Why Games Lie to You- The Fallacy of Fairness

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You are being lied to. Tricked. Deceived and Bamboozled. Surely that’s a bad thing, right? Well not always, video games are constantly tricking you, but keeping you in the dark is integral to the workings of not just the best games but nearly all of them.
The Architect has traveled to the far future, an alternate present and the depths of Hel itself to confront some uncomfortable truths about the way we think about video games, and to shed some light on some very dark secrets. He even came up with a way to talk about XCOM again!
You Saw:
Destiny 2 (2017)
Eternal Card game (2016)
Hollow Knight (2017)
Slay The Spire (2017)
XCOM 2: WOTC (2017)
DOOM (2016)
Rayman Legends (2013)
Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice (2017)
Fez (2012)
A Hat in Time (2017)
HITMAN (2016)
Bioshock 2 (2010)
Ikaruga (2001)
Volume (2015)
Spelunky (2008)
Batman: Arkham City: (2011)
Alien Isolation (2016)
Mirror’s Edge (2010)
Dark souls (2011)
Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing Transformed (2012)
Uncharted 2 (2009)
Pacman (1980)
Interesting Links:
Jennifer’s GDC Talk: • Video
A great Making of bit for hellblade: • Hellblade: Senua's Sac...
Cool article about the nuts and bolts of combat design in DOOM: www.gamasutra....

[@GerackSerack]

As a Game Master in tabletop RPGs, I totally get why games may lie. The important part is what players experience. A dungeon with branching paths is more fun than a linear one, but it's also better to prepare one really good monster encounter than five mediocre ones. This is called "Schrodinger's Ogre", for the ogre is both in rooms A and B at the same time, and it's only when the players choose a path that the ogre assumes a final state.

[@abrittishpanfish6269]

do you ever fudge a roll to add a bit of tension of cool things down a bit?

[@NikozBG]

Lol the "Schrodinger's Ogre" is amongst the funniest things I've ever heard.

[@Madhattersinjeans]

A Brittish Panfish Oh man, I would love to see two sessions covering the same mission. One where the DM fudges rolls to build up tension and sometimes help the players out. One where the DM plays straight as the dice roll, no help or hindrance. I think we would be surprised how much we rely on fudging numbers for a fun experience, True chances to hit/miss and be killed tend to force players into a very very paranoid state. Too long in that state and they'll start avoiding hard encounters and dragging out fairly simple quests in order to not take damage. Min/maxing kills fun. That said you can still enjoy yourself having a harder experience, and if the gamer group is pro enough maybe they can deal with things effectively. I suppose you can just fudge the numbers to make the game harder for them though.

[@haveiszalfaroqie]

I didn't even know Schrodinger has a pet Ogre until now.

[@Oneiroclast]

While fudging dice isn't uncommon, the DM has a powerful tool here that a video game doesn't: they may opt to roll particularly major/impactful rolls in the open to make it clear to the players that this roll is 100% guaranteed to be honest and DM fiat isn't going to screw them or save them.

[@timothymclean]

"Maybe the real lies were the friends we made along the way." That's...a lot sadder than it shoulda been.

[@ArchitectofGames]

:(

[@krozz69]

*Slaps head of friend - You can fit so many lies in these friends

[@Tenelia]

Ayyyeeeee frrrriend! *drunken weaving*

[@Silverfirefly1]

Maybe The Real lies with the friends we made along the way.

[@Lewis360]

250ms human reaction isn't really true, while technically it's true the brain expect things, that's why players can easily feel the difference between 30/60/120 FPS. There is an interesting article on Anandtech about that.

[@NikolajLepka]

A very simple example of a game cheating is Portal 2 (Spoiler warning for those who haven't finished it) At the very end of the game when you have to shoot the portal up at the moon, it doesn't actually matter which colour portal you shot on the ground first, the game will always make sure to place the correct one to engage the epic end sequence. Imagine if you actually could place the wrong one on the moon and then nothing at all happened: it would be massively anticlimactic

[@Madhattersinjeans]

Would have been a good moment for a hidden ending.

[@haveiszalfaroqie]

Would feel like that troll moment in HS where Yogg gives you all the good stuff and turns them against you at the end of the random spells.

[@abramthiessen8749]

I actually found that out myself and didn't expect anything to happen. They also give you a very long time to shoot that portal despite it feeling rushed.

[@iceshadow625]

I remember when I first experienced that scene. I was like crap, I hope I shot the correct portal! Oh thank god I did! Lol and then I found out later it didn't matter.

[@SkyRied1]

But what if the surface of the Moon isn't suitable for the portal to be shot?

[@ArmanNobari]

2:49 browser tabs: "what is a human" ... "how am baby make" ... "WALUIGI PORN" i, what

[@zyeran]

we live in tenebris times. WHAAAAA!!!!

[@cooldeemo1087]

91-fucking-1

[@BlurryDoggo]

Maybe he's messing with us? Hopefully...

[@Smullet90]

Don't forget the first tab, "hacker typer". 10/10 troll

[@peasaladdeluxe6392]

Arman Nobari a miserable little pile of secrets

[@SamuelDurkin]

"dungeon master" a game on the old atariST and amiga. Used to randomly spin the disk drive for no reason at all, it did this because it knew gamers would imagine that it was loading some new threat and would add to the feeling of impending doom.

[@worldwidecatvods]

That's incredibly smart and evil at the same time.

[@elonwhatever]

When they lie in order to mentally trick you into throwing more money at their game for stuff you'd get by leveling, then there is no defense.

[@Cman04092]

Yes, agreed. There is a big difference between tricking/manipulating people into spending money and helpful/good game design.

[@felixzeitler3955]

I guess it's the same with a game lying to you as cgi in movies. When it is done correctly it is barely noticable, but the bad ones stick in your head and give them a bad rep. So thanks for this video putting a littlebit of light in that dark (y)

[@timothymclean]

Random tangent, but I like cheap, crappy CGI a lot better than cheap, crappy practical effects. Practical effects are only any good when they're either dang close to the best in the industry, or so hilariously bad that you can't even try to judge them seriously.

[@kyleelmblade5193]

Excellent point. Whether it's movies, video games, live theater, or books, we are looking for a diversion. We *_want_* them to lie to us. These forms of entertainment are designed to escape reality. The challenge is to do so while maintaining the suspension of disbelief. That is easier to do with a subject like magic because, with magic, you can do just about anything. With science-based concepts, it can be more difficult, especially with more logically minded people. In the video game world, you have to strike a balance between playability and difficulty. Consider why the original Atari E.T game was such a failure. It was impossible to win. What's the fun in that?

[@JSTM2000]

I never played Xcom but I think the problem with their difficulty settings is that they train the player to play wrong if they want to eventually move to Legendary difficulty. When the hidden bonuses get stripped away, their previous knowledge becomes useless, so they end up thinking that Legendary cheats when in reality they were fed false infromation.

[@sauryasircar5326]

Nah fam. You just don't simply "move on to" legendary difficulty.

[@maxbrouwer95]

Exactly my thought. Why would they not just use the correct percentages? People bad at interpreting 50% are also bad at interpreting 55%

[@MouldMadeMind]

That's how difficulty settings work

[@grfrjiglstan]

Why are you game analysis guys all British?

[@ArchitectofGames]

This is pretty much true

[@zyaicob]

Don't you know Britain invented the video game?

[@jamesbetti9002]

Adam Millard - The Architect of Games Still fun to take swings at American politics regardless, though?

[@grfrjiglstan]

James Betti Have you seen the dude we've got in the Office? When a reality TV star becomes a politician, politics becomes reality TV.

[@ratlinggull2223]

@@ExValeFor yeah true, not having an accent literally means mute

[@samsibbens8164]

About Mirror's Edge - it's the same as in real life. If you've never done parkour, you'll see objects and buildings and everything as just that, objects, and buildings. When you do parkour you stop seeing them that way. Instead of seeing paths as 2D, just the roads, sidewalks.... places with no objects, you start seeing paths everywhere. You don't see a wall, you see a path. You don't see a concrete barrier, you see a shortcut. Fences, tables and walls aren't things you have to go around, they're the path. If you've never done parkour and you start playing Mirror's Edge, you can't play without the red color to show you the path. But if you've played once, you start noticing paths everywhere, even where there are no red colors. Then you can play the game again without the red colors, and it doesn't matter. Not because you remember the paths, but because you see them. Same as in real life.

[@Kenionatus]

Do rock climbing (especially bouldering) and then look at buildings. :)

[@eadbert1935]

i always think about this when useful items are highlighted... i initially felt cheated because i can just walk around and instantly see items, making me feel like i'm not doing the exploring myself my most recent moment was in alien isolation, but there it's very similar to your example she's an engineer, she can look at stuff and instantly realise if it's useful or not... she might have to check if the tube of compound b is full or not, but that wouldn't be fun for a player either. it's really just about the range at which things are highlighted that should be put into question, similarly how you can't see how sturdy something is at 100m, but up close the "highlighting" makes sense again

[@randomsandwichian]

Hence, The Witness

[@fernandochiappetta1359]

I don't do parkour, but after playing one or two levels with the highlighted paths I chose to disable this option and it is really worth it. Yes, at the beginning it was a little confusing, but to be honest you learn to identify the possible items you can use to continue your path, and not having them highlighted in front of your face makes the experience way more natural (and therefore exciting). What a great game.

[@Mick0Mania]

I think an easier way to judge is: Would the player be okay with it, if the information was given to them after their playthrough? I heard some people were really upset about Resident Evil 4's secretly adaptive difficulty as they didn't feel rewarded or punished accordingly. I don't think people would be outraged to hear that platformers use jump frames. I would imagine they would be outraged to hear that they are "being lied to" not to enhance their experience, but to instead make them pay more money, or rob them of a more rewarding experience.

[@tomasxfranco]

I think it hurts when these things are not present. If you are used to lenient jumps, when a game doesn't give you that benefit, you make mistakes and feel like the game is worse. Whenever I feel like I jumped before sliding off the edge, I get quite annoyed.

