Tuning the Muzzle Velocity of the Plasma Rifle Bolt on Legendary Difficulty in HALO

[Music] good afternoon everybody welcome to my talk design a detail first I'd like to thank GDC and I'd especially like to thank them for putting me up against the doom post-mortem I'm sure that our audiences don't overlap at all so please turn off your pagers and this is an advanced design Tech Talk so I'm going to talk very fast we're gonna cover a lot of stuff if you don't get it all don't worry about it we're gonna put the slides up and I'll stick around for questions for a long time afterward and I'm just going to wait until so many laughs the joke that's on the screen and then Thank You Marty and then I'm gonna go on so Who am I I have 13 years of industry experience mostly as a game designer on all of the Halo games especially the first three with just a little bit on ODST and reach I did the

balancing of the campaign difficulty and also the multiplayer side as well as the tuning of all the weapons characters vehicles and other gameplay elements my opinions do not represent those of Bungie management which is probably why I don't work there anymore so last year I gave a talk that was inspired by this painting it's the Sunday afternoon on the garage shot and what's really interesting about this painting is that closer that you get to it the more detail comes out and so that inspired me to do a talk where I took a really trivial detail from halo examined it exhaustively and tried to explain the design process behind it and draw Universal conclusions from that there's a pretty popular talk so the GCC guys said come back next year you can do any talk you want so this is going to be my talk about what non designers need to know now I'm just kidding GDC one of the sequel so I was looking around for inspiration

and there's a great set a series actually of paintings by Monet where he paints haystacks which is not maybe the most inspiring object but what he does is he paints them from several different angles in different during different seasons different times a day with under different lighting and so his theme was to revisit the same subject matter multiple times and so my idea was I revisit the same design decision over several different games last year I spent a little bit too much time on the abstract I didn't get to the meet enough so I'm gonna start right in with the detail and anytime I get abstract and I'm gonna have blue slide so you can tune out if that's not interesting to you so the muzzle velocity is the speed the projectile comes out of the gun of the plasma rifle which is sort of the alien SMG comes out in bolts that's the name of the projectile on legendary difficulty which is the hardest difficulty in the game across the Halo franchise and if you don't know what

hail is I don't know why here so isn't this the same talk as last year how much more can you say about a weapon projectile well the sniper rifle was primarily a multiplayer talk whereas this is gonna focus largely on single-player a sniper rifle is shot by the player whereas the plasma rifle is predominantly shot at the player I talked a lot about active flow sort of cadence and rhythm firing a weapon this is going to be much more about reactive flow the environments effect on the player the sniper rifle was primarily balanced for a competitive environment whereas the plasma rifle is tuned for a difficulty level which brings me to the most I think important point last the last year's talk was was about balancing and this year's talk is about tuning so what's the difference well balance is really fundamentally about longevity it's about being able to play the game indefinitely without the developer having to change things or fix things and so what you do is you you design an

element passes you try to keep the game in a in a state that is continually playable and then you release the community and they remove all the stuff they don't like and what you have left is something that at least some small set if you're lucky is going to continue playing indefinitely and it has nothing to do with fun in fact most the time once the community gets them with the game it isn't fun anymore on the other hand tuning is all about fun it happens all at once and usually if it happens for one player it's going to happen for most of your audience and it needs to happen before release or it's just never going to happen it's very wispy it's it's hard it's hard to nail down just what exactly is fun and that's one of the things I'm going to try to tackle with the blue chunks and it has nothing to do with balance a lot of times precisely because something is unbalanced is the reason why it's fun so you know how looking back on Star Wars you thought it was about Luke and really it's all about Darth Vader looking back

on halo we could have named a plasma rifle because really that's what it's all about so before I start getting into halo wanna I want you to imagine that you're standing on a stage much like I'm sitting on a stage and you're in a room full of people and they're laughing at you now if you're doing stand-up comedy that's great if you're doing nude modeling not so good have you done if you these three pockets you know as long as it's only some laughter so really context is what I'm trying to get out here it colors every experience that you're gonna have and it's very individual it has to do with your personal history and what skills and experience you have and it really determines what you're expecting well your standards are you'll find that for a single game they often share a context they have a shared background and expectations and it's completely outside of your control perhaps you can choose your context by choosing your audience but most likely you're gonna inherit an

audience that you're gonna have to please so when we started halo one we looked at our competition which was Warcraft two until we stop being an RTS and then it was quake 2 which has some really unique sort of visible projectile weapons and some really common guards and just a ludicrously fast Space Marine we played a lot of tribes which has similar kind of weapons and also this jetpacking ludicrously fast space soldier unreal even more unique weapons and a really fast space soldier and then we looked at it even our own game where we had the the four which shot this slow projectile and he was a really fast security officer so another aspect of context that you need to look at is the community that's formed by your audience for us it was going to be myth fans but we weren't

