Helping Players Hate (or Love) Their Nemesis

[Music] this talk is is called helping players hate or love your nemesis my name is Chris hoagie that's right pronounced hoagie like the sandwich I'm the lead systems designer at monolith I think we'll start off with a video that shows us a little of shadow of war [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause]

all right at meinl if our recent products have been shadow of Mordor and shadow of war and we are based in Kirkland Washington it's a great place to work here's a little pic of our our office building a little bit about myself before these two products I worked on several others some some Lord of the Rings based before that I was in children's games I did several here here a few of them and before our children's games I was designing in other industries I did a little designing for

test systems for the f-16 designing oceanic fiber-optic cables and I'd I lived in Africa for several years so then in the Nemesis system what we like to do is we like to we like to surprise and delight the player and evoke these emotions of love and hate so this talk is going to be about that we're going to get into the Nemesis system we're going to talk about how we do this why we went into it talk about some philosophies of our design and some tricks and a lot of examples all right and here's the summary in case you got to go but the players hate it when you inhibit their progress and insult them and they love it if you help them and entertain them and it really helps to have a long relationship as long as possible and it helps to be a memorable orc to be a nemesis and not only in who they are but what they do so what is the Nemesis

system well a short answer could be it is procedural bosses I like this longer answer better it's an interconnected game mechanics that allow players to develop Nemesis style relationships with systemically generated enemies using systemically generated events and when I say Nemesis style relationships what I mean is that classic relationship that is long term that you see between two main characters over time losers respect and and fear of each other so there's a lot of examples of here's a few that you probably know this is Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty and this is a Beowulf n' and Grendel so the Nemesis system isn't what it's all about it's only a part of the game there's a huge set of game mechanics and systems that exist that only it can Nemesis system can only be enjoyed and even perceived if these other things are in place and are awesome and it isn't a separate thing either it is deeply

integrated it's got its roots and everything the whole team helps to bring that whole thing to life and the Nemesis system can be thought of interesting stories and interesting stories can only exist on top of a sense of normalcy once you establish normalcy you can have the interesting things happen because only when things stand out as interesting than people say oh yeah it's different than everything else I've seen so the best example of the gameplay for the Nemesis system is the revenge loop and in the revenge loop it goes it follows this these steps the orc kills you then you respawn and and this is important time moves forward in our game which means you don't go back to where you were alive you wake up later and then you decide to hunt down the orc and then you you kill the orc and this is a different than what players won of

course they want to kill every orc and they want to never die and when this is deviated from their expectations because when it starts to get really interesting so I have a video of this revenge loop I'm going to show you now and I spliced it and I sped up some parts so that we can get to the really interesting parts and I highlighted them so let's take a look so right now perhaps I will show you a beta mercy nothing personal I'll just follow a notice from my overlord he says Jill the talk I kill the talk actually was a little personal because I really do hate talks [Music]

so here time was forward they see now I'm trying to find the orc again [Music] this is impossible I slaughtered you with my own two hands yeah fine if I could do it once I can do it again [Music] [Music] alright let's talk about when time moves forward and in a lot of single-player games you actually have the option to or you're forced to even go back in time

and what that means is it's part of your thought process so pardon my crude designer drawings but here's me playing the game and I'm thinking to myself oh this is a hard part should I say if maybe maybe I'll reload maybe I reload version a or version B now I'm actually in my own gameplay process I'm like watching myself and my little time travel experiment I think I'll reload B if I fail here otherwise a might be good in our game we are forced to move forward in time you don't have the option to go back and it's freeing in a way it's it helps you focus on what's happening immediately you don't have to play that little experiment because you're all you're focused on is what's going to happen next what just happened and you are end up being very emotionally involved with the immediate events that are happening and the bonuses you have a longer relationship with the orcs because now they have a

memory that they can hold so in the revenge loop here are the emotions that go through the typical player like oh I'm so frustrated I just died and then most people they abandon whatever they're doing and they're like that orc he's dead I'm going after him then they hunt him down they find him and then they kill him like oh this is so amazing that felt good and I liken it to a rollercoaster so like I hated that part oh here we go yeah that was a great hill that we went down so here's the key is that we'd like the negative emotions we really like it because it leads to that glorious result in fact if it's strong negative it leads to a stronger positive so we want that rollercoaster hill to be higher if possible it's also similar to doing hard work so here's a fruit tart if I make a fruit tart it's a lot of work to put into it but man after you finish it tastes way better so we have support for this here's a couple