[@Mary42877]

Yeah, sometimes I wonder if I only beat the boss because the game was feeling sorry for me after I died to that boss thirty times in a row. Then I think "no, they wouldn't do that, they wouldn't lie to me". Then I see this video. T_T

[@todesziege]

Personally, when I pick up on things like these (and, really, they're often quite easy to pick up on) it can really ruin a game for me, in the sense that I will stop trying hard. If the game will "correct my mistakes", why even bother? And that sense of meaninglessness can ruin other areas, such as story, too.

[@CrudusViscus]

> game gives players incorrect information on easier difficulty > devs complain that players think game on harder difficulty is bullshitting them

[@EmperorZ19]

Right? If you suddenly change what 50% truly means, players will rightfully pick up that they've been lied to, even if they were wrong about which one was the lie.

[@MouldMadeMind]

I like the smell of straw in the morning.

[@Logan55689]

@@MouldMadeMind "Any argument I don't agree with is a strawman argument." - Extremely intelligent person trying to snark at multiple year old comments

[@MouldMadeMind]

@@Logan55689 i like how you repeat things i said.

[@Logan55689]

@@MouldMadeMind I like how you can't properly articulate yourself.

[@JSTama]

I get why games do this. But it bothers me when they lower the difficulty without asking, cause some times I can tell and it completely destroys my immertion and sense of effort.

[@wx7fm]

Ooo! ExtraCredit has a great video about automatically adjusting difficulties. I would highly recomend it

[@mo0man]

Maybe you should have just been better in the first place

[@EmperorZ19]

I hate auto-adjusting difficulty so much. I want to rise to the challenge and get better

[@PrejudicePain]

XCOM 2 breaks immersion when you realize you miss more 90% chances then 60% chances. So I understand why you wouldn't like that.

[@EmperorZ19]

@@PrejudicePain Do you have proof of that? Because that sounds like nonsense.

[@caad5258]

I feel like a lot of those "cheats" you outline are just simple mechanics, like being able to corner faster than ghosts in pac man or dark souls bosses having obvious openings. It's not cheating if the game design includes flawed enemies, or abilities exclusive to the player character. That X-COM reveal was staggering though...

[@Arvensa]

Pacman being able to turn corners faster than Ghosts is not really a 'cheating' or 'lying' scenario, just because the game doesn't spell it out in a tutorial. Pacman is outnumbered, but he is more maneuverable. This balances the scenario when combined with an intelligent player. As the player, in order to specifically exploit that mechanic, you may have to engage in some exploration and discover that mechanical differential through either fortune or experiment. That's legitimate player skill growth derived from learning to manipulate a mechanic that is relatively easy to spot once you notice it or go looking for it, and a bit more challenging to devise how to exploit, and then a bit more difficult still to implement correctly every time. This is what makes it a legitimate mechanic.

[@FinetalPies]

I think you're trying to separate "tricks" from "legitimate mechanics" and I don't know why. Pacman's extra maneuverability was added secretly give players an advantage and make them feel like they're better at the game than they are. Which is great, for all the skill growth reasons you mentioned.

[@Arvensa]

Being able to turn corners more quickly than ghosts all the time seems more 'legit' than only being able to do so when ghosts are near, or gaining movement speed when near ghosts. Although I suppose once you realized those were happening you could apply agency to exploit them as well. More pathing options would appear available to you because you're more aware of your capabilities. That would do the kind of risk-encouragement discussed for Doom and XCom (but in what I consider a much healthier execution than XCom straight lying to you about the % it gives you).

[@matthiuskoenig3378]

pac man isn't lieing because it never says you are the same speed as the ghosts, in fact the first time i played pac man i saw that i was faster within the first go. a 'cheating' mechanic in pac man would be somehting like the ghosts slow down or chnage direction to give you a chance to escape incirclement

[@Dabestbro.]

In Pac-man, the red ghost speeds up when there are less pellets left on the screen, did you know that? Did you also know that the different ghosts have completely different ways to home in on pacman?

[@rrteppo]

what is cheating for you is that one of the ghosts doesn't actually try and catch the player, but stay a few blocks away, so you are actually fleeing 3.5 ghosts not 4.

[@vacri54]

When I completed XCom2, it showed me the "world stats" to compare my own run against. The average number of "lost missions" was 0. This means that no, people weren't soldiering on after a loss, or taking deaths of their team as part of the game. All this "game balance after you lose a bit" is entirely wasted in XCom2, because people just weren't letting themselves "lose a bit" thanks to our good friend "Save".

[@jokkepokke95]

There's a difference between a game "lying" about its own mechanics to secretly make itself more fair to the player and a company lying you in the face so that you'll spend more money on their worthless XP boosts.

[@Orcimedes]

The reason I stopped playing XCOM 2 was because the percentages were lies. E.g. A *real* hit chance of 50% is terrible, but when XCOM2 says "50%" it's usually closer to the region of 75. It screws with my mental maths and I really don't like that feeling.

[@LecherousLizard]

While 95% chance equals to hitting 80% of 50% of the time.

[@36424567254]

just play legend then? also it's nowhere that big of an impact unless you're like playing rookie. it's also funny because most people that quit XCOM are convinced the game cheats AGAINST them rather than the opposite lol.

[@LecherousLizard]

Vision Well, enemies can instagib you from fog of war through 3 walls and 2 floors, so... yeah, the game definitely isn't cheating against players. Just because 50% hit chance is actually 70% hit chance on the lowest difficulty doesn't change the fact that 70% is what enemies have at every level of difficulty.

[@36424567254]

the enemy does not cheat its hit%. You may think it does, but that's just because the AI knows the hit% of the shot it will make from that square before moving there, so it always chooses the best one. This is a bit of a problem of the isometric view, that sometimes it's hard to gauge line of sight for the player while obviously the AI does not have such a problem, which is also why in xcom2 they introduced an icon telling you which enemy will be in sight when moving to a square

[@houndofculann1793]

Vision but since playing on Legend will make the game harder in a lot more ways than just being honest with it's percentages, it's not really a good option for people who would want the hard numbers to reflect reality instead of difficulty. I certainly would prefer the game to be open about things like "you have a 20% bonus to your hit chance on easy difficulty." Then again I would also prefer a game to have difficulty settings that cheat for the player on easy and against the player on hard, and have one in the middle with minimal cheating on either side. Civ V and VI have something like that, with Prince in the middle giving the player slight penalties but giving the AI players no bonuses

[@Lttlemoi]

Maybe people wouldn't think XCOM2 was bullshitting you in legendary mode if it didn't bullshit in all the other modes. If a game gives me a hard number, I expect it to be the truth. If it tells me there's a 50% hit chance and I both miss and hit a lot, that's fine because I knowingly took the risk. If on the other hand I end up hitting a lot more than I would expect, I start to question all the information the game is giving me and _that_ is not fun.

[@MRJTD99]

Except it's even worse in Xcom, because it's usually the opposite; giving you big numbers yet you keep missing.

[@stefan1360]

@@MRJTD99 not on legendary, the game "cheats" in your favor and both against you in lower difficulty levels.

[@PrincessFelicie]

Fire Emblem's "True Hit". It's that lesson of deception, exemplified.

[@georgecataloni4720]

I guess I'm the weird one. I hate this kind of trickery. Nothing deflates my enthusiasm like finding out the challenge I completed or aim to complete was all a lie. I hated when my mom took off the stickers of my rubix cube to get the perfect solution, and I hate it in video games now. Thankfully, there's a mod to fix it in XCOM2.

[@ITR]

out of interest, does the mod make the game show the real percentages, or does it change the percentages to fit what's shown?

[@LEFT4BASS]

There's nothing weird about that at all. Everyone hates it when they find out they're being lied to. It's a weird catch-22 because we like being lied to (else they wouldn;t design lies into the game, but we hate finding out we're being lied to.

[@EmperorZ19]

@@ITR I would assume the former. The game is balanced around the real hit chances, so changing them haphazardly would be a bad idea

[@GeekOfAllness]

One important issue here, is your caveat that games lying to us is good *when it enhances the player's experience*. The problem is deciding which lies are good, and which are bad. The bigger problem is that a lie one player loves is a lie another player hates. The AI for Isolation's alien constantly broke my immersion, while others loved it. As pointed out in another comment chain, some of us hate rubber-banding in a racing game. Etc. Also, two pedantic issues here: First, the video incorrectly talks about reaction times, when the subject is actually just timing precision. You don't get to the edge of a cliff then suddenly jump; you see the edge of the cliff then jump when you get there. Because our brains are wired up to deal with reaction times, you actually learn to send a signal towards your finger to press the button about 250ms before the edge of the cliff, then your brain lies to you so you feel like your signal happened at the cliff. Timing precision can get down to a couple milliseconds or so, but there's no way anyone could react to a new stimulus in that time. Second, the 250ms includes the time it takes to actually push the button. The timer starts when the stimulus (loud noise, bright light, etc.) is produced, and ends when the button press is detected.

[@Sodendop]

Well damit. I just picked up hell blade. Guess I’m Going to dip out and come back later to finish this.

[@ArchitectofGames]

It's great, you won't regret it!

[@LecherousLizard]

Unless he spends an hour trying to kill the last boss, because it's impossible to lose without taking your hands off the controller.

[@hayden867]

@@LecherousLizard That was the most rewarding part of the game + the climatic realisation the whole game was leading too

[@LecherousLizard]

@@hayden867 I must've played a different game there, since there was no build-up to that ending with the exception of the final "mission". I breezed through every "challenge" that came before it and if the "final boss" wasn't made completely immortal I'd breeze through that too. It was implemented in a way that the ending felt like a bug, not a feature and definitely not a reward. Especially since the ending basically says none of that happened and nothing has changed.

[@silent_stalker3687]

Flandre is best loli!!!

[@Zoomeep]

I draw the line at hard numbers. If you want to manipulate hit-chances tell me they are "high" not "80%". Edit: And things like DOOM making my last hitpoints worth more is slightly pointless, as I will be unnecessarily cautious when on (seemingly) low hitpoints, as opposed to continuing to charge in. The enemies blinking and the Glory Kill animations being awesome is invitation enough.

[@DeepCDiva]

I don't think being cautious in DooM works tho' HAHAHA

[@Zoomeep]

Mike Gosot Well, less "being cautious" and more "exploit an enemy's climbing animation". But you are right, "cautious" is not the way DOOM is best played, which makes it even more annoying to have the game "make me play this way" earlier than I need to. But overall it wasn't really that big of a problem, just a slight annoyance in hindsight.

