World Design for Different Player Types

[Music] so my name is rayleen deck and i'm currently a design lead at bungie i've been a designer for over 10 years with my start in the industry at bioware where i worked primarily as a level designer on mass effect 2 and 3 and then later on dragon age inquisition and ah thanks thanks guy thanks our lady hi there so in 2015 i joined a new newly formed team at bungie where i helped shape what would be the open world destinations in destiny 2 focusing mostly on pve multiplayer design so today i'm going to talk about how to design for different types of people and my examples come from my personal experience working at both bioware and bungie and these companies focus on large games with big teams right so solving for different player types involves many disciplines but this talk is only going to focus on world design

but world design can mean something different to all of us i tried and i couldn't find a formal definition but my designer ego loved this one right so very few careers offer people the opportunity to become a god yeah it's awesome but a career as a world designer might be as close as it gets so in my world our godly duties includes things like level design activity quest mission world systems design and good world designers are skilled in all these fields so that they can take a holistic approach when building experiences so let's start by looking at why designing worlds for different player types is important so as game designers we build systems and mechanics in our games that are target specific audiences for example party chat for social players or leaderboards for competitive players but do we really do the same when we think about world design and if we know our audience we can build worlds that are engaging for these

players and because we're human what we value often changes over time so for example a new parent may only play shorter games because they have less free time or maybe for someone like me i now value multiplayer games over traditional single-player campaigns because i use out i use games as a way to reconnect with my friends in my home country so if we can understand what players value but our worlds we can react and do less of one thing and more of another and the point is to find our blind spots as designers so it's tempting to want to put something for everyone in your game right so you can have amazing story for immersion driven players and tons of collectibles for achiever players and pvp for competitive players so you could do that right some some teams do but the ones that try often fail that's because it's really hard to have something for every type of person in your game where everyone will be equally satisfied so focusing on what the player values

will help you ship because it'll narrow down that possibility set of what should be in your game and this isn't easy to do right like as game designers we're not mind readers and a good portion of our time is spent iterating on features based on player feedback by building the wrong set of features for your audience leads to feature creep over scoping and crunch and crunching on something that players don't truly value is extra frustrating two before i go into examples so this is the best player categorization i found um some of you probably familiar with this it's like called the gamer motivation model by the company quantic foundry and i won't go into detail how this chart was derived it was beyond the scope of this talk but if you haven't already i really encourage you to check out quantic foundry's work on their website and they also have a talk on the gdc vault so you'll also have to read all this now i'm going to be reference it referencing this image throughout the talk

so at a very high level quantic foundry found that each of the columns are highly correlated and they call these clusters so i'm going to be organizing this talk around that idea so first we'll look at world design for the immersion creativity cluster and then the action social cluster and then finally the mastery achievement cluster so we're going to explore three central ideas and each of these ideas are catered towards different player types the first is about techniques that make your world feel bigger than it is and that's centered around players who play for immersion and creativity and the second idea is about techniques that make shared worlds feel friendly for social and action players and the last one is about techniques that give players agency in the world catered towards mastering achievement so what does it mean to make small worlds that feel big right so these traits fantasy story

design discovery they're typically found in role-playing games and a common problem that happens in rpgs is that certain player motivations become at odds with each other so there are players who want to immerse themselves in deep rich stories and then there are players who want to spend hours exploring and experimenting in the world and on top of that many rpg play players value achievement striving for completion and power so let's look at an example so after shipping dragon age inquisition we heard feedback from players that they were feeling overwhelmed with the amount of content in the game there were many objects to collect puzzles to solve and there was over 200 side quests and the most memorable memorable example of this is an area called the hinterlands and so this was the first open world zone to unlock in the game and one of the biggest in physical size and had the most side quests players would spend up to 20 hours here in order to finish all the quests before

moving on and so spending so much time early on in the game in one open world zone was when there's nine more to explore was not the designs team intention right so we tried to get people to leave right like on twitter right but it was too late it's too late even this guy this guy this player knows their player type they're completionists in them they wouldn't wouldn't let him leave he wouldn't do it so um many of the other zones that we had in dragon age all had the same problems as the hinterlands right so quests and activities didn't feel meaningful and players expressed that large chunks of the open world game felt like busy work and that players couldn't understand which quests were worth doing so some of the open world design conflicted with what most players play dragon age for which is the rich story and characters and so i believe that you don't need hundreds of hours of gameplay to satisfy players who enjoy story and exploration by designing small worlds that feel big