Georgia are Martin says fiction is about emotional resonance about making us feel things on a primal and visceral level and so I interpret that as emotions are the whole point if you're not going to do the emotions why I even do it so here's the article we got when we released out of war so this art is article it's not like I'm being bullied by mozu that's this way so Oh awesome this that this article is very satisfying to get because it shows that all right he's on his way up that roller coaster and a few days later he wrote two subsequent one and he shows like yeah this is it was proof to us this is working like this this is really where it's all about so this leads me to philosophy number one so I have a bunch of philosophies and by the way there are

kind of all swirling and all over the place so all right they're not really part of a list it's not exhaustive I have nothing seven so um here's philosophy number one we want to maximize the hate why because at the resolution is way more sweeter and there's two parts of this one of it is that the orcs are mean and the other is we want to get you to hate the orc not hate the game and so let's talk about orcs being mean there's a couple there's a lot of tricks we do but we basically trying to do it everywhere we can one example is the kill animations you saw on that example when that orc kills you we show those brutal it was supposed to look painful you know tallien is suffering and then we stands over here and talks to you he insults you he says things that are really aggravating it positive possible or memorable and then when he's promoted he's like yeah I'm stronger now because of your failure and then we also spend a lot of time focusing on that works face and the next

time it meets you of course he insults you again why you die do you I can kill you again you're so easy so talk about the Deaf taunts death taunts is the moment right when you're dying and he he looks over you over your dead dying body and then he says something insulting I have a little clip showing a few examples of being insulting and memorable you're the best that men can offer this war will be disappointingly short to debate made into must be frustrating losing the way you did just makes his order more fun for me [Music]

[Music] maybe a few times orkap a war chief or it could be Overlord was about that sad end or do you like to think we were almost friends okay we want to get the player to focus their hate on the orc not the game and the key to this is the players have to feel like there was a solution available to them within their grasp something they could have done to avoid it off only hi here's some examples if only I won that last chance minigame if only I got Intel I would have known he has that special move that killed me oh I forgot to run away he's run away in

our game so I here's a story about this during development of shadow of Mordor we were putting in the the trait no chance and before we had the banner that showed across the bottom of the screen it was partially working and it was implemented we were experiencing them the game Bob Roberts said oh this feature is terrible it makes me feel terrible why are we even doing this and then the banner finally got in the game and he said oh yeah okay now it's fine you know it's fine because it means I could have known if I had done research on that orc which a lot of times you need to do I would have seen as no chance it would have changed the way I approached him my behavior I could have avoided it so let's go back to that that loop that I was talking about so you first meet the captain and he insults you and then he then you get killed and this is the moment of aggravation of course the orcs promoted and I want to point out that you don't have to be killed by a captain you could be killed

by a grunt all right so and that's kind of the beauty of our game it's not just the captain's any grunt who happens to get a lucky shot on you can kill you and then he'll be promoted to captain and then he'll be just like all those other captains and then of course you hunt him down and you have the OP as a player to give him a death threat and I'll explain that it means you give him a warning I'm coming for you a message and then he prepares and he's get stronger why would you ever do that it's because when you do get them your loot is is way better so then you meet the captain again he insults you again and then you finally if you're lucky defeat him and a lot of times they give last words if they can and then you finally yeah this is a good feeling right so last words let's talk about that a second last words is when you get him on his knees it doesn't always happen but it happens with orcs who you know if the circumstances are right and this is the orc that you you know really well he'll say something to

you and they're they're meant to be memorable and emotion provoking and I have a little video showing a few examples of last words do you think you're better than us you enjoyed the kill don't you catch some drops of my blood Ranger carry it with you so we can be close it was so much more to add maybe you won't see me again but there's someone who will come for you he is my brother by blood and he will come for yours what are you waiting for I don't have any last words except for war just said

so a dilute when you do a revenge loop and you would kill that that guy your your loot is even stronger than before giving you a better pay out and it's personalized this is an illustration of a loot a ring that it has a quote from the orc who you just killed and his name so you can always look back at your loot and say oh yeah I got this one from mozu and if you happen to put a death threat on him then your your loot is even stronger so a philosophy number two we want to maximize the length of the orcs story and by this I mean like the roller coaster right we want the ride to be really long because it gets it it gets better you feel all these you know bad but yet good back so the easiest way to maximize the length of the story is the orc should not die and the easiest way to prevent that works from dying is you make them really hard to kill this is a potential problem because you get this loop somebody meets the work a second