[@rallis3937]

MetalBit Zoomeep It worked perfectly for me, whenever i was at low health i was desperately chasing demons to try to get glory kills for more health.

[@RPGgrenade]

most developers test these things, though. There's a good chance that playtests showed people would be a bit more tactical or rushy when on low health compared to high health, so they implement that.

[@hiveinsider9122]

The problem with manipulating numbers on lower difficulties is thAt it trains you to expect different chances, especially as few people start a game on high difficulty. The reason they thought the game cheated on xcom was because the same '50%' was lower on high difficulty, it seems in our mind that it is more likely that the high difficulty is lying, not the low one.

[@marsal2000]

Dude, if that cut was you, you're fucking amazing beyond levels known to humanity. 13:48

[@ArchitectofGames]

I'll happily take the complement!

[@marsal2000]

Adam Millard - The Architect of Games Goddamn. Honored to see those cuts for that game. No matter how short it was, the environment, the sound, the story, the feels... That money I spent on the game, I know, i will never doubt it, will never think it was a waste, but the best spent money ever.

[@daltondavis46]

Holy shit, I thought it was the game. Fucking fantastic!

[@wrathisme4693]

*The yogscast were talking about that Legend gives you more enemies which is extremely boring/tedious to play.* There was also a perception at that time that legend makes enemies hit more often which was mistaken

[@akba666]

I absolutely HATE rubberbanding in racing games.

[@Gamesaucer]

Why though? It gives players who aren't good at the game a chance to compete, and it gives players who are good a larger challenge. To consistently stay ahead, they really need to master the game. So imo it's universally a good thing that rubberbanding occurs.

[@akba666]

Because it means your skill doesn't matter. For beginners there should be easier difficulties where AI runs less optimal paths. For veterans it completely invalidates their skills because the AI just magically catches up and there is nothing you can do to increase you lead. It's just terrible in general.

[@Gamesaucer]

Well, that just means that the rubberbanding is done in a poor way if it invalidates skill. Skill should still matter. It just shouldn't matter as much. This both increases the skill ceiling and eases the difficulty curve, all without having to arbitrarily split up the game into different difficulties. ... By the way, difficulty settings are pretty bad. You're counting on players to judge how good they are at a game before they actually get to play it. Now, I certainly think in many cases you can engineer ways to make the game more challenging, but I feel like that should usually be done through accessibility settings and optional challenges that are much harder than the rest of the game. Difficulty settings are pretty much the most hamfisted way you can imagine to make a game accessible to players of different skill levels.

[@akba666]

No, rubberbanding by nature invalidates skills. Racing game is probably one of the easiest genre for a player to judge their skill level. You can literally look at a number and know how good you are. With rubberbanding you only win because the faster cars slowed down for no reason and you only lose because the slower cars magically sped up over its limit.

[@wylie2835]

Thats because it's used inappropriately. In mario kart it's fine. But in most games AI should be scaled BEFORE the race and not during. This way you are competing against your own skill and the game requiring consistancy or improvement.

[@jplayer073]

While the video is overall good, it completely missed the point of what happened in Destiny. Nobody thinks games are 100% honest. People who are knowledgeable about games know that plenty of tricks are used to approximate player expectations. Destiny experience gain was throttled purely because they didn't make nearly enough content for the size of the budget available, and none of the systems necessary to make replayability rewarding or fun.

[@FinetalPies]

They said it was scummy, I think it was just a segue into this interesting topic. Also the "nobody thinks games are 100% honest" part is literally untrue. A lot of people don't notice these tricks

[@jamesvonderhaar2553]

The XP throttling was so incredibly minor, and XP so irrelevant to the the endgame experience, that this could not possibly be Bungie’s motivation for implementing the system. Moreover, most MMOs have this sort of system, ever since Guild Wars 2 did it so many years ago. MMOs with repeatable content need a way to discourage players from repeating the one most efficient piece of content over and over again, lest the best way of advancing be repetitive and unfun. Reducing the amount of experience you get from doing the same quest or defeating the same enemy over and over is the simplest way to do that. Of course, Destiny’s way of doing that failed spectacularly because they -didn’t tell you that-, but the problem was a UI bug, not an intentional attempt to deceive the player.

[@CharalamposKoundourakis]

And that's their prerogative.

[@MonochromaticPrism]

James Vonder Haar The reason it was a problem was that after a certain amount of leveling you get a loot box type item. They also offered loot boxes in exchange for real world currency. Thus, the reason they did it, and why it was scummy, was to make farming less rewarding and try to get people to spend money on loot boxes.

[@jamesvonderhaar2553]

Stephen Justinen Reward schedule is different than magnitude of reward. If they wanted to reduce the amount of XP earned in total, they simply could have reduced the amount of XP gained across the board. Or, more pertinent here, they could have simply set XP rewards to be lower at launch. XP throttling does not reduce the amount of XP gained, but changes when XP is rewarded. In this case, in addition to not wanting to incentivize unfun patterns of play, Bungie was clearly trying to head off a potential loot cave situation where an exploit obviates an entire reward system. It’s true that that is in the financial interests of Bungie, but it’s hardly nefarious.

[@lunaw2174]

in my opinion on the X-COM difficulty, if the game becomes ridiculously hard when it isn't cheating in your favor that's bad game design. Make higher difficulty better AI or tougher enemies, not stripping the cheats in your favor that shouldn't be there. Also these could even have been actual mechanics made known to players and suddenly it's a feature everyone knows about instead of the game lying to you. Also, taking into account reaction times isn't really lying, I've known about coyote time before i was told about it (and the reasoning behind it) because sometimes you can clearly see that the game gave you a slight amount of time to jump while standing in mid-air because the game needs time to receive the input. EDIT: still think it's a great video btw, just wanted to voice my opinion on the way you referred to those two EDIT 2: after rewatching the video 1 year later. You call so many things cheating when they're not. Dark Souls bosses leaving openings isn't cheating, it's a rule of the game that attacks leave you open and it goes for everyone. that packman turns corners faster isn't cheating, it's a mechanic that allows you to get away against 4 ghosts. If you look at dead by daylight you could say it's "cheating" that survivors can vault windows faster than the killers by this logic, but it's one of their escape methods

[@PrejudicePain]

I agree, especially as someone who played XCOM 2 and rage quit when I realize I was missing more 90% chances to hit then 60% chances, I get that risks can be entertaining and that system encourages you but it's a strategy game, it isn't supposed to be designed for you to be an adrenaline junkie risking everything all the time. Strategy games are supposed to reward careful and precise executions.

[@HakoYigarashi]

Ah yes X-Com i remember how i modded the shit out of that game, purely because it's stupid that an Elite soldier with a shotgun rushes up to an enemy face to face only to miss at 0.5 meters distance.

[@EmperorZ19]

Personally, I'm really not fond of numbers differing from their presented values. It's too direct a form of lying IMO, and it reinforces people's poor intuitive understanding of probability

[@LEFT4BASS]

I feel the same, but I also think it makes sense for studios to do it. At the end of the day, their job is to create a game the players will enjoy and players enjoy a game more when a game matches with their understanding of chance, even if that understanding is wrong.

[@PrejudicePain]

@@LEFT4BASS As someone who rage quite XCOM 2 after missing more 90% chances then 60% chances, it was not fun and I felt like the numbers were weighted to force me into bad situations "to make it more engaging and fun", I was already engaged and having fun until I missed a flanked 90% three times in a row, then had my sniper hit a 35% chance to hit, it didn't feel good, I wasn't being rewarded for flanking the guy and instead the entire game was playing catchup to save my soldiers.

[@LEFT4BASS]

PrejudicePain in my experience, higher hit chances are actually higher, even if the exact number isn’t on screen, but they’re still probabilities.

[@BigBeerus]

@@LEFT4BASS the probability of a 90% landing in that 10% 3 times in a row is incredibly low. Considering I've missed 90%s up to 6 times (i think 8 once) in a row several times and actually know how to calculate probability i call bullshit on it playing straight up with probability or even close. It cheats in its own favour. If they would just admit they made it do that by accident people wouldn't hate their game as much.

[@LEFT4BASS]

Big Beerus idk what difficulty you’re playing on, but it’s never been that rough on me.

[@tapiopuranen88]

Xcom 2 giving me what it thougt I wanted instead of what I actually wanted caused a diminishing interest. 10 hours in I stopped, too late for a refund. Instead of slow and steady meticulous % turn based combat the game wanted to jam "rush through the mission in half the amount of turns you want to use" missions down my throat constantly.

[@igorthelight]

Install a mod that disables timer in missions.

[@LecherousLizard]

Same, glad I demo'd the game through not-so-official means. You'd think it gets better later, but nope, it does not. Never in my life I uninstalled a game so fast. I still beat myself over wasting those 15 hours.

[@Outwardpd]

If you purchased through Steam you can generally get the refund accepted to your steam wallet even with 10 hours played. Though getting it refunded in cash is completely impossible at this point. That is why every time a huge flop is released reddit blows up with "Steam is accepting all refunds for X game, that is how bad it is!" when in reality steam doesn't really change their acceptance/denial of refunds, they've just always been very lenient.

[@Th3Raz96]

I realize it's not for everyone, but the supposed value in the timed missions is that it forces you to adopt a completely different approach to what you're used to in standard missions. The biggest reason XCOM is so difficult is that it never allows you to get comfortable in one type of strategy, you have to be able to constantly adapt to different situations, and the timed missions are a really good example of that concept. Where you would normally take time to slowly get into position and whatnot, you now have to rush in and strategize on the fly.

[@LecherousLizard]

The fact that developers themselves dialled back on timed missions in later DLCs shows that concept isn't as good as you give it credit for. In most of those missions the enemies have no idea you're there, yet you start with a timer anyway, which forces you to rush, meaning the only "viable" strategy is going straight for the target (which takes half of your available turns to begin with) and hoping you don't run on enemies along the way, because then you're certain to run out of time. The idea itself may be fine, but the implementation in this particular case is atrocious.

