about -- which states that you should "Expand what you already have before you add something new."
It might have only been a few seconfs, but thanks for the Void Stranger clip! Such a great game
The turnaround on getting that minecraft movie sheep in was crazy
Dam I fucking love your channel. The way you approach games and their mechancics and idea behind it in a more theory based approach. Leaves for so much potential of interpretation and ideas to flow when listenting to it. I started using some of your advice and points outside of game development. Even in just Worldbuilding or Private Projects. And lets just say they have been awesome in further thriving depth into anything I make. Love you man thx for keeping up the good work and sharing your mind with us.
I think there's a case to be made for "quitting while you're ahead". A lot of these games kinda are too long.
YESSS THANK YOU FOR COVERING BREACH WIZARDS i honestly think it's my goty
The whole setting is hilarious
I really enjoyed playing It Takes Two with my daughter (after explaining what a divorce was) and one of the things I really loved was that you got more or less two new mechanics each level. A mechanic didn't have time to wear out its novelty before it was replaced. I also liked that the characters got different gadgets so that the two players had to cooperate and play differently.
As for TBW..... it seems like a laptop game to me and my laptop is a Mac and it doesn't run there :(. My big gaming rig is where I sit down for longer sessions with other types of games. TBW seems to be more of something that I play on the train or when I have a bit of time to kill, which is currently Invisible Inc for me. I love that game. I'll absolutely get it at some point though.
This concept is partially the reason why powercreep exists. It shuffles content. The Elden Ring DLC doesn't have gear novelty, which is good so you don't need to grind, but is bad for making you try new gears.
It has multiple new weapon types that play entirely differently from other weapons in the base game, and dozens of new spells tho?
The satiation of novelty concept was very interesting. You optimise your novelty away even though open world promised unlimited freedom. Absolutely loved this video
Blasting Wizards Through Windows?
That does happen in Scrabdackle once, where a bad wizard blasts your wizard out of the window of the academy...!
Was just going through some of your older videos, glad to see a new one!
I'm so glad you put this feeling into words! I've tried explaining this to friends, but all I could do was ramble
7:15 This perfectly encapsulates why I have trouble sticking with No Man's Sky despite how much I have always liked it. I have said for a long time that its patterns change so slowly, if at all, that, despite being an explorer, my high pattern recognition keeps leading to me getting bored enough to be distracted by other games.
So happy to see anyaustin shouted out :))) he's been my favourite creator for a while
I love Heat Signature, and I find myself regularly coming back to play a level or two. Always enjoyed chucking people out of space windows. Thank you for helping feed my addiction!
Part of my soul died a little when you brought up Persona's elemental system even though it is just a derivitive of the main Shin Megami Tensei series systems.
Adam, I love your work. My 2.5k-hours-played hurt when you put PoE footage over "games that run out of steam too fast."
I feel that I work best when the items involve most of the experimentation and thus novelty for me. One example is the game Streets Of Rogue, which gives you an item every time you complete a quest, which of course gives you plenty of options to tackle your objectives, and since items are ether one use or have a limited durability for the most part, you can’t quite abuse the same tactic. I will say that this works better for the more stealth based classes with a few exceptions, and less so with the more combat focused ones, but that may be my bias coming through. Another game that manages to cause novelty more then others. Another good game that does novelty well is system shock. What makes it work is it feels like everything has some sort of use, and due to the oppressive atmosphere I feel a need to see what that case is. Hopefully I explained this well.
One thing I think can be easy to forget about game design is that content only adds as much to the game as the player's relationship with that content. If you introduce a cool idea but don't let the player truly master it through expansion on the original ideas, they don't get to reach the satisfying parts of their relationship with that mechanic no matter how cool it is in principle.
In Baldur's Gate 3, there's a fireworks shop with 3 stories. One particularly tanky character is standing at a ledge.
It was immensely satisfying to Eldritch Blast him off the ledge :)
8:30 path of exile is a masterclass on novelty. A decade old game still growing in playerbase even while they're developing their sequel and still breaking records is the way it is for a reason
I've been playing poe since 2014 and I can assure you poe is leaps and bounds better at novelty than any other game I know (and yes, I played a lot of games)
I remember when my brother and I were playing the high rise level in Left 4 Dead 2, and a player playing as the Charger charged him straight out the window. It's an instakill with no chance to respawn, but we weren't even mad.