so let's look at some examples one of the open world zones that players said that they enjoyed more than others was crestwood specifically the stills still waters quest line so i'm gonna step through this quest as best i can and then we're going to analyze it all right so during the main campaign the player is told to go to a stormy zone called crestwood once there they find undead attacking the nearby village in the village the player can talk to the mayor to ask why the indebt are attacking and the mayor says they are coming from old crestwood that's been flooded years ago in order to solve the undead problem the player will have to drain the lake by releasing the dam to access old crust wood that is currently under water after getting access to the dam controls the player drains the lake and heads into old crestwood they then head deep into a cave and kill a boss that's so many in the undead and so coming out of the caves with crestwood no longer cursed

the world is no long the world is not dark and stormy but sunny and peaceful the player then heads back to the village to inform the mayor that crestwood is safe but the mayor is no longer there he left a note on his desk explaining that he was the one who flooded old crestwood in the first place years ago the villagers became very ill and to stop the disease from spreading the mayor flooded the village and killed them all that was the solution so the player was then given a follow-up quest to go find the mayor so i believe there are a few key points that highlight why this zone was memorable side sidequest narrative is easy to follow so it's important to keep story concepts simple because people can only actively process a handful of items in their short term memory and in open world games there are many quest activities active at once and the player can complete them in any order and so if the player has too many options or if the story is too complicated they

lose interest secondly the sidequest narrative encompasses the whole zone of crestwood so there's one central problem for the zone and for crestwood is uncovering the mystery of the past to help save the village after doing this the players feels like they have completed the zone given a sense of closure if there are too many quests in the zone or if each of each of them have different themes or narratives it's hard to answer the question what did i solve so people want to see how their effort matters after killing the boss in the cave and heading back to go find the mayor the environment changed from stormy to sunny in addition new quests became available so your work was recognized and lastly the sidequest narrative ties back to the main game so after finding the mayor the player can use a global game mechanic that have a dragon age called judgment to decide the mayor's fate and so this side quest

creates a small connection back to the central part of a part of the game and suddenly it feels worth doing so let's talk about level design so as i said we built a lot of content in the open world maps right but during internal play tests we got some surprising feedback players say that they were bored and they couldn't find much to do but looking at that image it's hard to know where to find the fun right there's no meaningful choice to be made about which way to go when all the hills look similar to the player the open world areas kind of felt like this right like a flat boring field so we made some level design changes we use the natural world to create landmarks using both lighting and shapes so close to the player they can see that there's probably something in that house and further away they have a longer term goal of reaching that monument with the flag in the distance there's a lot of talks though about the importance of landmarks so i'm not going

to get into that here but what is interesting is that during the next play test the feedback was wow there's so much more stuff to do here but actually we didn't add any new activities so sometimes adding more content isn't the right answer but it's how you're presenting that content to the player so the big takeaways here are to focus on building content that can be integrated into the world and presented into ways that feels meaningful so you'll have to decide what is most important when designing your worlds right so for rpgs like dragon age tends to index on these player types right especially story driven and sometimes that means less content for other types of players for example for completion lists completionists there could be less quests or for explorers maybe less things to find but that's okay right so i i believe it's a better choice to build fewer quests at higher value than losing then risk losing engagement from your core

audience all right so let's now take a look at action and social oriented type players and ways to build worlds that feel friendly and multiplayer world design is often a more complicated set of problems than single player and this is because for better for worse one player can influence another player's experience so when playing games you want to be the hero right but in multiplayer worlds there are tens hundreds or even millions of other players that want to be the hero too and you want to spend time with other people but you also want to feel important so as designers our multiplayer worlds need to still feel personal but personal has doesn't have to just mean one person it can mean you and your group of friends are feeling like they're accomplishing goals together so many of the techniques that create small worlds that feel big can also apply to multiplayer games but

we need to shift our thinking a bit when we bring in multiplayer storytelling because in a multiplayer environment storytelling should never negatively impact gameplay right so we need to make the world and the experiences in it to be multiplayer friendly so i'm going to look at some techniques from destiny 2. so on destiny 2. and so my team wanted to improve the social aspects of the quest system that was in destiny 1. so in destiny 1 after completing the main campaign players could engage in quests and quests were long multi multi-step side activities that could take days or sometimes weeks to complete although quests were great at providing long-term goals they were not so great for multiplayer because if i wanted to play some quest with my friend there was a high chance that that my next objective would be totally different than my friends because we'd be on different steps of the quest so it's hard to keep players together