really sure they were gonna be action gamers that are they gonna be in a halo there are mat gamers who at the time we're feeling a little betrayed because we're gonna be on Microsoft's console and there were Marathon fans but marathon fans totally embraced the mouse and were they going to be able to switch over to be with a controller on the other hand we had this new Xbox community which we didn't really know a ton about we thought it was gonna be younger so maybe less sophisticated and they were gonna have to do with controllers so how is that going to hurt their input so we decided we're gonna try to bring both of these audiences in but it turns out the most important context for the plasma rifle is the in-game context so in the story the plasma rifle is used by the Covenant elites sort of the backbone of the alien menace it's their assault rifle and technically we couldn't push a lot of enemies on screen so each of these guys had to be pretty powerful so we needed a kind of a potent weapon in multiplayer we really wanted to use every single player weapon in multiplayer not just because then you'd be playing the same

game in both arenas but because we didn't really have that many weapons in Halo one but we didn't really have a clear idea of what the multiplayer roll was going to be or the plasma rifle now in single-player there's two things that are important and one it's the most common scavenged weapons so inhale you're always picking up weapons off the ground and since a lot of enemies use it you know using those weapons yourself quite often and also it's the most common enemy projectile coming at you which means for difficulty since it's the most common enemy projectile it's it's a very large factor as goes the plasma rifle there goes the rest of the game and actually when it comes to the franchise it's the most common enemy projectile and it's sort of astounding how the entire series can be defined by one element but if it's going to be one element it's going to be that thing that you're constantly getting shot at so of course you know if you can't think about me you know I'm really into paper designs and so I'm not going to show you the paper design for the halo on plasma rifle because it was terrible but here are some choice of quotes it misfires in

the brain and does AoE damage underwater we didn't have rain and we didn't have water and that was the first line like that was the most important thing the primary trigger is an instantaneous visible beam which is not how it ended up at all because it's not fun to get shot at something that that travels instantaneously you're supposed to hold the trut second trigger to charge the over-over charge except for halo doesn't have a second trigger so I don't know where that came from it's more of effective than other weapons against energy shields so at least you know we got some of that in there and it also disables mirror fields faster than any other weapon except for the disruptor and there's no mirror fields in Halo and I don't know what a disruptor is so clearly we had a very vague understanding of what this weapon was supposed to be okay blue sides here we go what is fun activity that you're gonna be able to engage with this weapon in so first of all these are going to be the three hours of fun it needs to be reactive it needs to be a repeatable activity and it

needs to be reliable so what I'm what do I mean by any of that nobody can have fun for you so fun requires that the player participate and if you're going to participate in something it needs to be interactive so that means that in order to be fun something has to be reactive it needs to be repeatable and sort of known for saying that halo has 30 seconds of fun which repeat over and over but I could have said that halo is fun for 30 seconds and then something better changed because you have to play that 30 seconds exactly over again it's not gonna be very much fun and so what this activity needs to do is resist habituation what is a fiction you may ask so I just got back from the Caribbean and being from Seattle when we first got there the Sun fell very very hot and after a little while it stopped feeling so hot I didn't notice it anymore until I got a horrible sunburn and what was happening there was my nerves of my skin were getting habituated to the sensation of

the Sun and habituation is the reduction in sensitivity when something happens over and over and over again now you might think this is bad is in the case of a sunburn but it's actually extremely important as I found out later when my summer and started to heal and it itched madly and I couldn't sleep and I couldn't have a conversation and I couldn't even really think straight because I couldn't do anything but feel my skin and if you didn't have a ooh a shin you wouldn't feel like that all the time my situation is also a really crucial learning tool so when you see something in a game over and over and over you get habituated to it you stop noticing it and you start noticing the differences between the experiences that allow you to analyze them and come up with different strategies but it's also the designers mortal enemy the weijin makes you bored so what you should be going for in a fun experience is predictable enough that you can bitchu eight to it somewhat and learn it but not so predictable not so habituated Bowl that you get bored and finally means to be reliable it needs to be fun

every time for as many people of people as possible ideally and it turns out these kind of reliable activities are ordinarily rare and you probably participated in most of them by the time you were five or six what I mean by that you didn't throw a grenade before you were six hopefully unless you're breaking the yes or be so grenades are a staple of Halo game play but really when you look at the experience of throwing grenade it's really close to peggle which finds its roots in games like Arkanoid I mean how many of you are itching for that ball to go right up that crack in there if you don't know what our tonight is maybe Angry Birds is a better reference for throwing grenades which goes back to like in physical activities like pool you know what angle do I have to hit the bumper at in order for to make the pocket which even you know even when you were a little child throwing stuff in a

wastepaper basket it's all that same kind of fundamental activity that you could just do forever so maybe you're not convinced what about melee it's another Halo staple really important part of the game never gets old just like it never got old and final fight just like it convinced you to hit all those stupid flash banner ads I couldn't I couldn't find the punch a monkey there is no like actual copy of that on the internet anymore but which when you think about it is really just a callback to to whack-a-mole and whack Amole is just a machine playing sort of a violent version of peekaboo and this is my son he's super cute so I avoided the use of my presentation how about the Warthog the Warthog way slider than any actual vehicle just like in Mario Kart which is very similar to skiing which is just right sliding around your socks or in her socks preferably so why are these things fun