[@roostermaind6413]

I'm kind of disappointed in the fact that these tactics are so ingrained in developer's minds they sometimes forget why they're doing it in the first place. I noticed something was off in the Gravity rush games whenever I ran off edges and expected to rapidly fall where I needed to be. They I remembered that not only could I pixel walk a bit but also that Kat has a very very slow acceleration during the first seconds of falling. That's the one game where coyote time isn't required at all since you can just shift if you accidentally run off a ledge. In most cases you'll be going off ledges intentionally and you'll want to get to your destination as fast as possible.

[@Arvensa]

Yep, that's how to artificially make your controls handle in a clunky manner if I've ever heard of one.

[@vraolet]

i actually liked that, this one second may be annoying if you want to jump of ledges but it's really useful to keep the flow during fight, it allows you to keep some momentum while aiming for the next enemie instead of stabilizing, aim, and then go.

[@roostermaind6413]

Vaknir Tseifo Damen you don't really need to aim. The aim assist is so hyper you can basically just keep using the gravity kick with square as long as your target is anywhere on the screen and Kat's trajectory will snap to it. It's like her attacks magnetize to weakpoints. Which honestly is really enjoyable when you get to fight giant waves

[@CharalamposKoundourakis]

It works that's why

[@carston855]

The most unfair thing about XCOM2 is stun lancers running fully across the map and critical one shotting my sniper in the back line for maximum damage. You know it has to be that one sniper I stacked kills on to unlock officer training upgrades.

[@joaomarcoscosta4647]

Howdy there Adam Millard, my fellow architect! I hope you read this post: there is a matter I would like to discuss with you. While I agree that there situations where it can benefit the gamer if the game "lies to him" (like the example you've given from Shenua's Sacrifice, in which it serves a narrative purpose) I believe that lying about statics in strategy games does more harm than good. As you've said, most people are really bad at statistics. And while giving the players inaccurate information in order to match their flawed perceptions can make a game more fun, it comes at a cost: reinforcing those flawed perceptions. If a strategy game gives players correct statistical information, it can help immensely in teaching people how statistics work. Which is really useful knowledge, with a wide array of applications. However, by giving the players inaccurate information, a game is effectually making people even WORSE at it. With the added issue that, if players ever realize that the game has been cheating in their favor, there is a pretty good chance that they will feel, well... Cheated. Btw, another strategy series that lies about statistics is Fire Emblem. The first 5 or 6 titles in the series gave accurate information, and the ones afterward favor the player in a pretty curious way: they generate two random numbers instead of one and decide the outcome based on the average result. So, you the game tells you your attack has a 90% hit chance, the odds of missing are actually close to 2%. Funnily enough, I've seen people criticizing Echoes (the remake of FE2, which actually gives accurate information - like the game it was based on) for having "bad RNG" ^^;

[@davidbayley4785]

I agree, particularly the point about reinforcing flawed perceptions. Fire Emblem is a good example of lulling players into false expectations about statistics. The lower settings on XCOM teach the player to expect certain things and then they call the highest difficulty unfair when it is actually the most fair. I can totally understand the point of making the game more fun but this is geared more for the average player. Since I personally like to really dive deep into games and play the hardest difficulties to the best of my ability, I don't want the game lying to me about hidden modifiers, especially those tied to difficulty settings. XCOM isn't the best example to nitpick here, but hidden modifiers on lower difficulties can sometimes teach players to play badly and get away with it and then make them frustrated when the same tactics don't work on higher difficulties.

[@joaomarcoscosta4647]

@turtle225 Yeah, exactly. From the way that XCOM is described, I do not believe that "not lying to the player" is the real issue with the legendary mode. Rather, it is the fact that the game as a whole has been balanced around those inflated hit percentages - and players have been taught to expect certain results from the false information given to them. (Edit: Well, that, and it might not have been properly balanced. Which is not hard to imagine, given that the rest of the game has been balanced around different values.) If the rest of the game kept the balance intact - but gave the real values to the players instead - it would still provide the same level of challenge while giving the players the necessary skills to tackle the hardest mode - or any other situation where a proper understanding of randomness and statistics is important.

[@lilowhitney8614]

The thing is, statistics are really hard for the human brain to intuitively grasp and it's not the game's job to educate people about statistics. While you're right that it instills in the players a false sense of how chances work, it's not any worse then how most media instill a false idea of stuff. Plus, if the game had to educate people about statistics, it would take time and resources from actually working and polishing the core game. So by going with the flawed preception instead of fighting against it the developers can make a better game. Not to mention that people have different apptitudes for things and different rates of learning, so teaching how statistics work would become even more of a chore and may not even work for everyone.

[@mhss1992]

Lilo Whitney "Plus, if the game had to educate people about statistics, it would take time and resources from actually working and polishing the core game." How about simply not lying about the numbers? I don't expect a game to give me a lecture about statistics, but I'd feel pretty insulted if I found out that a 50% hit chance is actually a hidden 75% hit chance, or something similar. The fact that the video puts something like this in the same category as a grace period to allow for the player to react is quite jarring.

[@haveiszalfaroqie]

I think the cost of statistic-lying to players can be easily remedied: Tell the players the truth. "Ok, I said it was 50%. Actually, it was 80% this time along."

[@conniescurse7325]

There is a huge difference between a game not telling you directly how a system works, and a system telling you a false stat value on purpose. They're not related in any way.

[@jonathanfavourite]

10:30

[@eloujtimereaver4504]

Coyote Time is actually much easier to add than not add. Due to the way collision masks are usually handled for platformers.

[@ArchitectofGames]

I'd not even thought about it that way!

[@igorthelight]

That's only true if you want to make 1 safe frame. If you want more than 1 - you have to implement if properly!

[@eloujtimereaver4504]

Igor Sandu No, you have unlimited safe frames, because according to the game's collision system you are still standing on the platform. The collision is usually actually a box around the character, not where the character's feet are. If you have continuing forward momentum you might slide off of it, but if you stop while your character looks like both their legs are off the ledge, you can stand there just fine as long as the bounding box has at least one pixel on the platform.

[@igorthelight]

+Elouj Time Reaver I understand and fully agree with you. You also can make a collision mask for platform a little bit bigger (wider) that the sprite, so you can stand "on air" but that will look kinda stupid. There are a lot of ways to implement safe frames :-)

[@haveiszalfaroqie]

Well, Hollow Knight uses arts that cover their platform collision boxes.

[@thefoxamongwolves9843]

Kinda reminds me of this thing I read about the shuffle function on the old iPods. It initially was truly random and would shuffle your songs into a completely random order. But as is the case with true randomness, it often accidentally grouped similar songs together, maybe a few songs from a certain artist all lumped together or something. And people complained because it didn't feel random but it was. So they tweaked the algorithm to avoid putting similar songs together. So now when you hit shuffle, instead of the sings being put into a random order, they're organised into an order that feels random but in fact isn't.

[@oQuindo1]

I was one of the people who did not buy the game after the 'limited save data' controversy. It came down to me not wanted to wast my personal time. There are some things that I do not think you should lie to the player about. Save Data is one of those things. I would compare Undertale to Hellblade. Undertale 'lied' about deleting the save data in game and in the rules of its world. Hellblade did it outside of the rules of the world.

[@oQuindo1]

Vazazell Yes it is weird, But getting invested in a story only to have you save lock and become uncompletable is one of the worst must frustrating things possible. Hense, why when word was getting around about the 'save data deletion' I simply skipped it.

[@mbartelsm]

I agree, should the game have handled the saves in a weird sort of in-character way and then lied to you through the voices that you had a limited number of lives, that's cool. That's the kind of thing you'd expect from a game dealing with psychosis. But, when the game tells you through text on your screen about mechanics outside of the plot, it's breaking the fourth wall and it becomes the developers lying to the user.

[@Gamesaucer]

The problem with Hellblade, I think, is that it's kind of obvious that you can't really trust anything the game is telling you. So the game telling you that your lives are limited is not going to have the same impact. I think it's justified. The devs were trying to give you a certain experience. One where you cherish every life in the game almost as if it were your own. You decided that experience isn't for you. That's fair. That means that you weren't the target audience. They delivered that experience to the people who wanted it. You did not. I don't play racing games. There are plenty of good racing games, it's just that I'm not interested in the experience. However, I am interested in roguelikes. And while I like roguelites, I do mean roguelikes. Games where game over means you're starting from scratch. Hellblade, in that sense, is right up my alley. Of course, I don't like actually losing. That's where roguelikes differ from Hellblade in particular. In roguelikes you expect to lose. The real progress is your experience. Hellblade simply wants to simulate that risk. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Even if it does lose them some sales. If you're salty because the devs lied and made you uninterested in the game, don't be. The mechanics on their own might be something you'd enjoy, but that's not all that makes up the intended experience. The devs set out to craft an experience specifically for the people who like that kind of risk in games. That's obviously going to exclude some people as well, but the game is all the more interesting for it. And besides, now that the cat's out of the bag, there's no reason you can't play it. This wasn't going to stay a secret forever. Once you're spoiled, the experience automatically, involuntarily changes to a more forgiving one. In your case, that's more in line with the kind of game you want to play. So I don't really see the problem.

[@oQuindo1]

@@Gamesaucer that might be the case if you are playing it. But enough people believed it that out of context articles sprang up about it. I am not salty about it. I was just giving the views of a different perspective and why, in my opinion, hellblade is a game that lied in a bad way that lead to it being less commercially successful when it was the first "tiny triple A" game they were launching. If I have bought and played it sense the launch is not really relevant to the conversation.

[@Gamesaucer]

Sorry, you seemed kind of salty that you didn't get to play it right away to me, so that's on me. I still don't think it's a bad thing though. I don't think there was a good way of informing the players in-game, and I don't see why the devs can't lie about their game to make the experience closer to what they intended. It's a little manipulative, so I can see why people might dislike it... But in the context of how that affected the way the experience was delivered to players, I think they managed it just about as well as they could have. I see absolutely no problem.

[@cherubin7th]

I would consider this with the false percentage harmful. Of it was only like high, middle, low then ok, but giving a wrong number is not good. People do misjudge the numbers because they are inexperienced with it, but with time people would learn what it means if games would be accurate. But this can never happen because people are now trained wrongly and this will reinforce itself, because now if a game is accurate, people will complain because they have been wrongly trained by games many times. What comes next? Teaching people bad grammar in games?