time and then they die again and then they get double angry and then they meet them again and then they died can another triple ax oh my god if they're able to break out then they're triple happy and they're really feeling good about this moment and the mechanism they have to break out of this is they have a lot of tools at the disposal for how to how to approach and kill this orc and it could be a like wait till later until I'm stronger could be a bring my allies with me use beasts you stealth but if they can get get out of that loop it's really glorious it's important that every orc that you meet is beautiful and here's a trick that we use to make sure every orc is beatable is that each one has a built-in weakness they can't shed it as they grow so in this little diagram this orc has I put on the red is a strengths and his weaknesses got a little yellow one there which is secretly marked as he'll never shed this an example of a strengths might be I'm am unifier and a weakness might be I can be killed by fire so as he grows he will

randomly grow we don't quite know what's gonna happen to him or the experiences he's gonna have but we're sure that there's always a way that you can kill him and so an example of that might be he's simply killed by stealth attacks which you could have killed him when he still tan but as he grew you didn't realize that but but they're still away there's still a way that you can get that guy so we liked the longer story so I'm gonna add a few things to this diagram I'm talking about longer stories all right so here's the humiliation one of my favorite features the orc doesn't actually kill you as an exception he looks over you and he says you're not even yeah even worse killing he insults you and then he walks off and then you course you can find him again and re-engage some political players forget that they can run away or the orc will try to run away this is a change from shadow of Mordor in shadow of war we realized we want these stories to be longer so we thought really hard about how to help the orc escape and aside from just

running and other tactics while he's running we have a death-defying this is a trait that some orcs have at the moment you get him down he's on his knees you think he's going to give us last words and all anything looks up and he says I'm not done yet and he gets a breath of second win and he's back up when you have to fight him so again of course you may not defeat him at that point he has another chance or there's a tricky escape he looks at but soon he goes I got one more trick up my sleeve and then he hits you and then he runs off screen and he escaped now that's kind of a cheap shot so we can't use that too much but if it's an exception once in a while it's kind of a kind of a cool story and the orc lives to have a longer story you can always shame the orc this is when you momentarily make him suffer and he'll go down a level I'll talk more about shame a little later or of course you can recruit him he'll be on your team and that's awesome because and now you you like him and you want him to survive and now his story won't be prolonged I'll talk more about that guide - and then she cheating death so

Genie death is really powerful because you've already gone through they I got my loot I'm so happy I killed him and then he basically announced to you you thought you killed me but I really wasn't dead I'm back and of course that's really emotional like what I spend so much effort trying to kill you and now you're back and then it can be awesome and it can be terrible like during development of shadow of Mordor we had to make sure that Loup didn't like go out of control because if a guy comes back too much then it gets aggravating but a little bit it's awesome so this is where we control it right there we say well maybe he doesn't always cheat death so who cheats death so we need cheating death to be an exception it can't happen to every orc it has to be an amazing thing what just happened oh I didn't know that could happen in our game oh yeah that does happen with something that kind of thing so we do is we keep track of the interaction you have with every Ark and they have a little score we called the player

interaction score or piss for short yeah we thought that was really clever name so then the if their piss is really high then at the moment of their death they have a higher chance to to cheat death and then that chance is reduced over time so we we can't let them cheat death infinitely and that's of course you cut off their head everybody knows if you cut off the head then they're not coming back they're dead for sure alright but you can't control that the way the game mechanics work is when you get an orc down you're not sure whether you're going to use that animation that cuts off his head or you can attack statues chest or a number of other animations so we do something else here which is if there is an orc who is a candidate for cheating death like we can tell you he really hate this guy then we we actually protect him we say no no you're not gonna actually cut off his head because we would a chance if that chance that he can come back and have a longer story and then after he

cheats death a couple times then we're like okay now now you can go ahead and cut his head off because we know that that feeling of cutting that orcs head off you're like why don't you stay and then his head goes off like oh yeah that's really it really feels great and this chart shows the survivability of orcs so for a typical player I mean there's all kinds of players but typically you will meet 85 captains who you will kill in your first encounter with them and then you'll need 14 who you will have two encounters and then about four who you will have three encounters and this area is the area where you have a nemesis style relationship you have you start to care really like who is this guy why does he keep defying me or why does he keep escaping or why is he haunting me he keeps chasing me down and killing me now you might say oh 85 is a lot that seems like a waste like all those orcs do we you just threw this dead instantly well I mean that you have to have an exception right if that 85 was like as low as all of the others then it