there's a book called the brain that changes itself and it talks about people who have suffered mostly brain injuries or birth defects that use practice and and rote skills to sort of regenerate their their their brain tissue and it says that a train or stimulate neuron develops 25% more branches increases its size and and it gets a lot more blood supply going through it and so my theory is that just like physical exercise is fun just for the sake of exercise mental exercise is fun in the same way so if you look at dodging which is something that you did when you were a child there's lots and lots of things that you're doing you are you're detecting movement in your peripheral vision and you're tracking objects as they move across the space which translates really well into 2d in a game like commando for

instance but it it's even better in 3d where you're trying to take the nonlinear change in size but projectile as it comes toward you and determine where it's going to intersect with you and predict its trajectory or determine the closest point that it's going to reach so you know exactly how far you have to dodge so just a quick tangent the conventional wisdom is that 3d sucks and maybe the technology isn't there yet but eventually games are gonna be in 3d they're gonna be way more fun because they're gonna tap more directly into those brain circuits okay games other than Halo are fun for this reason so your brain is really good at pattern matching actually has like physical hardware for that so that explains things like Tetris predicting complex systems with an almost intuition level is common you have special circuits for determining a rate of change and especially comparing one rate of change

to another so if you've ever tried to see if your healers man I was going to last longer than a bosses life and wow that's what you're doing path planning is pretty obvious in a game like pac-man but it's also when you're trying to complete three or four quests in an area you're trying to do it most efficiently your plasticity is sort of how you make new connections that you never had before I think portal probably stretched everybody's brains a little bit and finally another thing that you're hardwired for is to have a theory of mine to try to get inside somebody else's head which is very useful in something like Street Fighter or even it's locating my chest so back to reality okay so we need something that's reactive and repeatable reliable the exercises you're dodging circuits and so we rewrote the plasma rifle paper design to say it's a high rate of fire gun that shoots plasma bullets the travel at a fast but Dajjal speed so that mechanic works itself out in in this way we don't

want to be too fast when they give you enough time at dodge and if and also we wanted to be slow enough that it's a continuous motion because actually just throwing you three throwing up 30 still frames a second if you can't connect those in your brain into a single believable real object then you can't engage those dodging circuits and we gave it a really visible contrail which was especially useful in the in the PAL version actually which where it's harder to dodge because you're getting fewer updates but we didn't want to be too slow I mean it's sort of comical if the bullets are just hanging in air and we will still want you to experience all those near misses so that just brings me to a sort of a fundamental definition of game mechanics where you divide the potential gameplay into two parts actions that are permitted and actions that aren't permitted so Barrio cannot jump over the flag mario cannot run left they're just things that mario cannot do this is good because it allows us to constrain the game but the problem is that one

mechanic isn't isn't a game it's not even really interactive if you only have one constraint then you're not making any choices I I recently made my first flash game and it's pac-man in a line basically there's no ghost there's no maze you just eat all the dots and it's boring so if we look at a halo mechanic let's say that there's a mechanic where your handheld weapon it beats distant enemies right and so if they are distant then you win if they're not distant then you lose sort of a contemporary design theory is they excuse me that you should layer new mechanics on top of this one and if you layer up enough mechanics then you're gonna make a game and if your game isn't fun they should be layer on more mechanics but I really think all that does is give you a larger number of choices that you aren't making so what I

suggest is that you want to have mechanics that support each other sort of like a tripod that they're leaning against each other and all the area inside is the gameplay and so a game a sandbox game has you know a huge area and maybe a more linear game has a much smaller area but at least there's a lots of different possible places that the player can be at any given time so that means that the projectile mechanics also need to be supported by AI mechanics so the elite reappears and we had them fight from the open so that you can see them find it from the open and dodging and that would teach you to dodge we also made them shoot directly at the player because it's a lot easier to dodge something that's coming straight at you rather than trying to figure out which direction you you're gonna need to dodge we gave them a little bit of smaller error so it wasn't quite as predictable and then also shooting bursts so sort of like a fad a fan pattern do-do-do-do-do they kind of swing it across but they don't track the player during a burst so if you start dodging a burst you're going to be able to dodge the rest of it the player mechanics also

needed to support this so instead of having the blazingly fast super soldier we had a agonizingly slow super soldier mostly relying on the acceleration of going left to right in order you have to anticipate what you're going to dodge you can't just immediately move out of the way as if you were a Ferrari and we also had a narrow field field of view which is which was not not a common thing at the time PC games had you know the crazy fisheye views and the reason is it makes objects that are distant in the middle of the screen feel like they're much closer and larger and that allows you to track projectiles a lot better because instead of being really really really small and then also in being huge in your face they're actually increasing as they would in the real world by a inverse square law we gave the player shields which recharge after a little short time so that means if you're dodging and you getting close shots it's not that risky and so we actually increased the amount

