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Friday Fix: Can we make Yserbius more engaging?

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ZaneDubya

Hail friends, and happy Leap Year Eve! We are one week out the Twinion public test, and four weeks from the Twinion grand release. I have watched as the first testers in Twinion have slowly been solving that dungeon. It's been exciting to follow your progress, and I have appreciated the opportunity to fix the game stopping bugs that arose in your path.

On my end I have whittled away various bug reports and feature requests. These are all tracked on the Github repository. I added a link to the Github to the MedievaLands website, which you will see in the top menu bar, and under the hamburger menu on mobile devices.

As I add these small features and squash those bugs, I can't help but wonder if I'm missing the forest for the trees. I have been hard at work polishing up the original experience, and many of you have told me that MedievaLands is much more fun to play than the original game. And that's good to hear! But is there something fundamentally unsatisfying about playing Yserbius that my work on MedievaLands hasn't begun to address?

Looking Back

It's instructive to look back at the contemporaneous reviews of Yserbius. I added a handful of these to the MedievaLands website under the 'Press' page. While all reviews of Yserbius are generally positive, focusing on how much fun it is to play with friends, there are negative notes as well.

Bernie Yee's 1994 review of the Yserbius boxed set, published in Computer Gaming World, discusses issues with the game's mechanics. In that review, Yee notes that Yserbius's "minimalistic game design" was essentially the same as 1985's The Bard's Tale. He touches on NPC interactions (none) and character progression (very little nuance compared to other contemporary RPGs). Yee points out that Combat is "simple" with no tactical nuance. "Combat becomes tedious after a while," he write, "between the random encounters and set piece 'monster squares' that refill with enemies to fight over and over."

Yee has the right of it. Yserbius is a great game - it obviously made an impact on me and if you're playing MedievaLands, it made an impact on you too. But it's also clear that Yserbius feels less than fully engaging.

I felt this as I was working on the original MedievaLands release. At that time I was focused on recreating the exact original Yserbius experience. It turned out great, but my focus on the original game meant that MedievaLands kept everything from the original game's design, both good and bad. Now, as I work on adding Twinion, this second full pass through the game's mechanics has given me the experience to consider what is keeping Yserbius from being a more engaging game.

The Core Loop and a Lack of Engagement

The problem with engagement in Yserbius arises from the game's Core Loop. By "Core Loop", I mean the mode of the game that takes up the most of both the game's design and the player's moment-to-moment focus. This is different from the overarching goal of Yserbius, which I would describe as "explore a dungeon with friends, solve puzzles, and grow in strength by defeating monsters so you can defeat a final tough boss."

The Core Loop - the thing that demands the player's attention and which the game's design focuses upon - is the combat. And not a combat from beginning to end, but rather a single round of combat: the player chooses an action, the game runs the combat simulation and supplies feedback to the player, and the player adjusts their mental model of the game based on that feedback.

I don't think the choices the player has, nor the feedback the game provides, are really that engaging.

Player Choice and the Lack of Balance

I discussed the issue with the player choice previously in news posts (see 'Is Yserbius a class based game') and we have carried on that conversation by talking about why the various classes, in their current implementations, aren't much fun to play. Yserbius suffers from a lack of balance, in that by the mid game, the player does not have many meaningful choices to make. There is objectively one best character type to play, one best set of equipment, and one best action to take in combat: physical attacks most of the time, after an opening round of shields, buffs, and occasionally debuffs. Because there is a best action to take at every single step, the possibility space for player actions within the game is not very broad. And if there's no possibility space to explore, the game is not very engaging for a player - they are just there to repeat the same action over and over.

So how could we fix this? I think a fix would arise from balancing the current set of player choices, and by adding new choices where the current game is most restrictive. To balance the current set of player choices, we will have to make more of these choices viable. For example, we could make the Wizards and Rangers more valuable by making their ability to contribute to combat more equal to that of Knights and Barbarians. We could do the same thing to the game's itemization by adding more options for player equipment, each with different advantages and disadvantages. I've recently rewritten the game's item framework that can handle much of this, and hope to introduce some of these new items soon. As for adding new choices - this would be more difficult, but I would like to see classes that really do have to focus on physical attacks - like Barbarians - have more options to play with each round. Perhaps there should be multiple kinds of physical attacks. Reginald had some ideas on this subject recently - perhaps we could have attacks that damage multiple enemies, or attacks that focus on one enemy, or attacks that apply debuffs to enemies. Yserbius has many skills - can we make more of these viable options in combat.

Feedback and Juice

The second issue with the core game loop is the poor way which the game gives players feedback. To be more clear: almost all the results of combat scroll past you in a very small text window. In large combats, it is hard to see what has happened. This is frustrating. I hamfistedly tacked some feedback on to the existing engine last year, with the player health bars and damage/healing numbers appearing over the player tiles. Honestly, this is not enough. It's still far too difficult to see who is attacking you and what your character is doing.

There's a game design term for improving game feedback - it's called "Juice". Check out the talk "Juice it or lose it" on Youtube for an overview and demonstration of the subject. In short, Juice is a set of graphical effects that give the player the impression that their actions are making a meaningful impact on the game's state. Yserbius was designed in an era before programmers and artists started to focus on juicy feedback, and when there was not really enough computational power to show the juice a designer might want to include.