The Philosopher of Games. Great video as always! :)
...that feeling when you remember that you actually *DO* know what "defenestration" means.
2:51 ah yes, the brazilian faction
And the south Koreans. And the captain americas?
I think all of those are actual Civ VI civilisations
Yet never any guerrillas from Red Faction, not even in the face of Armageddon!
one of my all time favorite games is the puzzle game Carto. It took me 8 hrs to get 100% completion in 1.3 play-thrus (the game lets you replay singe chapters after the first play-thru to discover the easter eggs or try out different solve paths). It has fundamentally simple mechanics that it builds on and only introduces a small handful of truly new things. fits this design ethos perfectly
I would like to say, the character writing and banter is also excelent
YEEEEEEAH IM SO GLAD TO SEE YOU COVER THIS GAME!
This balance between too much of the same and too much difference is something I have become aware of in my search of fun Incremental or Unfolding Games. Some games, like Cookie Clicker or AdVenture Capitalist, don't have much in the way of novelty because everything works the exact same way - you have a single resource that you spend it to increase its income. There's a bunch of different options on how to invest it, but their only difference is in their stats. On the other hand, I occasionally come across incremental games that seem to offer an endless barrage of novelty, but when you step back for a moment, you realize there's even less strategic input from you - you're just waiting to push the one button that will make the number go up fast enough to unlock the next button.
My favorite incremental games are ones where understanding the game makes it progress faster. In some games, that's understanding which of several resources is bottlenecking your progress and focusing on increasing the income of that resource. In other games, it's figuring out how to optimize your use of a limited resource, like space, or time in loop-based games.
Even the best of these games can lose me because a lot of them have a reset mechanic as a core part of the gameplay loop, which allow you to do the same thing from scratch, but slightly faster. Sometimes, however, the reset mechanic will be interesting enough to keep me playing, which usually boils down to changing the rules of the game enough to make it novel again by forcing me to approach it differently, whether that rule change is a boon or a challenge.
Subnautica and Grounded- two classics...
I want to submit for consideration both Airborne Kingdom and The Wandering Village for the same sense of novelty.
It's the reason I'm waiting for Laysara Summit Kingdom and Timberborn to be accessible.
Is the wandering village, by any chance, somehow about fire?
Balatro did this and got me out of a little gaming slump. Every joker completely changes how you interact with cards and they interact with each others
The third infamous game had four powersets, with you only getting access to the fourth during the literal final boss (and only being allowed to use it). It was a cool way to keep the post game stuff interesting.
Starfield and Dave the Diver are the new Adam Millard opps 😭 they catch strays left and right
Gunpoint is one of my favourite games EVER. It just got fast-paced, free strategizing/decision-making so right. I've been waiting so long for something similar when Heat Signature wasn't for me, I'm so excited.
Would love to see chapters in your videos. Keep up to great content!
Fight in tight spaces has the “out of bounds “ mechanic. There is nothing more satisfying than to OTK a boss with a well placed 0 damage push card!
You touched on Path of Exile's skill tree and, me being long time fan of the game, can't stop myself from commenting. In my opinion, that skill tree can be easily misunderstood - it does have a lot of options and novelty, a lot of setups that define builds and change how they play. However, one shouldn't think about every single node as a meaningful choice. You're meant to choose between notable/keystone nodes - the big ones that have great impact on your builds. The small nodes are more of a travel cost between the big ones. They give some small bonuses, but that's mostly for minmaxing (e.g you're missing 5dex, it might be better to grab that dex node instead of 6% increased dmg). But having a limited amount of those travel points makes you plan, you could pick 5 big notables near each other or go for 2 clusters that are on opposite sides of the tree and you end up wasting so many points to get both.
While some game could have a total of 15 bonuses, each costing a different amount of points, I'd say PoE's tree handles it better - cost of various bonuses is defined by the relative distance between them.
But he is right though. Those small nodes are pointless. Hence the change for PoE 2.