of damage that a plasma rifle will do against shields but at the same time we gave you body health it doesn't recharge so we wanted to preserve your life by making you do a little bit less damage to body when it comes difficulty in Halo one is pretty straightforward we had these red elites and they were like tougher versions and the blue leads they shot more burst they shot longer bursts so they're a little bit harder and we had a global weapon damage scale so unless Andheri everything did about twice as much damage to the player so mechanic mechanics are universal if if the game designer writes down plasma rifle bolts are Dodgeville than they are in abstract mechanic land but they need to be calibrated to make them personal personal and effective in the real world these are the actual numbers that create the experience that the mechanic is describing and make the plasma angled dodge ball for a certain player so in halo it was calibrated for me actually I said that before actually it's not precisely true so ask yourself and

hopefully you're not already asking this of yourself why did you come to this talk today confabulation the truth is that you can't recreate your subconscious mind in your conscious mind it's like trying to emulate an xbox on an Atari 2600 it just doesn't fit and so what you have is an internal model which you use to guess at your own motivations usually it's pretty accurate because you have a lot of experience with yourself but what you should do is also build one of these internal models for the player that way you can predict the player reactions and so when you're calibrating you're calibrating for this little internal guy that you believe is what is representative of every player so this is my GABA it's also the series of steps that led to the calibration of the plasma rifle the process for me usually goes like this I make my best guess which in this case was 10 because I had no idea 10 is world

units per second which is a unit of measurement that means absolutely nothing to you and then I would try the extremes so I would try 20 and a hug wow that is almost instantaneous or 1 and I have to wait for the bullets to get to me and sometimes I forget they're there fall asleep and then they hit me so then I narrow in on the value so I tried 5 and that was better but it was still way too easy to dodge so I went 15 which oh that is too fast and then I went to 13 which is totally dodge ball until I tried to pay attention to something else and shoot back and then I'm getting so I turned it to 11 which felt really good and then after a while I kind of felt too good so then I popped up to 12 12 so they experienced that your calibration gives you something that you need to test to use your research obviously for us we found that players could dodge the plasma bolts and that felt really good for them but it had some unintended consequences in Halo 1

first their fighting out in open so they saw more of the enemy behaviors which is good but they also died without seeking cover because they wanted to only fight out from the open which was not so good and then it was also extremely broken so basically you can always touch the plasma rifle in in halo and this is why if you aim directly at the player as an AI and the players moving you're gonna miss so you could solve that by trying to lead the problem is if they zigzag at all you missed by even more if your projectile is dramatically slower than the player then this is not a solvable problem and basically if you know that this is the case in Halo you can break the game pretty badly on pretty much every difficulty level in an angry encounter so that's bad when it comes to multiplayer we get added movements done so when you get shot by the plasma rifle it makes it you can't

turn as fast and you can't move as fast and that was to compensate for the fact that it just wasn't you know you couldn't use it at a good range because it was traveling so slowly but unattended consequence of that was that moving the sound was really annoying it works okay in counter-strike when you're gonna get shot three times and then die but in our game when you could take a lot of hits you would just have to sit there and take a lot of hits which conflicted with the Halo flavor quite a bit it was also horribly broken because you could use it on vehicles which whatever it was a short development cycle look and I say now when it comes to legendary this is kind of interesting because the plasma rifle as all weapons did twice as much damage so then my legendary are very difficult had some unintended consequences basically the the difficulty scale was stacking with the material scale I described earlier so against shields I was actually doing almost four times as

much damage which meant that it was taking down your shields almost instantly the way this was badly broken was so dodging was not actually any harder so in unnormal you could dodge back and forth and every project I would miss you and if a couple hit you that was fine you just a cover and legendary you could dodge it back and forth in the exact same way the same number of bolts would hit you and they would kill you so you we were actually making the game harder we're just making it more punishing but luckily we got a chance to fix everything in Halo 2 so again we're looking at the competition Ghost Recon came about that time and it was different than like an unreal and that had instant projectiles it was really encouraging you to fight from cover Rainbow six came out and it also had into projectiles and fighting from cover and Counter Strike and so basically we're seeing a trend here people want

instant projectiles I'm finding from cover when we looked at their own community and the halo 1 pistol is really unbalanced and really popular and I would think that's probably because hey it's innocent projectile legendary is also you know like I described before completely unbalanced and very popular which means that people enjoy the fighting from cover even if it's excessively punishing so we talked earlier about how fun requires participation and what that means is that fun requires buy-in basically people will play the game that they want to play no matter what I did the halo 1 tutorial and before giving you a weapon in the original version of the tutorial I would throw you into combat an idea was we'll teach people to run away well we tell people was running up next to a guy and let them shoot you to death because you can't figure out how to kill them because you can't get on a weapon yet people will they they go with their expectation over any kind of hint