[@florinadrian5174]

Very intriguing topic, a well done exposition of a subtle fairness issue. But I think you're wrong specifically about XCOM. First, the unmodded game absolutely lies to you because while it's displaying a hit %, it already knows what will happen. That's because they keep the same random seed. Why? My guess is that they wanted to discourage save scumming but that's a very dishonest, inefficient and ultimately failed method. Now if you mod the game to re-seed, the game still lies. I suggest you do (you're the Architect of Games, after all) a simple test by saving, shooting, recording the result, reloading and repeat. I have done this test inadvertently and it seems to me that the % are pushed down, not up. For the the higher ones the 95% cap you mention could explain it but it seems to be across the board. There may be an exception for very low % which might get pushed up instead. Jake Solomon is full of shit, he's just lying to cover his game's lies. His team invented the "that's XCOM" catchphrase to disparage the feeling that most perceptive players get when they get a whiff of game's dishonesty. In his shallowness and incompetence, he took one of the best game concepts out there (one that I've been playing for decades) and made an almost failure out of it. Twice. Look at the instability and performance issues years after release. Look at how Long War and all the other modders showed 'em how it's done. So don't take Jake's word for it. In fact, if he says right, bet on left. Because for XCOM, dishonesty is actually killing the game for the experienced player who not only can do math (yeah, of course 50% and 50% is not 100%, some of us knows it very well) but uses it for risk mitigation decisions. If I can't rely on the 40% the game displays to me then what the hell I'm playing for, a rigged casino slots game? So maybe Jake intentionally sacrifices his audience of math totting players for the sake of the rest of them. Or maybe his team is just incompetent.

[@CallumBradbury]

xcom 2 has random seeds homie, hate to spoil your essay

[@tvsonicserbia5140]

Obscuring and hiding can be useful, but flat out lying can make you loose players trust, and cheapen the expirience on replays when the lie inevitably gets found out.

[@4hodmt]

3:30 Complete nonsense. Jump timing in platformers has nothing to do with reaction time. You see the edge coming well in advance, so you don't react to it, you anticipate it. By your argument it's impossible for humans to play the drums.

[@807D14M0ND5]

Platform collapse without warning. They can materialize when you are mid air. Etc

[@RevaneCrowford]

I love Hellblade, but I also have to admit that this "deception"-approach almost backfired for me. Because the first time I learned about this game, it was presented to me as "if you die often enough, your data gets deleted". Not the exploration of mental illness and player agency, not the re-contextualisation of norse myth, but just as "you guys, this game is REALLY HARDCORE". And consequently, I filed it under "not a game for me", and didn't think about it again. It wasn't until articles literally told me that "the permadeath mechanic is fake" that I suddenly considered, y'know, playing this game. And, as I said, I love it

[@Dorrovian]

I'm personally not really sure if Senua had a right idea - from art perspective, probably yes. But for example it made me not buy the game, while I was very interested in it before for both gameplay and artistic idea. I don't really have time to play game again if it would really delete my save and I always avoid Hardcore modes because of that.

[@TheVelvetTV_Riesenglied]

so now that you know the truth - will you give it a chance?

[@Dorrovian]

TheVelvetTV - I have known it for long time and well... It missed my "actually released" time window and now it would go into kinda long backlog. So... maybe one day?

[@archmagusofevil]

That's funny. For me, it made the game more fun. Even though my gaming time is limited and i never have the chance to finish most games that i start, that mechanic was a motivator. "I'm not going to have time to play this a second time. At least not anytime soon. Must overcome this trial now so i can see her journey to its end"

[@Dorrovian]

archmagusofevil "i never have the chance to finish most games that i start" - this might be why. I always finish games I started, unless I decide to drop game altogether in first hours.

[@kionashi]

archmagusofevil please help me understand, why do you not have a chance to finish the games you start? Im guessing you must have a pretty busy life with work and family so your gaming time must be very limited, but hey, nobody is forcing you to get all the hotest games when they are released, you don't HAVE to quit Dragon Quest to start Spiderman, you could be playing Dragon Quest for the rest of the year and when you finish it, then go play Spiderman, you might even get it for cheaper by then.

[@fleefie]

To be fair, i love fair games. For some weird reason, not having fun in a fair game is what feels fun ? It's weird to explain, but i like knowing that what im playing is truly fair, even if i keep losing. * In a fair game, losing is fun*, and so is winning, but in a game biased towards you *losing feels awfull but winning feels better than winning a fair game*. I think thats the biggest thing to understand here, some people prefer the good feeling of winning and having these huge bursts of dopamine, while others prefer a constant but lower feeling of fun :)

[@MouldMadeMind]

That's called enjoying illusions.

[@subprogram32]

this was a great vid, i really liked the detalied graph of all the hidden stuff XCOM 2 does. I think that's why I got turned off of watching LP's of XCOM 2 after a while - I kinda subconsciously knew the game was holding back what it could do, and that was oddly frustrating for me to watch! But obviously it improves the experaince for most players quite a lot I'm sure.

[@ArchitectofGames]

Yeah I was briefly angry when I found out but there's no denying it makes the game better

[@Arvensa]

I don't like the XCom system because when given hard numbers and a frozen clock which I can use to plan however intensely I want or need to, I will actually start calculating the percentage play against the 'actual' risk and reward the game is telling me exists. And so I'll tend towards the safer shots and proven strategies anyway. Once I'm forced to take risks against a simple rng system, and they succeed, it doesn't actually feel that rewarding most of the time. I just go 'oh, guess I won the coin flip that time'. There's something to be said about narrowing down play options to the only one that has even a half-ways decent chance of succeeding, and then being rewarded for your effort if it does. But if the game is designed to lead me down that kind of path repeatedly, it quickly becomes stale and frustrating to engage with, because with low or no stakes, I know I can just play the same level over again pretty much the same way until the rng on that critical roll or two happens to come out in my favor. If you throw AI that intentionally throws the match into the mix (and don't also provide some kind of believable lore reason for this behaviour), it's even worse. I'll tend to pick up on that fairly quickly, and then it doesn't really matter if I know whether it's intentional throwing or just really dumb AI. I might idly experiment to test which one it is, but at that point (without a supporting lore explanation) it feels like an exploit, and it cheapens my victories.

[@insaincaldo]

Well wouldn't it be an easy fix to just find people playing on legend.

[@TheDynark]

SioxerNikita Totally Agree. I do not mind if a game has a "we round the edges of the game in your favor"-option, but I want to be able to find this in the game, without checking the internet. XCOM even more so - it gives you clear percentages, reasons like cover and so on. If there is a smoothing algorithm, then I would like to be able to uncheck it. (I would take easier encounters, if it goes bad for me for example.)

[@Cerebrosum]

@@Arvensa Isn't this what Legend is for?

[@georgelionon9050]

I forgot which racing game it was.. but back the day there was a famous case, where it the opponents were designed to dynamically adapt so you progress quickly to 2nd place... and then make a real tough job to win it.

[@Patrick_Engels]

I couldn't disagree with you more. Examples like the hp in doom is exactly wat i despise in games. It makes every game casual and even unpredictable, in a negative way. Its the similar to the concept of pseudo choices in games, where you have choose something, but in the end it doesnt even matter because every choice has the exact same result. Oh and lets not forget the worst mechanic ever created in games. When you play racing games and all the ai cars slow down or speed up depending on if you are driving well or not to make it seem like its always a close win.

[@zentrobi1548]

I thought i was the only one noticing this, i kinda knew it about doom, but i wasn't sure about it in racing games and my friends just kept telling me that i was seeing things and ofcuse the AI cars wouldn't do that

[@tfwnoyandere]

yes

[@mhss1992]

The bit about statistics is really condescending, to be honest, and is clearly an example of games being dumbed down to cater to a larger audience. I really don't want a game that gives me a false impression of my skill level by outright lying about a percentage. Would the game be any less fun if it told you the actual hit chance? Would people really stop playing just because the game isn't telling them they are tactical geniuses at every moment? I don't think so. In the end, this just punishes people with actual skill by minimizing room for error.

[@LEFT4BASS]

I mean, they design the games based on what people have been proven to enjoy. We don't mind being lied to, we just don't want to find out we've lied to. If we never find out, the lie makes the game more fun for most people.

[@jeice13]

There is a bit of a difference between lying to the player and not telling them things though

[@Erika-gn1tv]

idk I usually like knowing _exactly_ what's going on when I play. Especially in a game that heavily relies on numbers. Not to say that sometimes stacking the odds in the player's favor is all bad, just that i like to be aware so I can plan ahead.

[@MouldMadeMind]

So you can realize your lack of tactical competence?

[@Erika-gn1tv]

@@MouldMadeMind Well, _duh._

[@snailgirl6]

Kinda reminds me of something suspicious that just happened with Pokemon SoulSilver about a day ago. I was fighting Silver (the rival) on Victory Road, and used a priority move to finish off his evolved starter. It SURVIVED with about 1 HP, and was able to counter. Along with Silver's Pokemon getting critical hits all over the place, (that I usually never get...), I think this situation is rigged to make a more epic fight.....and its not the only time I've seen this in a Pokemon game....

[@mothwizard3095]

Along with stuff like that, I kinda feel like your opponents aren’t affected by status effects as long as/as badly as you. Is that just me?

[@DisKorruptd]

10:18 What Jake doesnt understand is that risks are fun if they're rewarded, punishments will always hurt twice as much as rewards of the same size, it's simple loss aversion, we need a reason to take risks, more than just "Because you'll run out of time" but why do we have a timer? they dont even know we're here yet, and we're the ones making the attack, not them, they dont have anything we want except territory, why do I have 6 turns to take it? if you want a slow game to be harder, fine, make it harder, but make it an option, Taking risks gives you the opportunity to deal with fewer enemies, but dont just take that option out altogether, running out of time should instead call in reinforcements, and that timer shouldnt exist until you're spotted, if we're looking to rescue scientists, why are the aliens keeping them hostage if they're just gonna kill them in 6 turns? if you want to force in an insta-fail mechanic, then you need to justify why that mechanic causes a fail state

[@DisKorruptd]

Also in regards to the loss aversion thing, every other game aside from XCOM 2 is listed as cheating in your favor, players like when they are helped, no player likes when they feel hindered, with the statement of "Humans think emotionally" that's the thing, the gameplay isnt about what the numbers are, it's about how the players feel about them, and XCOM 2 is infamous for 99% feeling more like a 99% chance of missing if the player FEELS like you're cheating against them, that's a problem, the game shouldn't feel like it's cheating against you at any point.