wouldn't be an exception for these long-term relationships and actually we root for these orcs when we're in play tests and we're watching players play our game we see an orc die we're like a local B cheats death wouldn't that be great wouldn't that prolong his story it would be it'd be so fantastic with philosophy number three we don't know who your nemesis is going to be why because it's all random it's all about what you do in the game so it's really better if your nemesis is actually as a result of your actions or interactions so because then you're more emotionally involved it's because of what you did or didn't do so what we do is we basically just cede the world with lots of orcs of varying types and if you make a mistake well well that's a opportunity for that new relationship to start and by the way these these two guys bruised and Zog aren't are not the same as the rest of the orcs they are forced upon you as a

player you have to be disguised but after they finish telling their story then they're basically released into the system you can do whatever you want with them oh yeah and you gotta remember your nemesis or your works that you mean this is really really important and so I'm gonna sort of shift that and talk about remembering orcs for a while how do you if you can't remember an orc how are you gonna have any opinions about them how do you have any relationship with him so how do you make anything memorable so you're gonna meet someone how do you make yourself memorable so that they will remember you well I talked about two things already I do something that will impact their emotions have a long time meeting them or many interactions and now I talk about my friend Darryl okay this guy I went to school with him years ago and what's interesting about him is I haven't talked to him since I

went to school and he doesn't know that I'm talking about him now and he he wasn't even that good of a friend he's one of my friends you know but he wasn't my best of friends and yet at the same time I I remember him better than some of my close friends why is that what about him makes him memorable so I'll tell you a little bit about his personality he was a little bit opinionated and he was kind of assertive and he but he loved life and so he had he had a really strong personality and so this is my theory which is it's not about being likable it to be memorable it's more about having a unique identity so we've tried to make orcs have a unique identity so that they can be memorable and if you want somebody remember you have a unique identity it helps okay so I know another point is breaking the norm doing something really strange will help you be memorable so

I'm gonna tell story now about Brian Pamela Tuan and he's a friend of mine at monolith and he told me an interesting story that he did long ago and for a girl he liked to try to make himself really memorable by doing something really unusual actually kind of an embarrassing story maybe you promise not to tell it but I don't think he'd mind because it really really is applicable here so what he decided to do is he decided to dress up yeah yeah you said you weren't gonna be her all right I I guess I don't have a story about brain actually actually I I

actually don't really have a story about Brian we uh we decided to orchestrate a little or confrontation here to to illustrate breaking out of the norm so because of this moment of conflict we wanted you what we wanted you all to say oh my god what's happening maybe to make this speech a little bit more memorable yeah thank you okay let's how do we design memorable orcs well we usually start with their identity here's a guy Gollum firebrand err I mean it's procedurally chosen but this guy if his name is that we already know a lot of things about him let's talk about his visuals for first I mean he's probably going to be fire related he's got a fire weapon you see probably a branding iron we can make other things interesting and memorable about him like he's got this goggles maybe you'll say

oh that's kind of weird if it's not something you see often in the game it'll stick out as dialogue can stick out as unusual his taunts during his combat we have this thing called mannerisms which is it's kind of like a subtle thing that they say over and over not all orcs have this but once in a while an orc will just repeat themselves over it's time every time he hits you it's time now you might get really annoyed at that in the same way that Princess Bride like stop saying that and so that was the point is that it becomes irritating and memorable in combat they might have specific attacks that remember oh that's the guy with that one attack other behaviors they might have he have certain kinds of ambushing maybe he shows up certain times repeatedly it becomes part of his identity or he lives anyway we try to do as many things as possible to make him memorable I'm going to show you some examples this is the maggot so he has a problem he he he's suffering from maggots he's he's got like maggots eating away at him and

he complains about every time you see him he he uses that opportunity to talk about the maggots eating away she can feel them in his scalp eating away and so when you look at this guy is he is he terrible or wonderful well if you think this is terrible awesome because you have an emotional reaction if you think he's wonderful awesome because you have an emotional reaction so it turns out he becomes memorable because of this of this unique identity he's has and and the more time you think about him and why he's this way and how he feels where some more memorable he'll be which means the more likely you'll have an emotional response when he kills you or escapes or whatever here's some more tricks we use we use name dropping in death taunts the lean over and they'll say to you it was Grisha who kills you remember that and then maybe Grisha will be something that you remember so that when you go head them down it'll be the I he has that guy is Krisha we also do this we the orcs