I think there is are many ways we could improve the feedback in the combat mode. We could make the user interface less static, allowing the user interface controls that represent the combatants to move around and actually hit each other (this would not change the current combat tactical options - players and monsters would still strike at each other from two rows of six tiles each). We could add more particle effects, beyond just the damage numbers. We could increase the size of the text box, similar to how I've increased the amount of text visible in the Tavern. And we could move more of the combat action out of the tiny text box and into the visible game world.

Looking Ahead

I honestly don't know how much of this I'll be able to add. I don't know which of these ideas will turn out to be easy to design and which will be easy to implement. But I want you to know that I am thinking about how to fundamentally improve Yserbius, and make it not just a fun remake of a game we played thirty years ago, but a game that is fun and relevant for today's players as well.

Until next time, friends. Take care down there!

Reginald

As I've mentioned a few times in my previous responses, I think a rebalancing of the classes and potentially adding some new flavor and items into the mix would really bring a new light to the game as a whole; if not only for the new possibilities, then for the appearance that the game has over time evolved into something more than it initially was. As you yourself said, the game is essentially now at a point of being a reliable canvas of what Yserbius once was. With Twinion coming out soon too, that will just add more credence to the idea.

Perhaps abilities and the like can also be something to look into, too? Some abilities kind of drop off their usefulness after reaching a certain point, so perhaps additional skill levels or something after a certain level threshold has been reached? It'd also help give a reason for players to strive to reach the higher levels rather than hover in the 20's and 30's.

Grobrak

Hmm... The main problem really lies in how Spells and Skills currently work, I think.

What if Spells and Skills operated similarily to weapons? That is to say, if you introduced a new stat or two - something like Intelligence and Wisdom - which help scale the base strength of these abilities? Spells in particular could really benefit from this, as they easily fall behind in power compared to melee attacks. So a Wizard casting Lightning with a high Intelligence would produce better results than a Barbarian with lower Intelligence ever could. Although it could depend on race, much like the other stats do - so you could end up with a Gremlin Barbarian capable of casting decent magic.

Grobrak

(Sorry for the double post, I'm writing this in-game and the reply window is bugging out if I write too much after making a new paragraph!)

Another thought to toy around with would be introducing weaknesses and strengths against certain weapon types or elemental types for spells. We do have Wind, Ice and Fire to work with already, after all. You could sneak in an Earth element by changing a spell like Storm Gust into Dust Storm instead, haha. But my point is, this could introduce an incentive to play different classes capable of wielding different weapon types to handle enemies more efficiently. Smashing through hard husks or carapices, slashing through zombie flesh or burning the pelt right off of a wolf or panther.

Food for thought?

Silver

The original game gave players a choice of whether they were going to take their character offline completely once they hit level 20 or stay online forever after that point. I definitely don't want to replicate that, but also, both games take a steep climb up the difficluty curve for a solo player right about the point where a character would make it to level 20 (so after the Cleowyn's Quest and Thieves' Den in Yserbius, for example)

The game, as it currently is, really bceomes a game of whether you can play in a party or not to have fun, or whether you really enjoy grinding, if you don't or can't find a party ot play with. What might make the game more engaging is finding a way to make it so that solo players can feel like they're making progress and able to hold their own, while making party play engaging and perhaps faster for climbing up the hill of experience.

As was mentioned by Grobrak above, Spells and Skills really take a nosedive of effectiveness right about the time where the difficulty spikes. If there were a way to make damage scale better against monster stacks, that would also make more classes and builds viable in the later dungeons.

A thing that might also be interesting is if items that have magical spells imbued in them are equipped, instead of each item having a set number of charges to it, each item or weapon has a percentage chance to cast their spell during a combat round, such that the player could inflict statuses by attacking, or after their physical attack, a free spell is cast on the same target(s) to do additional damage. (Or healing the player while doing damage to the enemy.) These kinds of effects might make it so players have to decide between items with great physical strength, where they will do lots of damage quickly, or with great magical power that can be devastating if the spells cast along with the physical damage.

This faithful reconstruction has proven that the game can work again, but we have a few aditional decades of MMO, MUD, and other multiplayer expereince now.

Grobrak

Silver, you are right about there having been decades of various types of multiplayer games (especially RPGs) since MedievaLands first debut, but in a way I believe that's a strength because it means there's a lot to draw inspiration from.

I doubt a strictly modern adaptation would work with an old game like this, but it has the potential to draw from all the "goods" and avoid the "bads" of games that came after it., mechanically speaking.

Silver

I agree, Grobrak. I meant it as something to draw inspiration from, rather than as a knock against the game. Part of the reason I decided to use a vitamin-based cheat engine forthe game was to be able to get through the story without having to stop and grind for ten or twelve levels so that I could experience the story. I think there's a lot that we can draw on from subsequent MMOs and how they balance grind versus reward, and possibly, if the code can be expanded to allow it, to stuff the dungeon full of additional quests that can provide more engagement on all levels of the dungeon.

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