store recommendation that you can make again the most important context tended to be in the game the elites in Halo 2 were not the faceless enemy that they were in halo 1 in fact sometimes they were allies and at some points in the game you were actually playing as an elite and so they needed an instant projectile weapon in their arsenal also in insinger player we decided since dodging is not fixable maybe we'll emphasize fighting from cover a little bit more and in multiplayer since movement sign is not fitting with the game again we want to have some sort of instant projectile on the plasma rifle or at least much faster projectile which means me together loop number cute so every Christmas I asked my grandma for a subscription to edge magazine and every Christmas I get a subscription the game romance me thank you grandma but

lately it's paid off because game Pro is actually turning into a very good magazine and recently they had an article called the psychology of shooters and in it they described a study done by a pair of researchers named Andrew Perez Bilski and Scott Rigby where they mounted half-life and they had one version where there was bloody and horrible and guts and violence in one version where there was nonviolent it was sort of like a game of tag and what they found was that both versions equally satisfy the basic needs that they were looking for which were competence and autonomy and you can read this either in game pro or on Jimmy Madigan's blog psychology of Gamescom which I hardly recommend so their their eventual sort of conclusion was that shooter if I sure satisfy human needs and because of bloody shooter and tax you're both satisfied competence and

autonomy they're both equally fun but we all know that tag of duty would not sell and I believe the reason is that our needs are much more complex than some competence or autonomy and I figure out everything with graphs so let's make one why is it is let's see so dodging is a competence right that's something you can good at but why is it way more fun to dodge on normal than it is on legendary when it kind of cheapens legendary if you can just dodge everything and covering is always a choice why isn't a more interesting choice on legendary when you really don't have any choice you have to go take cover and why is it more fun to dodge grunts and more fun to cover from elites and why is it more fun to dodge if you're playing aggressively and it's more fun to cover if you feel like you're wanting to play defensively and my answer is that a competence in a

shooter specifically dodging is much more fun when you're under low pressure and autonomy is much more fun when you're trying to tackle a problem that's much more difficult so when games satisfy these complex needs that's when they are really fun and this complexity comes from the context that the needs are being satisfied in now we already find out we can't control the context because that's part of the audience so what we have to do is match our fun activity to the content context that those players are already experiencing so for instance context can make an activity feel natural when the activity flows out of the context some great examples of this assassins creed there's no question in anybody's mind that this is intending for them to sneak and it filled the world really really in grains

and you that you should be sneaking I think the best example last year so is Super Meat Boy that poor guy is designed to die over and over and over and over again well the context will also make an activity meaningful I think this is what Clint Hawking was talking about in his talk yesterday I'm still processing it so I'm not exactly sure rescuing the princess for making it through a mission or becoming the Pokemon master so what we did back in reality where we split the plasma pistol and apply some rifle bolts so that plasma pistol became the slow dodge' believer in the plasma rifle became the faster one that forced you to cover and then different difficulty levels we sped up the projectile so I normal the plasma rifle still Dajjal if you're far enough away about a legendary it's never dodge able and we changed the air mechanics again split them so the grunt kind of fights like your kid brother like to shoot straight at you and they're really easy to confuse and if you hide they come and look like directly whereas they lead so

them are coming cunning they lead the player and because they have a faster projectile that's okay again they track during the burst so that you have to constantly dodge the entire burst and also they they suppress you before they come sir so what that means is if you take cover they'll shoot at the cover and shoot around where you they think you're gonna be coming up and they'll do that for a good 15 20 seconds before then coming up and very carefully from from usually a as far away as they can peeking around the cover to super still there we had two protagonists in Halo two there's the chief and we stopped displaying his health because what we wanted to do was make it so that as soon as your shields are down you ran for cover and you ran for cover with the with this feeling of oh my goodness this is really dangerous and scary but then we increased how fast the shoes recharged you didn't have to stay in cover for very long because in Halo 1 you can just stand out of cover and dodge back and forth until your fields came back and you were shooting the

whole time it's a little bit more boring to stand behind a rock so we wanted to take less time we even moved the shield meter right next to the motion tracker so you could be crouching behind cover looking at your shields and at the motion tracker to see if somebody was coming around the cover after you for the arbiter we experimented with like an invisibility where he could turn itself invisible for just long enough for his shields to almost start recharging with more or less success so I already mentioned that shots travel faster on legendary but we also changed how the weapon damage scale worked so first of all its per weapon now it's a longer global in Halo 2 which meant that the plasma pistol we could make do a little bit more damage but not really significantly whereas the plasma rifle we can make do a lot more damage if we're gonna drive you into cover turns out this is a terrible way to balance difficulty but I didn't know that at the time when we were calibrating oh shoot we didnt calibrate so almost at the end of the project our