reminds you of your history last time you ran away and of course the player doesn't always remember but it really helps if the orc reminds them oh yeah I guess I guess it did run away and then it'll reinforce that and knowing it'll become the truth so philosophy number four we want to actually maximize the correlations between their identity and the things that we do to help you remember them so you never know how they're going to be noticed we ask playtesters after they play the game who was your nemesis and what do you remember about him and we were surprised it wasn't always visual sometimes those audio sometimes was combat sometimes it was the way the orc found them or behaved with them and so basically when I do everything we can so that they become memorable so this guy is is the diseased he also has a problem you know he's got there's the diseased face and arm and he's got some boils on his Jessie's got poison things around his belt so we trying to do everything we

can they only got one chance usually saw that chart they're probably going to die the first meeting but if they don't this is awesome this is a good good guy to have as your nemesis and we try to use outrageous things whenever we can in tropes help and by the way this part of the ORAC visually is way more impactful than the see he's got a belt around his bellies got Jara's with the high balls and that's all cool and all but it's not as impactful to the player as everything around the head and shoulders area that's something we learned here's another orc the dwarf hater so here's this concept before he was made and then they got the ones in game shot so this starts off as an idea what if we have an orc who just hates dwarves and it's all he it's all he thinks about it like talks about what would he look like well maybe he has warfare finnaly maybe he collects dwarf beards and dwarf skulls and wraps around us as as jewelry maybe he finds dwarf equipment dwarf how many it doesn't quite fit but he shoves it on his head anyway maybe he is a

weapon we didn't get we didn't do the weapon but this is our Diaz that it was a crow cage with a dead dwarf in it and when he strikes it's a dwarf bobbling around side that was technically challenging so we did implement an obscure this trade he has a hate of dwarves so is the only guy in the game who has hate of dwarves because it makes sense for him and then another thing is that the game doesn't have any dwarves so that it's not triggered unless you deranged his mind in which case he thinks you're a dwarf and then of course he'll become enraged at you so one more this is the blast he's you can just look at him and tell a lot of things about him right away he belongs to the Machine tribe and if you get to know the tribes you'll already know a lot about him yeah you know you can tell by looking at a base in the Machine tribe just got grenades around him you kind of tell where he's found he's got a fire weapon he's got this thing on his back turns out it's a flame cannon so he'll bring

you with that if you can so you might say hey hoagie this is this is a lot of specific crafted content for a procedural game you start talking off this is a procedural enemies well yeah yes I know the game is has a lot of systemic mechanisms for putting things together events and orcs and situations and when he gets down to the granular level we do have a lot of finely crafted things and it's a ton of content but the two of them are blended to to try to make it unclear about how the system really works philosophy number five the scope and nature of the design should be unclear to players this is intentional we don't want players to feel like this is a mechanical thing we don't players to figure it out we want them to be instead surprised then delighted there should be a feeling of discovery and wonder what

else is out there what haven't I found yet oh look I found something really great I'd like to find more this is the type of feelings we were trying to evoke from the design and I think I'm going to tell my friends about this this game alright let's talk about telling friends alright so this became a metric for several of us on the design team is this feature that we're considering implementing gonna be great is it so great that players will blog about it and what makes players blog about a future it's got to be amazing right it's got to be so amazing they practically fall out of their chair so it turns out they blog for like three different reasons and we focus on number one most of the time it's they meet something really interesting unique or number two they they have a lot of emotions I'll tie it up when this this situation they want to talk about it or number three they want to talk about how great they

were and how they conquered their problems and then when players hear this here these they especially the first one they think to themselves well what else is out there I didn't see that maybe maybe I should I should explore the game more and that's great because now players are questioning their understanding of the scope of the game they're waiting to be surprised and delighted even more and to facilitate all this telling a friends we use natural language in the announcements and the orc the orc dialogue for example this is a banner that comes up and screamed who shocked the unkillable for example is the random enemy became deranged look at that's already in sentence format using words that are easy to use in your blog if it happens to be something that happens to you and is worthy of talking about a natural language so if lastly number 6 exceptions we love exceptions we love exceptions - exceptions this is something that we

think about a lot and it includes the development process which supports making exceptions which is tricky because how how do you do that well if you can manage to support development process which allows people to discover new ideas halfway through oh we should had this thing I didn't think about it before yeah if you added sometimes those are the best things they lead to more memorable and interesting situations so here's what I think it normally takes this forward-thinking game programmers what are the features that designers are going to ask for later how is this feature going to expand in the future data-driven content so the designers can do a lot of tweaking of things late in this cycle and a flexible production schedule so that we can add things a little bit late oh can we get that recording session we have these new lines can we fit it in oh maybe yeah okay we have to be okay also would not all the content being