@@collapsiblechair9112 Saying the skill tree offers no complexity, interesting decision making or novelty is wrong though. Each individual node you take isn't interesting, but the larger picture on how your skill tree looks in summary, efficient pathing, the way it can be expanded with various kinds of jewels very much is interesting and incredibly complex.
So glad I wasn't the only one that fell in love with this game
Your yakuza experience is exactly why I only 100% games that I enjoy the primary gameplay loop. There have been a lot of games that I dropped halfway through for this very reason.
Did NOT expect a unabomber reference in a video about novelty in games. 4:21
Adam kicking himself for not having played Astro Bot before this video :D
I agree about Tactical Wizards and on some of the examples on the struggle for novelty - but I gotta say, The Unfinished Swan is actually a great example of novelty. It gets an incredible amount of interaction from a single set of verbs over its runtime. They even included some bonus cheats to shake things up on a return playthrough. It’s far more Titanfall 2 than it is COD Ghosts in this respect.
Defenestrator Simulator!
I've had this game in my Steam Wishlist for YEARS!
About midway through the game, towards the end of the Kalan arc (Minor spoiler warning):
There’s that bit where Dell is like “Hey, we’re gonna work with another team.” Of course you see from a mile away that it’s Kennedy,” and the face off scene is just as hilarious as you’d hope-but then the mission starts and you realize you can PLAY as the Less Lethal Pyromancer and I literally gasped in surprise and delight!
10/10 game.
Love your videos. This one really helped me think about the project I'm working on in a new way. Thanks. Also, these are quarter pipes 10:53 not half pipes :D
4:16 DARRELL SPOTTED
Pairing the phrase "[...] explore them at a satisfying level of depth" with footage of Subnautica is a masterstroke of editing.
Ah yes, my favourite trilogy. I wonder what Tom will do next
I’ve heard someone say this game is closer to a puzzle game with its bonus objectives than a true XCOM-like, and it makes sense the more I think about it
8:32 - not sure why, but I just had flashbacks to Bubble Tanks
Great video, slightly tangential but I been thinking recently that one of the biggest problems with Procedural generation in a lot of games is not actually the quality of the content it generates (though I do agree it will never be as good as purpose built dev.) but a lack a restraint. If you are looking for recourses in an endless verity of worlds its highly encouraged to do a quick sweep of a place grab the easy stuff, than never go back because that place now has less things than any of the endless other places you can go. So you mechanically encouraged to view each place as shallow, disposable, and worthless. Where as even the same quality world building were their is a finite amount of space in any given playthrough makes places matter more, while still letting future playthroughs be at least moderately varied.
Fun fact: the second defenestration of Prague caused the 30th year war
Thirty Years' War.
"I CAST DEFENESTRATION"
*enemy flies out like Jin from that Tekken game where Heihachi threw him out of a moving Helicopter*
This video is how I learned one of my favorite games World of Goo, got a sequel! Thanks so much!
This reminds me of how I like changing up my team composition and equipment in different games just for sake of doing so :O Like I don't like finding one routine and repeating it everytime it works meaning I'm willing to take L to just try out new things. Variety is spice of life and all that
I truly mean it when i say I think Tactical Breach Wizards is one of the best games i've played and definitely my game of the year
That's the challenge of making games. It's not finding new and novel mechanic but instead expansion or depth of existing mechanics. Even if devs managed to expand or deepen their game's mechanic, it still depend on players to dive and explore it.
As a guy from Czechia, it delights me to see a game that uses our national sport as its core mechanic xD
This is Genshin Impact's secret sauce, they reuse some mechanics over time, but also add entirely new mechanics to each map added, and weave them together to provide unique play experiences.
I really like your point about the game length being just right in Tactical Breach Wizards. I've grown bored of it right around the final chapter. I think it has a lot do with the fact that it's when your characters' abilities hit some critical mass and you just spam buttons until you win, without any tactics.
I feel like breath of the wild is the best example of this, the game stays novel despite you getting all of your tools in the first 30 minutes of gameplay, its just about being given new environments and ways to use those tools
7:57 what game is that?
Starfield
There's even a wizard with a magic broomstick so she can throw herself out of one window and back in through another.
Possibly even knocking someone else through another window in the process.
11:09 Kishotenketsu! 🎉