[@whatifyellow5679]

This mindset that "its just more fun if we device them and abuse the wiring of the human brain" worked great for the casino industry!

[@yppahdalg2397]

While...similar when you put it that way, it's also pretty misleading. I could say that a sword and a pipe are similar because they are both made of metal, and I would be technically correct. It's a loose interpretation putting no consideration for anything behind the scenes. A game made for enjoyment is much different than slots made for profit. There are fundamental differences that simply can't be ignored. It's less "abusing the wiring of the human brain", and more tuning itself closer to what our brain perceives it.

[@Xxgunmanx]

A lot of examples of the game lying to you i end up reasoning as them attempting to make up for the autonomy you lose by only being able to control an in game character who has a limit to their capabilities. An example of this that bounces off the video is Faith's "Runner Vision" in Mirrors Edge. I believe that is there to make sure that the player knows what faith can actually climb on as opposed to tell you where to go. I played with it off for a while because I thought it would be interesting to make quick decisions but I found myself thinking "Huh, why cant my character, a literal professional runner, not manage to grab that fence 5 ft off the floor? or grab that low ledge and go that way?" the answer was that the level wasn't developed for that path and Faith wasn't programmed to grab onto each and every single ledge or jump every obstacle no matter how reasonable they may seem. This leads to the other use that is to tell the player what their character CAN do that you wouldn't normally be able to do. Examples in Mirrors Edge include the grabbing onto steam pipes that would be untouchable due to heat or the drops and jump that would leave a persons leg in splinters if they were to be performed in real life. Same thing with Dark Souls bosses leaving windows to attack. In real life you wouldn't only be able to move your sword in a total of 3 motions and nothing more, you would have a much more diverse set of tactics to use and you would be able to interact a lot more with the person you are fighting (e.g targeting limbs to reduce mobility or attempting disarms) which just are not possible to code into the game since they are too complicated, too numerous and not really needed. The small bits of cheating that games do to help you usually accounts for the fact that you are extremely limited in what you can do and control as a person playing a game. (The doom health thing only really works on someone if they don't realise what is happening, id rather just be given a reason to be on high health such as excess health drops from glory kills being turned into small amounts of ammo if you don't need health) EDIT : The problem with XCOM lying is that if you get used to a 50% chance hitting 60% of the time, you will believe that when it hits 50% of the time the game is cheating against you. People react emotionally because they have a feel for a probability and can work from their experience. Everyone knows coin tosses are 50/50 (ideally of course) and no one will tell you otherwise and if I told you to bet £1000 on a coin flip you would most likely tell me to piss off, but if you had only ever being exposed (unknowingly) to weighted coins being flipped, you will almost definitely feel that your chances are winning are much much higher because that is how it has always been. If you win 65% of the time on a what you think is a fair flip you start to feel that 50/50 is a worthwhile bet and therefore when it comes to the real thing (as Lewis said in the clip shown in the video) you will feel that you are being bullshit on the RNG when you really arent you have just been told you are more likely to win on a 50% chance than you actually are. This is why no one likes it when the decisions you have felt confident making (rightly so because they work more often than fail) suddenly don't work anymore, you feel like you are losing more because YOU ARE LOSING MORE. What the game has shown you to be a good choice is now an awful one and it ruins the tactics you have built up. It makes the game frustrating because you haven't been given the chance to fail and learn, you've been babied into shitty tactics and you always just scraped by on terrible odds coming through.

[@dyer4677]

There's actually a really interesting example of this in the Fire Emblem series. In the first couple of games the creator insisted on using something called a "Single Roll" mechanic with the RNG. So if your character had a 85% to hit something it just generated the number between 1-100 to determine the hit once and that was it. And while this was the most statistically "fair" way of doing things it still left the game with a certain randomness that would leave players frustrated if they just got a single bad roll or one of their enemies just got lucky and hit their 2% hit chance. So later on in an attempt to avoid making players frustrated they added in a "Double Roll" system where when the RNG was generating its numbers it would really be generating two numbers and then use the mean of the two. The result would then tweak the system so that results would line up more in line to how the player felt like things should go. So with double roll if the game showed you you had a 80% chance to hit it was actually slightly higher, while if it showed a 20% it would be lower and the closer you got to 50% the more accurate the number the game was actually showing you. This kept until Fire Emblem Fates where they changed to a "Hybrid System" which was to remedy the faults of the double roll system which some players found tipping the favor too far towards the player but without leaving players chances completely up to the whims of RNG with a single roll system. Since the actual math behind the hybrid system is a bit too complex for a quick summary what it did was keep the mechanics of single roll for chances the game showed you as 50% or below so you could have a good idea of how a roll would go but keep you on your toes so you don't always write off low chances. And for chances 51% and up its basically a neutered version of the double roll system. Any chance the game presents as 51% or above is still higher than what they're showing you but not as much as it would be in a double roll system, the idea being they still didn't want players to feel like they were cheated out of a hit when their numbers were high but to have the odds stacked slightly less in their favor so it felt like the game wasn't holding the players hand as much. I personally like the games regardless of finicky little stuff like this running behind the scenes but it still in interesting to find out how developers make games.

[@HorkSupreme]

A better solution I think would be to add glancing blows rather than some cheated RNG. Expand the mechanics to accommodate near hits or close misses.

[@MC-xw2ro]

No, they think the only difficulty mode that is fair is bullshit because they've unknowing become accustomed to the buffs the other difficulties provide, it doesn't come across illogical at all. It feels like the legendary mode bullshits you on rng because IT DOES bullshit you on the rules the games has made you accustomed to. Without the game conditioning you to have better odds than what is displayed, legenday wouldn't feel like it is cheating you when it comes to rng.

[@Harmen_D]

5:40 "The brilliantly designed glory kill system" AHAHAH... no This is one of the reasons I rarely play modern games, you can percieve the lies but it's actually hard to pinpoint the exact cause of it. While playing XCOM 2 I had the constant feeling of something being wrong, in my perspective the normal difficulty levels were the ones with actual "bullshit" numbers. After playing so long turn-based games you choose a "risk level" that you want to play on, which is basically how much do you want to gamble or how much you want to reduce chance of miss, while playing XCOM my success was oddly higher than the risk level I had chosen for that playthrough, which made me think something was wrong. I never played on legend difficulty because I'm not a masochist. On the yogscast calling the legend difficulty "bullshit" it's because of how our perspectives are formed from our experiences. If they played on normal difficulties and on legend the 75% hit chance is suddenly missing a lot more it's going to make them feel that the game is bullshitting the numbers, so it's not that the legend difficulty is "unfun", it's the game that misleads us and gives us the wrong expectations.

[@Zoomeep]

JJ The problems beginn when someone at the top of the mountain pushes you off and invisible hands carry you back.

[@AleksandrKramarenko]

@HarmenBR FYI: The video creator is wrong in calling legend a "fair" difficulty level. Sure, some cheaty things get disabled for the player. But the reason that people call legend bullshit is because the player gets debuffs (lower stats), while the enemy gets buffs (higher stats and more enemies), which does make it quite unfair for the player. I've modded the new XCOM games quite extensively, so I know how the game mechanics work.

[@thoughtpolease7183]

YES! I feel like Adam Millard tried to argue that they must be lied to or they think the game is bullshitting them. When in fact the reason they thought that is because they had been calibrated with wrong percentages and correctly detected the difference. If they had written it correctly to begin with then there was no problem. Not sure why he would try to defend this move from Firaxis

[@ZygfrydQ]

I remember, when playing some racing game (over a decade ago), I've noticed also such "cheating" to keep me more interested in the game. Whenever I was winning the race, my opponents were always breathing down my neck, passing by me whenever I made a mistake. But when I was losing, they suddenly became slower, allowing me to catch up and somethimes go even to the first place from 6th etc. Anyway, great vid, as always, keep it up!

[@hoplitethirtynine1487]

There is another reason why games cheat: expediency. Sometimes the game creates enemies out of nothing to give the players something to fight. I experienced this in Civilisation Revolution where an enemy ship would spawn of my coast and the constantly land ground units without having to return its home base. This is not to make the game harder for the sake of it, but because the computer is unable to act like a human player. It's either too efficient too inefficient.

[@Rasea611]

The problem I have with games lying for me (like XCOM does) is that it makes the feeling of victory hollow. Imagine that you decided to learn how to ride a bike, but with training wheels first to get used to things. Once you have, you ask your parents to take them off so you can start learning to ride the bike without assistance. But instead of doing that, they just use invisible paint. So you're learning to ride the bike with what you think is your own skill and improvement, but in reality you're still on training wheels. And once you find out, then all of that improvement and skill you thought was yours isn't actually yours. You were being assisted from behind the scenes. That's why games lying to you like that is stupid. Creating memorable moments means nothing when you realize that those memorable moments were heavily fabricated. You were given several handicaps to create those. You didn't create them yourself through understanding the game more, or applying your tactical knowledge in a skillful way. It makes the entire experience hollow.

[@WrenchInThePlan]

I suppose the emotionally-based feeling of fairness when you're having fun can be chalked up to confirmation bias - where people prefer to see/hear things that suggest they're in the right, and not in the wrong. That's why people are always so salty when they lose in games, rather than when they win.

[@ArchitectofGames]

Very true! Conformation bias is a big factor in games like this.

[@invenblocker]

You don't notice the times you hit 4 70% attacks in a row, but the moment a single 70% attack misses is something you'll remember for the rest of the level.