AI counts cut dramatically we had to strip objects out like crazy and we had very little time to recalibrate any of the weapons so they ended up being about 15 world units per second so slightly faster than halo 1 and then I legendary much much faster so the normal experience of the player playing with inhaler 2 was that they can dodge grunts pretty easily and at least forced him to cover sooo so far so good unfortunately because we had to remove so much cover there wasn't enough and a lot of times you'd be fighting guys that were supposed to drive you into cover and there was maybe one piece of cover if we remember to leave it in there and because we had introduced havoc and elo 2 sometimes that cover would move so they would throw a grenade at you and your cover would go flying off the cliff and then you be completely exposed but that's not why I was totally broken why I was totally broken was because of the suppressing fire I talked about earlier the AI would over focus to a ridiculous degree and I'll try to explain that so

basically the way to always get the advantage of Halo 2 is to take cover and then pop out at a different spot so if they eye shooting at you you don't go behind cover then you pop out from the other side and then you get two or three seconds to shoot at them before the shoot back and then they start shooting at you and you go back behind the cover and you pop out on the first side and it takes two or three seconds for them to figure out this tactic and you can just do it over and over and over and over again and if you ever played legendary almost certainly figure this axis only way to get through as far as multiplayer the faster projectiles that the plasma rifle had were great because they made the weapon useful of range and we removed entirely the idea of movements on from the game unfortunately there was a bug that meant that if you were carrying an SMG which was every you know two and a plasma rifle you were doing almost twice as much damage as anybody else it was intended to reduce the amount of damage with that it wasn't fixed to a patch and it was totally broken because if you put two plasma

rifles together you could basically drop so many shields almost instantaneously and also because the projectiles were moving faster for the player the plasma pistol overcharged that we added is that's where they got the term noob combo so unlettered arey the experience is actually harder it's not just more punishing it's actually more difficult to dodge unfortunately it is still more punishing and especially on Marines if you're playing legend around hail a two-year Marines lifespan is about 10 seconds and it was totally broken because we had engagement distances that were very far which worked fine in Halo 1 because the AI would close on you until until it's kind of slow projectiles were effective but those projectiles were affected with a much farther distance the fact they were effective and arranged beyond what even the players weapons were effective at

and so when you get something like a jetpack elite wielding two plasma rifles which we've already talked about is I'm BOTS and multiplayer and then you add a 4x multiplier on top of that and they're jumping around and they have recharging energy shields you get a game that's really way too hard especially my level but luckily we got to try it again a competition as you can see lots and lots of military games and several of them feature cover systems now our community at this point had been almost entirely single-player focus story guys but with Halo 2 Xbox Live was started to get a much larger multiplayer community until they were given about roughly equal weight in Halo 3 and Halo became known for that kind of free-flowing combat that Halo 2 had got us you know dodging and sidestepping and covering

and so a cover system where you're sticking in the cover just really didn't fit for us so we decided against we're we figured our audience was established enough that we could sort of start ignoring the competition a little bit and going our own way but again the Indian context was the most important there's no enemy elites in Halo 3 they switch sides on the Covenant and so sometimes context is not outside developer control but it is outside of designer control and that means there's no enemy plasma rifles because the Brutes use the Spiker and the Jackals uses the carbine and grunts uses an dealer and so nobody on the enemy side is using the plasma rifle so does that mean my talk is over no it means an interlude so pretty clearly halo 2 was a misstep how much of a misstep is up for interpretation but I spent a lot of time after hail to ships I went on a soul-searching journey to try to find out you know what what should we have

done what would have been fun I looked a lots of industry resources Raph Koster says their games are edutainment Will Wright says games are exploring a possibility space far be it for me to disagree with oh right Sid Meier says games are a series of interesting choices but when I looked at all these descriptions that designers were giving their describing their own games not really every game it's certainly not halo so I looked into academia I hope there's not too many academics in here I may not make it out alive I just picked one of their definition random games are an exercise of voluntary control systems in which there is an opposition between forces confined by a procedure and rules in order to produce a disequilibrium outcome yeah these areas aren't giving us a definition that is super useful what they're doing is dissecting games into their various components which is good for categorizing not so good for building something that defies categories I'm a philosopher by

background that's what my schooling is about so I just kind of leaf through some of my old philosophy texts Aristotle talks a lot about catharsis and sort of how entertainment is about bringing your yourself back into balance that's interesting Pascal says that games are a distraction from your imminent death begins Hines says that games cannot be defined which is not helpful because then he says because you already know what they are he's just rying to make a point about language and so that doesn't help me at all my my final conclusion was that game desire should be philosophers I think it actually helps you sit outside yourself and understand what you're thinking but philosophers are not game designers shixin me Haley in his book flow says that flow or some people could translate that into fun is

the immersion of the self in an activity and he talks about the autotelic experience and that basically means what you're doing is completely pouring into yourself and it has no purpose apart from itself from yourself even if it's accomplishing some other goal to other psychologists deci and ryan talked a lot about self-determination theory which is that human needs motivate people which includes players they focus a lot on intrinsic means and extrinsic means I think their research is great and I think flow has a really great lot of great insights but I sort of have a different take on the categories which I will attempt to explain the graph so if you try to find a couple of we're thought in a ways to classify needs you'll find that some needs are need needs meaning if you don't have them you

