Optimizing the Fun Out of a Game

[porkybork]

Game designer Soren Johnson once said that “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.” Are there any instances where this applied to you? Have you ever made a character build so busted that it trivialized every combat encounter? Have you made a system in a simulator that was so efficient that there was no challenge in it anymore? Or maybe, have you ever put so much focus into optimizing a game with grindy mechanics that t made you frustrated with the normal game play loop? Doesn't have to be video games only, could be TTRPGs or card games.

[Pamatronic]

Optimization IS the fun part of many games.
Stuff like Factorio/Satisfactory have it as their literal core gameplay mechanic. And even RPG´s often have a focus on this.
If you can manage to "optimize" the fun out of a game, that just means the game is poorly designed/balanced and doesn't account for players utilizing their options.

[porkybork]

17 hours ago, Pamatronic said:

Optimization IS the fun part of many games.
Stuff like Factorio/Satisfactory have it as their literal core gameplay mechanic. And even RPG´s often have a focus on this.
If you can manage to "optimize" the fun out of a game, that just means the game is poorly designed/balanced and doesn't account for players utilizing their options.

I see. I mostly thought of this because I made a ghost armor build in Ghost of Tsushima that was so good at terrifying the enemies after killing someone that I would only have to kill about half the total amount of enemies per encounter even on lethal difficulty. It also made Jin a monster when it came to stealth kills. Thematically, it was amazing, but it made me miss charging in and having to carve up the enemies. Thankfully, GoT allows you to save builds so that you can switch between them when you feel like it, so it wasn't actually that big of a deal.

[Count Chocula]

21 hours ago, porkybork said:

Game designer Soren Johnson once said that “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.” Are there any instances where this applied to you?

Change the saying to "some players will optimize the fun out of a game" and I would agree a little bit. Because who's to say how another player has fun? No one plays a game if they are not having fun doing it. If optimizing is the way player X has fun, then they are not optimizing their fun out of the game.

 

I agree a little bit in terms of multi-player games because, and let's take TTRPGs since I play a lot of TTRPGs, there are players who optimize my fun out of the game. But my solution is to simply not play with them any more.

 

Soren Johnson sounds like a bit of a petulant, judgmental twit.

[porkybork]

So this could be my own fault for not giving proper context for the quote in the OP. Soren Johnson is an American game programmer known for being one of the lead designers of Civilization III, Civilization IV, Offworld Trading Company, Old World, and Dragon Age Legends. The quote is from an article Soren wrote in 2011 as part of a series based around game design philosophy and practices. It is also worth pointing out that these articles are directed towards other developers. Basically, he notes that players will often look for exploits in games that lead to the highest rewards while negating most of the costs. While there's nothing inherently wrong with this, doing so may cause players to limit their strategies to ones that are efficient but tedious; plus, players may become unwilling to experiment with different strategies, instead sticking to a handful of tried-and-true methods. Listed examples in the articles include the tank mage from Ultima Online, ICS spam in Civ 1-3, and spending several hours running into a wall over and over again to raise the Athletics skill in Morrowind. Soren then argues that devs should avoid removing exploits unless said exploits make the game more mindless and limits player creativity. He even recommends giving players more options in how they can play their games while making the general gameplay loop a rewarding experience, ending the article by saying "Ultimately, the designer can’t go wrong putting the player in control of his or her own experience."

 

A few examples I can think of for something like this are:

Killing nothing but boars in WoW to level up.

Farming cow hides for crowns in Witcher 3.

Using the Fenrir cheese strat in Kingdom Hearts 2.

 

Is it wrong to do these things instead of playing how the designers intended? No, but that's not really the point of the article.

6 hours ago, chocula said:

Change the saying to "some players will optimize the fun out of a game" and I would agree a little bit. Because who's to say how another player has fun? No one plays a game if they are not having fun doing it. If optimizing is the way player X has fun, then they are not optimizing their fun out of the game.

 

I agree a little bit in terms of multi-player games because, and let's take TTRPGs since I play a lot of TTRPGs, there are players who optimize my fun out of the game. But my solution is to simply not play with them any more.

 

Soren Johnson sounds like a bit of a petulant, judgmental twit.

And this is why context is important lol.

[belegost]

49 minutes ago, porkybork said:

Soren then argues that devs should avoid removing exploits unless said exploits make the game more mindless and limits player creativity. He even recommends giving players more options in how they can play their games while making the general gameplay loop a rewarding experience, ending the article by saying "Ultimately, the designer can’t go wrong putting the player in control of his or her own experience."

I see Larian have been paying attention and taking notes.

[Count Chocula]

25 minutes ago, porkybork said:

I"Ultimately, the designer can’t go wrong putting the player in control of his or her own experience."