found we do a lot of work on these specific stories and we have to be ok as developers and the players not going to see everything maybe somebody will see it but maybe not each person will see it because what that'll lead to is maybe people will hear about it from others maybe little question their understanding of the scope of the design really it's all about having exceptions the feeling of exceptions leads to you remembering the experience is remembering those orcs so that you can have a relationship with those orcs so that you can develop those emo we are trying to evoke okay I got us some examples of exceptions this is a the blight and the claw here's two examples of transformed rolls and when we say transformed rolls they change who they are so instead of just cheating death and coming back and saying ah I'm not dead yet it will say I'm not dead but in the way that you killed me you have transformed me the first guy the blight was poisoned by you and he comes

back and maybe he was someone else too like the sneak or something more generic before and now he says this poison it has like changed Williams gun inside me talks about how he feels about it how he's stronger because of it and now he has poison based attacks and he's really aggressive so the other guy the claw you probably killed him by stabbing him and cutting off his arm and then he comes back and he says I am now the claudin reborn and he shows you his claw all the time you can and talks about it and he tries to kill you with it and these guys are are fairly unique we can only allow the player to see these once as soon as you see these twice they're know they're now a system right there now mechanical they're so unique here's two more the Avenger if if an orc ambushes you because he you know he came because you're attacking his blood brother and then he manages to kill you he will

change his title he is now the Avenger because he avenged his blood brother and the other guy the uncatchable if an orc is a manages to escape from you like three times I think then he will change his name to be the uncatchable or the elusive in this case so I'm for cheating death I already told you this is an exception and then I've just described you transformed roles where now they're even stronger because they see the death we have a double exception you cut off my head but I'm not dead these two guys the the kind of right is the stitch who has is his self stitched back together you can see the stitches around his neck where his friends pulled his body together quickly put it this is the story he tells when he comes back to you like I'm still alive and it's because I have stitched me back together and the other guy is the machine he he's put together with with metal parts and he

says this because you cut me in half you have created the machine it's because of you you're the reason I'm alive they're your nemesis hopefully I mean you might kill him right away but sometimes it works out great so how do you make an exception well obviously you have to establish what is normal and then you have to subvert what is what is normal and really that's all about a stop the adjusting the frequency of something so with regard to humiliation let's think about the chance of something happening zero to 100% and obviously if it happens a little bit it's an exception and if it happens all the time we're off and it's considered common and so Humiliator is live at about 60% in our game right in that space where you feel like oh that was kind of odd but then if you see the second time or like I had that thing again it's on the orc itself it's not like him deciding to do it so work will be a Humiliator and he'll he'll humiliate you over and over every time he kills you because that's a great story

all right so an exception the first time you see it like what was that and then after a while you're like okay I get it and then it's in relation to what it's normal so somewhat related but not not really is what I say to my kids around dessert you're not allowed to have seconds until you have firsts yeah okay other other features that feel like exceptions this is the sword breaker so what happens sometimes is if you if you get killed by a no lock he'll look and he'll look over you you over your dead body and instead of just taunting you and being done he'll reach down and he'll take from you your sword that you were just now using he'll hold it up and say this sword is nothing to me and he'll snap it and shatter it in all pieces ago and why would we do that it's because we're trying to evoke these emotions and in fact this is so strong we were worried it would be too the players would quit at that moment so we gave a moment we gave it a message right after this think don't worry don't worry you can get your sword back go hunt this guy down and kill him and then

your loot will be your sword again but stronger and so people do that and it's very satisfying sex so satisfying that some players they speculate to themselves like how how can I get this to happen again but it's a yeah doesn't happen very much there's another one where an enemy will ambush you but instead of just showing up an ambush on you and saying hey I'm here he'll show up with one of your buddies in his arms and then he'll say his line like this follow way that you have is worth less than a slice of snack and then the follower is down on his knees bleeding out moments until death and now you're faced with a situation like oh I want to save them I save my buddy but this guy keeps hitting me I can't do it ah we were trying to establish an exception with heightened emotions for the moment here's another exception when orc normally meets you they just usually announce themselves here's an exception to that he's so lazy he can't even be