feel rotten and some needs are want needs where if you get them it's a positive emotion but if you don't have them you're not sitting around miserable and I decided to call those requirements for the need needs and aspirations for the for those that are more positive but also optional now clearly games are not you're not going to die if you're not playing a game so games probably provide aspirin means of some kind I also sort of played off of flow and the the idea of autotelic activities to come up with two new concepts of endo telic and EXO italics so teleca's from t lee awesome swings were like the goal or the end endo and EXO a meaning inner and outer so basically you have things that you do because you want a goal that comes from outside so that's like cake right I want

cake and it's going to end up inside of me and I don't really care how its provided I don't really care if I made the cake as long as it tastes good whereas exotel like is actually I'm being used for something so a lot of causes and religions are based on this but much more humbly for games is just my skills are being used to make something happen which is why games need to be interactive so that you can participate in them and cause something to happen so I would put games into this upper right quadrant and fun is the positive emotion that you get from for meeting those needs so if you think back to the graph fun is that quadrant of meeting and exoteric aspiration a game is a series

of constraints on an activity that reliably and repeatedly meet that exiting aspiration for a specific audience and I'm pretty just I'm pretty sure that I just said that games are about fulfilling your dreams so I'm gonna go back to the red slide sorry so what exactly is the exoteric aspiration that a plasma rifle is intended to fulfill well I think you have to describe these needs sort of poetically they're not necessarily something reduced to a technical term so the first one is I think they make the player feel like they're on another level there making their enemies look dumb and running rings around them is a good good sort of trope you want to manipulate your enemies and frighten them and play with them free kill I think the plasma rifle also fills the aspiration to be cool under fire you're facing danger it's real danger but you approach it with like kind of a discipline and you don't panic and you do things just the right way and you

know winning and also the plasma rifle is all about turning the tables so the enemy's trying to use the price war upon you and you take it from them and you use it on them and their friends much more effectively than they could turns out this is not just about the plasma rifle this is about every enemy weapon so even though halo 3 doesn't really feature the plasma rifle the legacy of the plasma rifle goes through to all the other enemy weapons in the game so for almost every weapon that the enemy uses in Halo 3 it's slower for enemies basically they start out a little bit slow and then they accelerate which gives you plenty of time to see where it's coming in to dodging they also have ramped up times so the the rate of fire actually increases the longer you hold down the trigger but it's much faster for players so the player in Halo 3 always uses the speed that the AI would have on legendary and that includes multiplayer when you're firing a weapon

you don't as a player care very much that it starts out slow as long as it gets to a quick speed very faster you have the the range that you mean and players don't burst fire at least not in the short bursts that they eye does so the ramp-up isn't as much of a factor for them this means that the player can always turn the tables on the enemy by picking up their weapon and using against them they eye for grunts is like comically incompetent there are always running away and panicking and putting their arms up in the air and we made sure that you can kill them with a single melee attack so you can kind of jump down amongst them like a cat of a mice and just start swinging but they bleeds on the other hand are they're dangerous but they're it's a manageable danger we added an ID and AI of how to cover firing so when you first emerge from cover they're gonna take a little while to start shooting at you they're gonna shoot at you in shorter bursts with longer durations between

them but the longer you stay out of cover they're gonna start honing in on you they're gonna be more accurate they're gonna shoot more often they're an issue with less time in between shots and so what this meant was that for a while you could stay out of cover but after a while without you even noticing it because you probably rated the AI would just suddenly be able to start hitting you and that would drive you back into cover we reduced the damage scale and legendary that global damage skill that was so high before because we just decided the damage it's not the right way to make the game harder I believe that the right way to make a game harder is to make it faster so the same experience slowed down becomes easy the same experience sped up becomes harder projectiles go faster the AI firing at leas gets shorter in fact the entire combat Seidel gets faster so it's probably 22 seconds of fun or something like that and this emerged in a concept we call a reciprocal difficulty so

basically it's a form of dynamic difficulty but it's not handled by the by the computer or the AI it's actually driven by the player so the more you push a Halo encounter the more it pushes back which rewards risk because if you push really hard you can break through very fast as long as you can handle how hard it's pushing back at you but at the same time it forgives failure so as soon as you withdraw hit withdraws you'll notice in halo the a I don't really chase you very much and we don't punish you at all for risking and then failing and running away your shields come back your health comes back AI resets basically so I recently read a really fascinating book called slights of mind and it's a couple of neuroscientists who go into the world of magic and they try to learn everything they can from the techniques that the magicians have to figure out what's going on inside of the brain of the people that they're fooling and one of the things that they talk about in the context of