[@leonardonhidalgo4463]

Okay, the video is as great as always, excellent content present in a very engaging and interesting way. As for the subject, okay, no. These "cheats" are ways to patch up bad design choices. The lag before falling "Coyote time" could be easily be rebranded as a mechanic (The character's feet hang on the ledge for a fraction of a second allowing a higher window to jump) to create trickier platforming challenges. Heck, you are not even taking into account that the human brain "predicts" what's going to happen given what is present and what is expected to be there. This is the reason why those optical illusions that trick you into seeing movement work. They might be just static lines, but they are drawn in a way that suggest the brain that motion is happening. Alternatively, you could design platformers that rely more on puzzle solving ability, sequences, etc rather than pure reflex, if you are so inclined. Old school Shmups have smaller hitboxes for the player in a "give and take" fashion. Sure, the hitbox will save you at lower levels but will also be the only reason you are alive in harder games and bonus levels where the player is EXPECTED to use their smaller actual size to their advantage like in "bullet hell" levels or games. The more the developer affords the player, the more he can expect afterward to the point that the affordance is the ONLY reason their skill can be used at all. What gave breathing room before can now be used to take it all away from then on. Pathfinding is an affordance. Unless it is completely ignoring your input to give you a far better solution that your puny human brain can't think of, it is trying to follow your instruction to the best of its capabilities. Less "You sure you wanna do that?" and more "I'll see what I can do" The Glory Kill health recovery system is a "cheat" in the same way "Oh, look. If I hit the enemy in certain highlighted areas, the enemy suffers more damage than in others" is a cheat. It is a relatively unspoken rule within a mechanic that becomes obvious with some minutes of gameplay. There is no smoke and mirrors going on here. If anything, the ledge grabbing should be a better example of "benevolent cheating for the fun of the player". I'd argue that the health recovery system is not there to create tension as much as it is there to force you into risky melee combat when down on health. It puts you in the right mindset to enjoy the game, I just don't believe it does it in the way you've defined "cheat" within this video. Finally, XCOM 2, or any XCOM for that matter, is not "fair". Even when the hidden math is not in your favor nor the enemies' the game still is stacked against you. You can kill as many enemy soldiers, they can get infinite replacements, as you want. You won't make a dent in their ranks, you won't demoralize them, you won't do anything to their war effort unless you are going after story objectives and targets. For you to not have wasted (immediately) finite resources on a soldier, they have to make it back alive. For an enemy soldier to not be a waste of... Not resources since they technically don't use those, well, so not a waste at all they just have to do ANY. And I mean ANY damage at all to you. Each point of damage one of your soldiers receive, each day they have to spend in the infirmary, each unit or resource you've spent to craft their equipment is as precious for you as it is for the aliens to lose a base in a story mission. But I guess since no side gets a bonus nor a penalty based on difficulty, it counts as "fair", right? Well, I don't think so. Saying that the fight against the aliens is "fair" because there are no inherent bonuses is like thinking that just because two people are fighting barehanded it instantly means the fight is fair. Nevermind that one is a common guy and the other a champion boxer. Now imagine you have 4 to 6 common guys against the boxer and his group of fighters with very different abilities and masteries. About 8 to 20 of them. If he loses one of his friends, he can get another at peak condition. If you lose any of yours, they come back as untrained rookies that have lost all that they gained until that point. As a brutal exercise in futility and overcoming the odds, it is a good experience. As a fun and emotionally thrilling experience... Well, maybe they should have designed the game in some other way. The base game (With its real difficulty) is not "bullshit" because we are subjective beings (well, it is, but you know what i mean). It is "bullshit" because it is "bullshit" and needs to be toned down or completely redesigned to become the fun and thrilling experience its creators wanted it to be.

[@retanoab]

I'm not sure what your points are here, except for XCOM. That's just a whole other topic. The Coyote time is actually a mechanic, just a hidden, never explained one. If not for that, a game like Mario would fall flat on its face, 'cause having the player's foot stick to the edge in order to compensate for reaction time would kill the momentum. It'd force the character to stop moving entirely, and break the nice flow that was going on. That would be quite noticeable, and make the game work more like Prince of Persia. If you're going for a slower, more methodic and precise approach for your players, it could work, but if not, it just hinders the experience. Shmups fiddle with their hitboxes the same way Overwatch does, except in opposite directions. Hitboxes are smaller in a bullet hell environment not to feel cheap, while OW's are bigger so people can actually land shots in their fast moving targets - especially with projectile weapons without splash damage. Both games do it because our brains are bad at judging distances on the fly. Don't see how it can be used against you, it's just how those games work in order to suit regular humans. The glory kill health giveaway wasn't the "cheat", but the way the game displays your health points. Enemy shots deal a constant ammount of damage, but that's not what the HUD shows. When the players are at full health, their HP drops at a much higher rate than when they're low. Not because they take more damage, it's the number displayed that is purposely deceitful. And that makes players always think they are at the brink of death, and take the risk of going for glory kills in order to heal, while in reality, they're just fine. That's the smoke and mirrors right there.

[@leonardonhidalgo4463]

Mr. Fahrenheit Oh, nice. Sorry for not answering earlier. Wait, maybe I misunderstood. I thought "Coyote time" meant "The millisecond in which your character's hitbox stops being on top of the platform's and the game will still accept a jump input as if they still were on top of it". If that is still the case, I want you to remember Super Metroid for a moment, the wall jump mechanic, in fact. To make a wall jump, you have to -Jump towards the wall while spinning (You need a running start) -Collide against the wall -Quickly tap the opposite direction so the character changes the animation and now looks like Samus is grabbing onto the wall -Press jump while Samus appears to be holding on to the wall -Repeat from the second bullet point onwards for multiple jumps That simple change of sprite from "spinning against a wall" to "wall-grab" is what I am saying would benefit the mechanic. Even if Samus appears to be holding onto the wall, you will still fall at the same speed at which she would if you had failed to pull the move. Adding a change of sprite/animation when the character (Like having the character's foot be planted at an odd angle compared to the usual to signify "Yup, press jump now or you are toast" ) is Coyote timing. I didn't mean to have the character actually grab on the ledge and stop. I should have expressed myself better. I meant to turn a mechanic that is there to make the game less frustrating into a mechanic that can be more easily harnessed by the player. Remember what I said before about "Give and take", the more tools you give your player, the more you can demand from them afterward. About Overwatch and hitboxes, that makes sense. Old arena shooters had weapons with the moderate spread and slight splash damage so that you could land hits on fast moving targets. I have not played Overwatch so I cannot comment further on it. If your ship, in a Shmup, has an effective hitbox of 3x3 pixels, that will save you a ton of troubles in the early levels and once or twice on the endgame. Imagine now I gave you a boss that can cover the whole screen with bullets except for a 3x3 pixel spot. This is an extreme example and something this hard should be kept for bonus bosses and the like, not the bosses most players will encounter as it will frustrate needlessly the people who have not mastered the game movement to that point. None the less, it is an (exaggerated) example of how I can take something I gave you as an advantage to screw you over later. Interesting, I misunderstood the point about Doom then. Maybe I did not notice because I started playing in the hardest difficulty I could from the get-go and the Imp fireballs did the same 20-ish (give or take 5) whether I was at full health or at 15, at which a single fireball meant I was toast. Maybe I should check the variable with Cheat Engine to be sure, but if it's true, then trying to locate the actual value would be a real headache.

[@CrashSable]

If we're talking about "fairness" then the higher difficulties of Xcom actually aren't fair. You can talk about how the lower difficulties give you hidden buffs, but that's the game re-balancing the odds to make it fair in the first place. The enemies blatantly cheat and take extra turns in all modes of the game. Plus, I've done my own testing and the game does lie in the enemies favour when it comes to accuracy. I logged every 90% shot I took over several games and with a sample size of over 10,000 the actual accuracy came to less than 70% - that can't be attributed to variance.

[@thefoxamongwolves9843]

Interesting results on the 90% hit chance. What difficulty was that on?

[@tempestnova6715]

And then there's the outlier in "Getting over it, with Bennett Foddy" which doesn't do any of this. It takes "Fairness", kicks it in the crotch and spits in its face.

[@lady_deaths_head]

that game lies so much, it says "with benett foddy" in the title, but i still haven't found him after 200+ hours of gameplay

[@nate3285]

Lewis and Ben save the world! Also, I personally find all the things that happened to destiny really sad. It had some great gunplay, and (if you know where to look) some good story hidden away. The business tactics just corrupted the experience and turned it into a mockery of what it could have been.

[@insaincaldo]

I really enjoyed playing the trial of the first one, trying out different builds and stuff.

[@Skyben2]

In "Path of Exile" you can't get hit 3 times in a row when you have 33% Dodge-Chance

[@demongrenade2748]

Alot of the 'cheats' that xcom 2 uses were also employed in xcom enemy unknown/within. I think a large part of what made the original long war mod so compelling and challenging was that it removed most (if not all) of these hidden buffs among other gameplay changes.

[@ArchitectofGames]

Yeah, long war is super hard and a lot of people don't know why

[@tomasxfranco]

*were

[@demongrenade2748]

thanks

[@vraolet]

In most fighting game, when you are doing a combo, the game helps you by memorizing one or two entries ahead, so if you are doing the combo a little too fast because you are afraid of failing the game helps you

[@sebastianswan7975]

You mean buffering?

[@vraolet]

@@sebastianswan7975 Yup

[@jeice13]

A lot of these i wouldnt count as the game "lying" such as the bridge collapse which seems more cinematic than mechanical. The xcom thing is annoying as it enables that failure of statistical thinking and id prefer if games didnt give blatantly false numbers

[@raylenn4444]

I definitely agree. In a game where you have to defeat the game, i can't enjoy kt if the game holds back at me and in essence lets me win. I want my victory to be a genuine one that i actually earned through my hard work and skill.

[@PatPatych]

From my own experience, I was making a runner game a while back. In it you press the button to switch gravity in the tunnel. It worked well for the most part, but it felt like button presses weren't registered sometimes. I've tried to add buffer frames - if player presses the button in mid-air just before landing, player will still jump after hitting the ground. After that, problem was gone. : - )

[@phyvo]

Input buffers are pretty common, To my ears it sounds even less cheaty than the example from the beginning of the video (that is, jumping while mid-air because your character just left the platform).

[@todesziege]

@@phyvo I don't think input buffers are really "cheating" though, as they're usually quite easy to spot with the amount of times you repeat basic inputs.