bothered to talk you instead oh you have to do it so he goes you're ugly and you're gonna die alright let's talk about shaming so when you shame it when you shame an orc what you're doing is you're putting your hands on his head and you're using your your elf magic to get into his mind and torture him and it was originally designed as an outlet for people who hate their orcs so much their enemy so much they're like killing is not even good enough for you I want to torture you actually it ended up being a mechanic where you you you need to lower their level so you shame him so that you can lower their level so that you can they can be low enough that you can recruit them onto your team and by the way if you feel bad about torturing these guys that's kind of cool because now you have these emotions like oh should I be doing this you know talons kind of am i kinda mean - normally when you when

you shame them they're usually just angry about it they'll talk about it about how you shame me never again they'll have a little scar on their on their face once in a while they'll be deranged which means you have affected their mind in a permanent way they will never speak normally again instead they adopt this weird phrase often related to who they were before and they'll just repeat that over and over again some players have regrets about this oh did I just destroy his mind and then you can also get the double exception which is now you've arranged him but you created a maniac this guy will become the strongest orc you've ever met and will chase you down and hopefully it'll be your nemesis of course we don't we don't know okay some examples of exceptions that we got because we were flexible late development okay so in shadow of mordor we got the screamer if you played the game most everybody met a screamer ork which is basically just screams he

doesn't say anything it's an exception and when people meet that they're like it's kind of weird it's a little unnerving so what do we do we quickly ran around cut the lines we got the body animations we used to burn it all the logic and got it in and it worked great so in shadow of war here's here's a orc we got in kind of lay one word I liked his title because as soon as you find out who he is you can't wait to hear what he's gonna say you know he's got to say one word and only one word and it turns out he says it didn't worried each time you meet him depending on the situation so he's kind of interesting then there's these guys bass and gasps so you only meet bass and guys if you play through the game and you gotten through the story of bruised now bruised you have to meet and he's a scripted narrative kind of work who we really like and he he had a real good personality and he had an Australian accent and after you have to down with him or like can we pull along the story yeah so we added these guys

and they come there also helps trillion accents and have the same personality and they show up really angry about how you you're mean to Bruges now we have this this orc trade called decoys so a tricky orcs will sometimes have a gang and their gang will all be dressed up just like them and even have the same iconography above them you can't tell who is who and hopefully you'll be a little confused as you're fighting this is the real guy or is just just a decoy and then this is one of our favorite is promoting to overlord if an orc kills you instead of like just him being promoted a little bit he's promoted to overlord and now you can't actually find him until you get into that fortress to afford assault and you meet him in the throne room that's really great too here's an orc I'm gonna show you a video of the inscrutable he's designed so that you can't quite understand what he's saying speak blood

there speak cuts it's all I directly you may wait while I rip your throat out alright exceptions are only appreciated if if the players understand what's going on and it comes down to messaging sometimes it isn't enough just to have dialog explaining what's going on you got to do more we use the army screen we use UI banners we try to do more and the we need to emphasize this even more because sometimes there's confusion in the army screen we have some stories told or inquest complete screens hey this just happened by the way sometimes it's text sometimes the symbology audio does a great part too sometimes the audio or the music will hash in such a way some of this subconsciously telling you hey something really interesting is about to happen pay attention here's a story about a messaging and how it kind of worked kind

of didn't work so we we saw a couple blogs of people who experienced this a follower will cheat death and normally they'll just be angry at you I know looked like this but sometimes the follow rules to be loyal and they'll say they'll say hey you thought I was dead but I'm back boss and some players don't quite understand that and they'll you'll start hitting the orc before they get a chance to swing at them of course it's a follower and the follower just goes oh and then then the second exception kicks in which is if you hit your follower too many times then he'll betray you and then you get this message and that's when the blogger says wait what just happened you mean he was on my side this whole time and I just forced him to betray me and now I have to get him back again as a follower so that's the interesting story and how messaging is really important so I talked so much about hey let's talk about love so it's best to have both love and hate so I would categorize there's two types of love we want to

focus on one is nemesis withdrawal and the other is attachment to followers so for nemesis withdraw what we mean is oh that was that was my favorite enemy oh is he really dead now I had so much fun with him I hope he comes back we hear this a lot from players and so that's nice we don't always control exactly what's happening it has random elements to it but we like to foster that type of of emotion also attachment to followers it's natural when you have a follower and you spend time nurturing him you have a feeling like oh I'm responsible for this guy I hope he does well you spend time thinking about what he's doing you spend time thinking about like how he can be more powerful so that he can be a better follower the even the act of recruiting him is you saying to the the game - I want to like this orc I have decided I'm going to care about him the