working working on the same goal if we decided if one of our goals was to improve social that our activities needed to be shorter so we had about 10 minutes in length we felt that if these activities weren't very long players would be able to join a friend who is halfway through that activity and not feel like they've missed a large story arc so we call these activities adventures and you can think of adventures as a shorter kind of less expensive campaign mission so during play tests we had groups of players play adventures together and many players would give feedback that they didn't understand what they were doing and why they were doing it each adventure has a short narrative that tells stories about the world but players weren't really understanding that story context so when playing together in a group it's easy to get distracted away from the narrative because social interaction takes priority right so players are talking to each

other they're like running off ahead of each other and they're just focusing on something else entirely so our solution was to shorten and simplify our narratives adventures would start with a short call to action a statement about what you'll be doing and why it's important the player only really needed to pay attention at the start of the adventure and if they miss a some dialogue later on it wasn't critical because at least we know that they should have a general sense of what they're doing and on the level design side we would place the adventure start location in quiet areas in the open world map where combat is less likely to happen and so this gives player time to listen to the dialogue without getting distracted so to keep action oriented and social players engaged it's important that it's easy and fast to play together and the narratives are short and concise and for these players the designer story is not as important as theirs and crafted narrative one-off experiences

they often take a back seat because your story feels personal to you and your group of friends and yeah mistakes were made yeah so i mean adventures were not perfect for our destinies audience um i don't think they were super fun as we wanted them to be to to repeat and we found that players still value those long quest lines and we ended up bringing those back in a slightly different form destiny's player base also highlight values pursuit right and i think that we could do something when it comes to adventures in the future so let's look at another multiplayer activity and destiny public events and public events are different than adventures because their goal is to bring strangers together right each public event is a short less than five minute combat experience that spawns in and out of multiplayer zones that we internally at bungie call public bubbles and if a player is in a public bubble they will be

automatically match made with random players until that player chooses to leave that bubble and when designing content for public bubbles one of the most important goals is to make players happy to see each other right and at a minimum we want players to not be afraid of another human being yeah and so the idea here is to build an environment where a stranger cannot negatively impact another player's experiences so it should feel like the people around you are there to help you and you're there to help them let's look at some examples all right so a good way to get help is to show intention and public events are advertised on the world map before they start for a few reasons and it gives players the ability to plan their time and it gives a focal point for strangers to come together and in the world the public event location is like a physical flag marker and players can interact with that

marker to get a bonus and a timer on their hud to show when the public event will start and the idea here is that a player wants that bonus so they click on the flag which lets other players in the area know that that player is planning on participating in the public events so it's a good idea to stick around if you want help but for showing intention to work so people players they need to to stop and smell the roses right so this is the importance of down time and to bring strangers together they need to see each other right so you need to find places to build in intentional downtime where the regular gameplay distractions are minimized and so emotes are a great example like here one of my design mentors up on bungie she would always say if you don't build down time in your game know that players will seek down time outside of it

so public events they're difficult to do by yourself right but they're not impossible you can technically solo one but it'll be pretty difficult and in order to encourage players to play together we kind of ride that line on difficulty if a new event starts up that's really difficult and a player sees nobody else nearby they probably won't engage with it and if the event is too easy players they don't need each other so you need to do some hard thinking about how difficult your multiplayer activity is versus how much trust your players have with each other so and like i was saying before in destiny public bubbles it's a low trust zone and so players are randomly matched together for a short duration so it's not enough time to build relationships with other people and so if difficult encounters are done poorly in an environment like this and players fail your encounter they're not going to blame themselves and they're going to blame at all the other players

so in destin in destiny raids raids are a high trust activity and so they require high coordination skill and communication players they self-organize into groups and they have need to speak to each other in order to overcome puzzles and encounters with only hints from the raid designers in public bubbles though players don't have the same type of connections with each other and because of this we try to match the mechanics to the amount of trust required so for example one example how this could go wrong maybe from the blade of crota event and destiny one and so here one person needs to go and grab that sword and use it to kill a boss but you can't guarantee that that one person will just grab this order and run away with it or just stand there and be jerk right so in public bubbles there's little to no social consequences to griefing and most people they aren't jerks but in

a large population you need to account for them as well as for people who just generally don't understand the mechanic or their new players so i found that when designing shared worlds for action and social players like immersion is a common conflict conflicting motivation so for example the public event flag is kind of gamey right it doesn't really it doesn't really fit in the world um i think that there's a sliding scale when it comes to immersion and multiplayer games on one extreme end like you don't want to just remove it because then the magic of the world is gone and on the other side you can't have it being too overwhelming where it negatively impacts gameplay so and i think that's the most important key and you could make an argument that that flag should be like a different asset right that ties better into the destiny narrative which is true right but i think you should pick your battles