a pickpocket is that you have a spotlight of attention and anytime you attend to one thing you are ignoring virtually everything else that is not happening your spotlight so that's the tunnel vision that we describe and magicians exploit this feature mercilessly they the doves fly up and you all look up as most you probably looked up just because I went like that and then over here they're doing something else and I figured you know if magicians can do that if they can use distraction then a game designer should be able to do the opposite in order to kind of hyper focus well they're calibrating so just a random smattering ideas I had to focus your attention I always create custom test spaces so that nothing else is going on except for the thing that I'm trying to calibrate you obviously can't ship a game that way because eventually you need to try all together but I found that it helps you focus and not get distracted on the other things that are broken or if they're too fun you distract it just playing the game I use post-it notes so if I'm balancing the plasma rifle I'll put a post-it note that says plasma rifle on the screen right now I have one

that says talk faster I stare at Rorschach tests and try not to see pictures I don't know this is like the equivalent of last year's mouth noises with the Warthog but I feel like if you can prove like train your brain to go into a state where it's not looking for patterns you'll be able to see specific patterns and put your spotlight directly on them more effectively you need to avoid habituation the way I do that is I take periodic breaks again the custom test spaces are ready for that because you play through it and then when you get to the end you just take a break or maybe you try tweaking something else sometimes I'll intentionally break something I usually don't check this in but I'll just I'll just break something and play the game with a broken plasma rifle for a while so I can away to something else and then when I'm going to back I'm more sensitive to it and I also do total recalibrations and this drives producers nuts but I'll basically save off a copy blank out everything and

try to retune it from scratch and then I'll compare the two and I'll say oh these are really close I bet you that's you know right or hey these are totally different and then I I have things to things to compare and people could tell me what something like more so at the end of all that inhaler 3:14 world use per second about 75% faster on legendary any multiplayer the normal experience was that even on legend or you can dodge for short amounts of time but eventually you have to return it in to cover the unintended consequences were this was that we started to see players sort of standardizing how they're playing so even on normal or on legendary different quality of players they would kind of have the same pattern and it was at and we would see that a level was taking about the same time for everybody to complete and it wasn't badly broken which was a good thing a multiplayer

people started using plasma rifle more often because it was faster it was more effective and especially when combining arms with teammates we saw people wanted you sayin weapons more and they wanted to play as leads more which was useful later on and again not badly broken the legendary experienced legendary is very hard it's supposed to be but it's not punishing hard it's just requires a very high level of skill and so we saw people especially reviewers that we're playing on in higher difficulty levels were giving it a higher score and we often developed this bizarre sub community where they play solo legendary Hall skulls on if you know what the skulls are that mean that makes it incredibly hard but at the same time it's still doable because we're not cranking up the damage to ridiculous levels so hopefully not badly broken which brings me no DST which was named halo 3 ODST for a reason because the sandbox didn't really change which

brings me to Halo Reach where the plasma rifle was reborn as the plasma rifle so our competition was be clear we by that time had a large collection of sub communities so there's the multiplier on the community there's a people that just wanted to jump into Forge firefight was really popular and one of the sub communities was halo developers basically almost every member of the original team had already moved on to the next big thing by then and fully half of the reach team was hired after halo 3 shipped so that meant to some extent halo reach was made by the community for the community and they're very in tune with what the community wanted which brought up things like at least versus Spartans where they wanted total weapon parity between the elite weapons and the spartan weapons which meant that they needed a elite assault

rifle which is what the plasma repeater eventually became and that meant well basically all they wanted for that game was the insta projectiles because otherwise it just wasn't fair it's hard to hit some human with a with a dodgeball projectile and they really were intent on going back to the feel of Halo on back to fighting elites they were dual wielding there are lots more plasma rifles in the game so according to the Halo Reach strategy guide diagonally I didn't really work on this game the plasma rifles prior our purpose is to disable the shields of close you know I'd forget it I'm gonna take a lesson from the plasma rifle I'm gonna kind of dodge this one it's not fair for an ex Bungie designer to talk about the decisions that the current design team made and I'm almost out of time anyway but you find that in the middle of the project things were very different than a oh three eight but by the end of the project they it's sort of veered back in the direction of what we had at the end of Halo 3 so conclusions shooting

bouncing you're not the same balance is about longevity especially in multiplayer and tuning is really the craft of making something fun which is depending on which theory section you agreed with specialized brain circuit activity or performing a skilled and natural meeting in pool context or meeting ex atelic aspiration the tuning process first you understand your audience either by choosing it or inheriting it because your audience is inseparable from their context then you find their exit telecast brief that they want to do you choose a fun activity that is reacted repeatable reliable and keep in mind these are rare and that's why you're gonna very rarely invent an entirely new kind of game then you integrate the mechanics so that they support each other and calibrate the

values to your internal player model sometimes starting over from scratch and then verify the experience from user research and hopefully nothing is badly broken and now I am out of here I don't really have time for questions we have like 30 seconds left which is not enough time for the first question or you usually get out their question so if you have them you can email me at Jamie Greece where I have a lot more time on my hands now and I'm also writing in more detail at a lot of the stuff on my website that the tip disappear calm and I have plenty of business cards up here if anybody has any questions they want to email me or they want a personal version of this talk or would like to offer me a job thank you [Applause]