Sunday, April 2, 2017

Decoding Epic Encounters in God of War


A cornerstone of the God of War series, is clearly creating large scale set pieces. I say set pieces because these encounters feel more like self contained mini experiences rather than traditional boss battles.

TECHNOLOGY
  • Centering the game around segments that don't necessarily fit within the modelling of moment to moment gameplay means that specialized tools needed to be developed for creation of these segments.
  • In GOW3 several boss battles take place on top of moving entities such as titans. During these encounters the characters respond dynamically to movements on the parent entity itself.
  • This infers the existence of a system where child objects of a particular joint respond to transform changes of the parent object.
  • However, these transform changes couldn't possibly be entirely systemic. A large amount of manual effort must have been involved in aligning attached entities during animation steps.

  • In addition, collision on attached entities must have also demanded intricate collision meshes to allow for battles to take place on the parent entity.

PACING
  • Each encounter typically has several different stages, with each stage having an epic cinematic payoff.
  • Sometimes an encounter can play out over the course of an entire level.
  • This affects pacing quite dramatically, as it allows for each stage to be consistently high octane with a tension release in between stages rather than during the battle.
  • It also allows for the opportunity to contextualize the encounter over time.
    Eg: Poseidon's encounter progresses from an attack on Kratos to an attack on Gaia placing Kratos' vehicle in jeopardy.


PROGRESS
  • Enemies don't have explicit health bars. Instead, what is made evident is how the beast can be defeated. This is also a means for players to gauge their progress in the battle.
    Eg: Kratos defeats Hades by literally cutting away pieces of him.

                                    
  • In addition most larger bosses also tend to have avatar changes over the different stages also indicating a sense of progress to the player. These avatars also help visualize the characters arcs of the bosses within the battle.

                                                     HADES REGULAR AVATAR                            


                                             HADES ANGRY AVATAR NEAR DEATH

                                        

ENCOUNTER INITIATION
  • Clearly a lot of effort goes into making each encounter feel unique.Nevertheless, certain characteristics of a classic God of War encounter are identifiable.
  • Encounters tend to begin at surprising moments without announcement.

                            HADES ATTEMPT TO RIP KRATOS' SOUL AT INITIATION


                                             POSEIDON'S SUDDEN EMERGENCE

PLAYER'S INITIAL REACTION

  • A player's initial reaction to boss' at this scale tend to be instant aggression. Therefore, typical first responses tend to be furious hammering of attacks at the boss.
  • To accommodate for this player behavior, bosses tend to begin by slowly paced similarly styled attacks.
  • These attacks tend to be agnostic of player position, making evasion fairly simple.
  • This stage could even be marked by diminished attack damage as the player will undoubtedly be hit a few times.

                 POSEIDON'S INITIAL UNI-DIMENSIONAL WATER BREATH ATTACK


    HADES' INITIAL UNI-DIMENSIONAL STOMP ATTACK

BUILDING IN NUANCE
  • Eventually the player deciphers the animation that maps to the boss's attack preparation and eventually learns to either block or evade the attack depending on blockability of the attack.
  • As the battle progresses, boss attacks tend to require more specific player evasive action.
  • There is almost a sense of puzzle solving involved in deciphering the required evasive action which could range from flying on impact, continuous rolling, rolling to a specific position etc.
  • This phase gets compounded by adding multiple attacks forcing the player to maintain an attack - evasion mapping in his mind.
  • This also causes players to attack from positions where they can realistically react in time to avoid impact.

                                HADES' EARTHQUAKE - REQUIRES PLAYER TO FLY


     POSEIDON'S PINCER ATTACK - REQUIRES PLAYER TO BE AT PLATFORM CENTER


PLAYER CHEATS

  • The game provides various means for the player to make himself invulnerable for brief periods. This includes magic attacks, rage of sparta mode, grabbing smaller enemies etc.
  • An element of meaningful choice that the player encounters is when he wishes to use these time bound 'cheat' resources.
  • However, the game occasionally invalidates these cheat strategies as well. For example, a boss strike could be longer than the invulnerability period of a magic attack.


    WHIRLWIND MAGIC - INVULNERABILITY SHORTER THAN POSEIDON TRIDENT

    EPIC PAYOFF MOMENTS
    • Boss encounters tend to be check pointed by payoff moments. The player hits circle to trigger a quick time sequence punctuating a visual cut scene.
    • These sequences tend to have the camera scale back to demonstrate the largeness of the encounter.

                                         CAMERA SCALE BACK MOMENT


INVALIDATING PLAYER SCHEMA
  • As mentioned above, encounters occur over several stages. One technique that the game utilizes is adding subtle variations on individual boss attacks in subsequent stages.
  • For example, an attack sequence that had two attacks might now have 4 instead.
  • This causes the player to actively resist moves that he has hopefully internalized at this point.

    HADES CHAIN ATTACK HAS 3 HITS INSTEAD OF 2 IN 2nd STAGE
                                 
ENCOUNTER FRAMING
  • Memorable GOW encounters don't always involve a boss. Sometimes waves of enemies can be just as engaging.
  • Simple things like how these encounters are framed can add pressure on the player.
  • For example, stating that 'wandering souls' need to be killed before they are converted into Hades army is so much more effective than simply dropping undead creatures.

FEEDBACK LOOPS
  • The game has a variety of types of beasts differentiated on various axes.
  • By combining different categories of beasts, the game builds in feedback loops making encounters easier or more difficult.
  • For example, a positive feedback loop occurs by adding grabbable characters. This gives the player breathing room to take a break from the action or evade attacks from other monsters.

                          
  • A negative feedback loop occurs when a combination of two monsters can deal greater damage. Eg : Medusa with other quick attacking characters can instantly kill Kratos by turning him into stone and then shattering him.

     
  • Another interesting component is that there exists triangular high risk, high reward built into the negative feedback loops.
  • For example, players can use Medusa's stone flash attack to turn into stone other monsters. This however, comes at the risk of Kratos being turned into stone himself.

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