um like how important is it to justify spending those resources how much can you spend and incorporating story and immersion in multiplayer games kind of like halfway is sometimes worse than not doing it at all so you have to be intentional all right so let's look at my last topic so worlds that give agency for players who value mastery and achievement so typically people we don't get excited when we're being told what to do right so humans we thrive when giving challenges and it's fun to learn and try new things in games when being told to go here and now go kill exactly five enemies now stand and click here and stand right over there like it gets turns boring and i think this is true for all players but especially players who play for challenge or strategy so they want to do things like get all the achievements or take on the toughest challenges so

what should we think about when building worlds for them one way to create challenge is to place high difficult encounters in the world right so the above image is a dragon encounter from surprisingly dragon age we got a lot of positive feedback when playing from players who chose to fight dragons and besides the great work from the gameplay team i think they were popular for a few other reasons players were never forced to fight a dragon they chose to go gear up and go drink hunting on their own and on the level design team we would provide some guidance to show that there is a dragon in the area for example by having it fly by land roar lake and fly by in the distance and i think this gave the player agency to make a decision on when and where they want to engage in a dragon fight without hitting them over the head with it

which brings me to opt-in challenge so thinking about challenge when working on when i was working on mass effect was interesting because the majority of players would play for like the story and the characters but there was a good chunk of players i'd enjoyed third-person shooter combat outside of world design the systems team solved this by building different gameplay modes right so you could play in full action mode where conversations are auto chosen for you or you could go full story mode where combat is easier but the player could choose to focus on what shepard says or does right so when thinking about world design we need to be careful about large difficulty spikes because even if you can technically lower the difficulty it doesn't like mid game it doesn't feel that great especially for many of our players motivations revolved about around playing through the fights to get to the next story beat and so one of the missions i worked on

was called was called grissom academy and it was a total cakewalk it was super easy yeah so this mission opened up fairly early in the campaign so players had a limited set of abilities and weapons but i think it's only saving grace was that the mission was optional right so if you're dead set on chip in your magnus opus combat encounter in a game that isn't entirely focused on tough encounters think about like when it should be available and who you're targeting so a common way of thinking about creating mastering achievement is through repetition so in order to get good at something you practice it over and over again so for our purposes here's a super over simplified diagram you complete a challenge in the world you get better at it through practice and perhaps becoming statistically stronger by earning loot

and then when you take on that challenge again you're better at it and then you're closer to mastery right so but a word of caution so if your game is about pursuit and the easiest which often translates to the fastest way of gaining rewards is by doing something that is repetitive or boring players will do it right they'll do that thing for hours and ignore all the other fun activities that you built that also give rewards but your activity takes too long it requires more effort than for example standing in front of this cave for hours like in destiny 1 but until we fire like the famous loot cave was a bug an extreme extreme case but the important point is that when designing for repetition the world and systems design need to complement each other and so when i when i found when designing for repetition like action is a common conflicting motivation so if you don't account for a repetition

in your activity from the beginning it only takes one or two replays to quickly losing gate excitement so i'm sure you've played a mission where a narrative twist or a surprising cutscene happened and repeating that mission again just doesn't pack that same punch so in these situations i think you're one-off expensive explosions and cinematics they take a back seat and so instead spend your action in excitement excitement bucks on things like variability right so where where can you add surprises that changes the experiences with in not very expensive ways varying degrees of success so how can that player get better at your activity the next time they play it it's also important to think about what you don't need for example is it fun to hear that same dialogue lines over and over again probably not so to design for agency with repetition you got to think systemically and globally

all right we did it so we looked at three different concepts to build worlds for different player types and so before i wrap up i want to leave you with some final thoughts so the player categories their guidelines each player is different and will not fit nicely into each category like we want them to and most of us have player motivations that fall into multiple categories so you can go find out what player type you are on quantic boundaries by quantic foundry's website it's pretty cool and your job my job is to use these examples of starting points right so this shouldn't be thought as complete solutions and it's the principles that are behind them that are important and think about who your target audience is and what is most important for your game and don't forget to extrapolate beyond yourself alright so justify your design decisions by thinking about which humans they're for and avoid using justification like this

is cool so we should do it and that's the only reason why yeah so and lastly world design still in its infancy just like games right i'm excited to see where it'll go next as it changes all the time and i think this is especially true for as the generation who grew up with games get older like me and i think we'll see new genres and world design techniques because players motivations will change over time and i believe that it'll be those designers who see this and design for what people value most that will see success so thank you