Now this sounds almost exactly the opposite of what it seemed to me before.  "Give players options." You can go wrong giving too many options, but as a general rule, options are good.

 

As for the quote about players looking for most reward for least cost, that's a people thing. Heck, that's probably an organism thing.

 

I guess you can say it's not the point of the article to say that it's not wrong for players to play that way. Although since what it is saying is it's not wrong to give players the option to do those exploitative things, by extension the article is indeed making the point that it's not wrong for players to do those things.

 

This quote from the article, smacks of elitism (rather than the petulance I mentioned before): "players will trade time for safety, but they risk undervaluing their own time to the point that they are undermining their own enjoyment of the game." Because how would he know?

 

"A classic example is the skill system from Morrowind, which rewards players for repeating any activity. Running into a wall for hours increases the Athletics skill while jumping over and over again increases the Acrobatics skill. Many players couldn’t stop themselves from spending hours doing mindless activities for these cheap rewards." Maybe players who do that find it fun. In fact, I will say for certain players who do that find it fun, or they would not do it. I wouldn't do it, because I would find it boring, But I'm not so arrogant (not in that way, anyway) that I'd tell someone else their fun is wrong if they do it. And if a game does begin to feel like a grind, a possibility noted by Johnson, so what?

[espguy]

Depends, on multiplayer games yeah optimization can cause problems for people that just want to enjoy the game even with suboptimal builds but on single player i dont thnink its a thing. I rarelly play games for challenge sake, most of times I play for the story, to rp a character or for the fantasy. Never really cared for challenging myself and while I dont always play optimal (in fact most times I focus on theme of the build and such) its fun ro sometimes be so ridiculously powerfull that you oneshot some enemies.

[landess]

Pointing at gamers is rude.

 

 

Been replaying AC Odyssey NG+

 

Level 99 and using a bow is all but worthless

 

I'm a bit of a glass cannon but also a useless git if not spending stamina to execute 'special' attacks.

 

It would seem the developer's themselves have reached a point where more levels (originally capped to 50) would create an 'unplayable' system. This is in regards to using every trick and equipment/skill choice to keep up with the power creep. It is a lot more challenging now than it was when I started with nothing. Losing over 100K HP (out of 125K) in a single hit to an enemy is closer to a souls-like experience than a Creed one.

 

Sometimes mods are the best solution to a developers ego.

[AKM]

Have never done it myself, but I've seen plenty of stupidly overpowered builds in both Skyrim and Oblivion on Youtube.

[mynewusername]

On 11/22/2024 at 7:43 AM, chocula said:

Running into a wall for hours increases the Athletics skill while jumping over and over again increases the Acrobatics skill.

realistic

[DrunkenCow]

On 11/22/2024 at 2:43 AM, chocula said:

Many players couldn’t stop themselves from spending hours doing mindless activities for these cheap rewards.

 

Bruh, no one sat in front of their computer or xbox swimming into the bridge in Balmora.  They just hit auto-walk on their keyboard or wrapped a rubber band on their controller and went to sleep/work/school same as they do at the start of Skyrim with the bear in the cave.

 

The problem is Bethesda games are mindless activities outside of leveling and they tend to make them worse with each "balance" patch so you are left either cheating yourself items or exploiting the quick-save inventory reset just to be able to build your dlc house and neglect your dlc kids.

[Grey Cloud]

Min-maxers. I've watched a lot of vids of WH40K RT where the players obsess about about doing "insane" amounts damage and one-shotting bosses (and anything else) and winning a fight on the first round. They spend forever buffing and debuffing (point-click, point-click ad nauseam) them boom. They do this by cheesing a game mechanic whereby having two, sometimes three, officers in your party allows multiple extra turns as well as extra buffing and debuffing (these generally stack). Many of them also use stimms for even more buffs. They never mention how many times they have done the fight or how many hours they have spent pouring over ability descriptions to get to this point.

 

I'm no expert on the mechanics but I have done 2 x Normal and 1 x Daring runs and am currently on my first Hard one. Only ever had one officer, very seldom do I have my officer give anyone a full free turn and I never use stimms yet I can get through almost all fights in a couple of rounds while taking hardly any damage. My first run on Normal was more difficult than this run on Hard because I didn't know what I was doing.

 

 

Edited December 24, 2024 by Grey Cloud

[Count Chocula]

Both of the two most recent posts reply to me as if I made the statements they quote, but I was quoting a third party.

[Panther Benz]

Yes, a lot of my Skyrim and one of Oblivion playthroughs were about maximizing character's power to less difficult fights wuth enemies in the main story. On the one hand, process of optimizing and grinding best gear often is very interesting for me, but on the other hand, after this game and this "story mode" becomes very easy.