other is it works being helpful and that works can be helpful in a number of ways of course they can help you kill enemies which is the biggest deal and they can bring your gifts this is a new feature we got into a patch recently when sometimes a follower will just show up out of nowhere and say hey boss here's a here's a treasure orc and he'll kill them for you and then the best is the Savior moments Savior moments is when you think you're gonna die and the orc saves you this doesn't happen very much but when it does is spectacular here's the video saved your guts there I did okay and that and yet uh is there always the inevitable betrayal will the followers always betray me well it is their nature

it's kind of what their society is built on they often do not always it's also interesting to note that Italian and chem caliber import don't really like the orcs as much as you the player do it's really they see the orcs as tools or or just they want to kill them but but betrayals are kind of neat in a way that they can bring orcs back into the game as an enemy and now you've got another hill of the roller coaster more emotions to experience if you really like the orc you want to recruit them go ahead if you can sometimes you can and then you can go through that process again try to keep him if you if he dies you can always use your use your necromancy skill late-game and raise them from the dead and then you have a zombie follower and then you won't betray you then of course that's a trade-off because you just just groans and okay so here's an exception about

love it talked a lot about love here is an exception to the love [Music] but I didn't mention your beauty no sir they did not forever okay is it terrifying or glorious well either way it's great for me it's both so in summary so we don't know what the player is gonna do so there's so many random elements to the game we just seed the world with possibilities and we see what's gonna happen in general we we can pick the good candidates for specific events we can set up the timing of the

events but we don't know if you're going to like the orc if it's gonna ever be an orc you remember or if you're gonna kill him right away we're just trying to encourage these exceptional stories of hate and love so I went to Reddit and I found a story to illustrate this is deoxys who who wrote this story he was killed by a grunt and the grunt was promoted to the gambler and he was angry so he decided to hunt down that gambler and then he recruited him he's gonna be in my team and together they killed enemies together and it was really great he felt good about that and then he was betrayed by the gambler and killed oh now he was so angry so he hunted him down and he says I'm gonna punish this guy worse than definitely shame him and he he lowered his level and he found him again a shameless second time so he lower his level even more and at that moment the gambler became deranged and instead of speaking he started to just say you never gave me a chance you never gave me a chance and he felt really bad

and so he recruited him again and then they were together and then one time he was even saved by this by the gambler and he said this is the greatest orc ever a good example of success right a nemesis story even better than the stories are people talking about how they were Phil felt emotionally about the game how the game impact them emotion here's a couple quotes I'll read the first one I went from seething rage to over zealous excitement in 20 minutes so yeah this is really really satisfying to see this it means we succeeded in inspiring players it's feel these emotions hate and and love the satisfaction of defeating their nemesis eventually so that's the end of my talk I hope you found it inspiring and memorable okay and

I know how much time we have okay we got we got five minutes if anybody wants to ask questions consider joining us at monolith on what we're working on next yeah thanks yeah hello so this mechanic of you need to get defeated first to get this revenge loop and get a better loot and so on I've got this mechanic exploited at some point or as I wasn't was a danger that okay I get better loot if I let the orc defeat me cuz then I can do the revenge yeah it's not happened yeah that's a good question so could people exploit it by by dying intentionally to get better loot and so they become more powerful well if you do you will have an orc who then also gets a nice story and he sometimes you don't

always kill him successfully so you're already engaging in a way that we want you and the impact of the loot is is minor enough that the variety of the orcs is great enough we don't know if it's going to actually we doubt that it will actually impact your successes such as substantial degree yeah do you have the dates are on the most number of times someone was killed by the same walk well we do know that some people intentionally died the same work over and over on purpose I mean we have stories of em and data to show that like I'm going to shame it orc down to level one and then I'm gonna die over and over and over and over until he is maxed level and then I'm going to shame him back down and so that we have data that shows like you know several hundred times but I don't think that's accident I think that's all intentional it's hard to know what players are doing intentionally so yeah awesome talk thank you what would your recommendations be for someone who wanted to make a similar system but with a different play mechanic like you were trading with the

orcs or dating the orcs yeah gosh I don't know I it it's such a monumental amount of work and it's so complicated so I hope you have a large team and I guess my advice would be focus really narrowly if you can because it's it's going to end up exploding in scope before you know it and try to make things memorable I think that's a key yeah all right thanks everybody [Applause]