[@xhawkenx633]

The actual fallacy here is that the guy in the video thinks that he is talking about fairness/unfairness. Fair means that to all players involved the ruleset is known, consistent and applies to everyone participating in the game. The game itself is what sets the rules to beginn with. Those rules can be unforgiving harsh etc. But as long as they apply to everyone and as long as the rules are accesable to everyone the game stays fair. In case of destinity 2, it is not about fairness the rules applied to everyone. It is about fraud. Now no one would ever argue that creating a game that can be played and enjoyed by a normal human is bad thing, but using fairness in this context is fucking stupid.

[@Tangerinian]

as soon as the players figure out any of these lies it upsets them more and ruins the experience more in the long run. It only works if they never figure it out, and the devs tend to underestimate what the players will figure out

[@todesziege]

Yep. Things like these usually become quite obvious after some time of play. It can really harm my enjoyment of a game, or even ruin it.

[@PsychadelicoDuck]

Funny thing, I thought the original Spyro had Senua's mechanic in it when I played it, way back in the day. Made even a very kiddy game like that much more intense. Was a bit disappointed when I tested years later and found out no.

[@willw1980]

About the grace jumping thing, I'm not sure if any video game has done it, but I have a wierd slightly complex idea for videogames, the game's programing almost assumes what you are going to do next, so it makes the line of code the first thing to scan over to see if you were going to do that. For example, in a car racing game, if there is a left turn coming up, the code would prioritize the "if thumbstick moves left then turn left" code before anything else. In a fighting game, the coding might have to learn how you fight in the game and execute in the way you play, almost how Forza did the ai feature with players online. This may not do so well with lower end systems, but might help with keyboards and controllers, making them possibly feel more responsive.

[@NautilusXO]

I remember finding out about the false save deletion mechanic after I had finished Hellblade, and I remember thinking, "Those madmen, they actually did it. I was losing my shit with paranoia every time I died, they gave me psychosis for a time." Brilliant.

[@Uriel238]

Blue Sense (that is the _hints_ hunters get that reveal where the player is) tend to spoil a lot of stealth. If the player plants a distraction (say a remote bomb to trigger a really big chain explosion) and trigger it from the opposite side of the compound, it's really disappointing when the baddies head towards the player and not the distraction. In _Far Cry 4,_ I remember that the Royal Guard would always know where Ajay was just if they got too excited. And in _Watch Dogs 2_ baddies unclear on where Marcus was could always still lob a grenade right next to him (and would, even if Marcus was hiding next to his unconscious buddies). It's not always a good thing to presume that devs know what they're doing, and that may be a call to thoroughly test and playtest AI. Especially as we move more and more towards games where players choose their approach to different situations.

[@ramsoofkyo9047]

maybe her mind is deeply flawed. Continue to cheat the perception without notifing about it and you'll contribute to regress in skill. I recall same topic being covered using Crash Bandicoot as example. That game was designed to ease up experience, but not in a unnoticable of simply Lying manner. Crash offered you free protection spell upon continuus deaths, it was mask that appeared above you after respawning. It was subtle, but you were aware game is boosting your chances. If Doom 2016 was doing me a favor when I played at Ultra-Violence then I'm fine with it, because I died enough times to be sure I'm sometimes more lucky than skilled. But RNG based games like X-Com are by design bullshit. 50% hit chance may as well mean you'll miss 5 shots in a row, while enemy hits you criticaly 3 times in a row without missing. Those "veterans" are simply not willing to play game that's unfair in this manner, being bad design from start, not because "hidden mechanics" are best solution for gamers. Solution to this is creating story mode and normal mode.

[@MouldMadeMind]

You know that the enemy uses rng too?

[@ramsoofkyo9047]

@@MouldMadeMind 1. you hit, enemy misses = game is boring 2. you miss, enemy hits = game is too hard Add something like "if you miss 90% shot, next 90% shot is a hit"

[@MouldMadeMind]

@@ramsoofkyo9047 didn't know there are two turns, with only one character and action.

[@ramsoofkyo9047]

@@MouldMadeMind grow a brain

[@MouldMadeMind]

@@ramsoofkyo9047 when the guy realying on oversimplification calls you stupid.

[@arthurbouwhuis1647]

I once played a racing game where i tried to go backwards, just for fun. at some point it felt like there was a strong force pushing me the wrong way.

[@Visionism]

Fun story - When Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice pulled the creeping death lie on me I thought it was a garbage game mechanic, quit the game and uninstalled it. Never played it again. I suppose it backfires sometimes.

[@live_kaito_reaction]

The hellblade one was so cool, I wish I didn't get too paranoid and actually looked it up myself and found out it was a lie when I played it. It definitely made the combat much more tension

[@joestevenson5568]

Sorry, but claiming all games lie to you, or that it is mandatory for a game to be enjoyable is simply false.

[@nathanniesche6380]

it's subjective

[@stevenneiman9789]

I personally think that about a third each of good game design are figuring out what kind of experience the player should have and then figuring out how to keep them in the interaction space and the headspace where that experience can happen for as much of the time as possible. Deception isn't the only tool in a game designer's toolbox to achieve that but it can be one of the most effective since you can use it to control both the way that someone feels and the way that they play without needing to restructure your actual game mechanics too much.

[@Ay-xq7mj]

In Skyrim people think they are great with the bow but arrow moves toward enemy / their head automatically.

[@_Salok]

There is no headshot damage bonus in Skyrim, so it wouldn't matter anyway.

[@ArchitectofGames]

I didn't know that! That would've been good to mention

[@Czesnek]

You are right and you can turn off this bullshit in configs.

[@Arvensa]

Yes, this is one of the first mods I put on my MO profiles-- to disable auto-aim. It actually throws off good aim by mistake a healthy proportion of the time as well, especially at certain ranges. And once I was certain it wasn't just wonky hit boxes but actually a fudging mechanic, I had to have it gone. (Skyrim's default difficulty is so low that it didn't have any chance of breaking the balance to have it on or off in the absence of other mods-- it was just annoying. Not like the bow's drawtime was made much longer to compensate in a way that led to more compelling fights)

[@robonerd125]

When i play Skyrim i play with a modded legendary, essentially +400% damage for both sides, if i'm dying in one shot then so are the enemies, either learn how to manipulate the battlefield or pick up some dark clothes and an undeserved sense of badassitude, cause yer a filthy stealth archer now... (whoever decided "harder" meant to quadruple the enemy's damage and health is an idiot and a sadist)

[@Nudgarrobot]

I'm just starting the video and I'm really hoping Amnesia: The Dark Descent gets mentioned for literally lying to you in the loading screens and things about how Sanity works and the consequences of low sanity

[@Vortal_Cord]

Really awesome video about a very interesting topic. My personal favorite example of this is the finale of Half Life 2: Episode 2. The battle is balanced in such a way that the ending always feels like the Striders are just about to kick the rebels ass and Gordon just manages to defeat them all at the last second. Worked like a charm on me the first time I played it. Once you know how it all works you can do it without losing a single building but that first time was stressful as hell. I love stuff like this. I'll take a convincing and exciting lie over a boring truth any day. In videogames at least, hah.

[@36424567254]

i'm pretty sure i've played a couple platform games WITHOUT the grace period. And it was extremely frustrating, because you in fact did feel like you jumped in time but the game didn't allow you to. Eventually you had to get used to jumping before actually being on the edge from your perspection (or in truth, you had to get used to predict your total reaction+input lag), but it was particularly hard after being spoiled by most other platformers.

[@PrimeSinisterful]

I was so dissapointed when I learned the death mechanic in Senua's Sacrifice wasn't real, it kinda broke my immersion in the game and any bit of tension it had, the story was still top notch, but it retracted so much from the experience overall for me

[@helgenlane]

That's why I didn't look up if it was real or not when playing myself. I knew it would ruin my experience if I knew it was fake.

[@gabrielandy9272]

it kinda drop the score/quality of the game because of the lie, it means the quality of the game only was up because the lied once u discover the truth it goes down, it kidna make me not want to purchase any game from that developer again, if they did not want the user to lose the save they could make so the user have to die like 100 times or so... but lying is very bad.

[@helgenlane]

@@gabrielandy9272 games lie to you all the time, both multiplayer and singleplayer ones. Some enemies miss on purpose or don't engage at all just so you wouldn't get swarmed, sometimes health bars are bigger than what they look like, sometimes games make the level easier after you die. If Hellblade actually deleted save files, many people would be afraid to play it. Because they don't know how long or how difficult it is.

[@gabrielandy9272]

@@helgenlane enemy's not going all in is game design not a lie for me. You want just a few enemies and to control the game balance that's fine doom kf2 even left 4 dead does that and it don't make the game easier or hard just balanced. Levels getting easier after I die I also dislike I lost all my love to re 4 after discovered that the score of the game for me got lot worse until I discovered that the professional difficulty don't do that, dynamic difficulty is fine but should tell the user about it I don't mind dynamic difficulty bots on quake for ex. Lying a gamemechanic like that is something i will not forgive because it's saying the game had something and it did not had its much worse.. already blocked the company on steam to never see they games again, they lied about permadeathif a dev tells before release that the new crash bandocoof 4 will be able to play with coco and it release without it its a lie just like no man sky fiasco.

[@sator_project]

I'd say the best way to judge Polish vs Cheating is to ask 'how would the player feel if they found out'. I think most people welcome Cayote Time, but Bioshock-blanks sound like a lame to do what should be an audio cue.

[@Thaden0]

These examples are Cool, but I suspect it's much more common for games to cheat to make up for poor AI. Thing's like hard modes just getting more resources or abilities in place of better strategy in a match based game. Most of these examples are story based games, things are very different in match based games which are quickly becoming the more common game type.

[@madmanwithaplan1826]

the whole thing can be simplified by a simple analogy. everyone loves a magician who pulls a rabbit out of a hat, but no one wants to see a magician pull your wallet out of your pants.

[@danielbrooks7764]

"we think about statistics emotionally, not mathematically." Game designers: stop conditioning people to be stupid.

[@FinetalPies]

This is a really misguided sentiment. Thinking emotions are stupid will not make you smarter, it'll just make you act like an ass while thinking you're smart. Impeding your actual growth. "You can't learn what you think you know" and all that

[@haveiszalfaroqie]

But we play games to get emotionally invested, not to work on calculus.

[@danielbrooks7764]

I didn't say "emotions are stupid." I said thinking about statistics emotionally is stupid, and games reinforce people's biases with positive feedback loops when they skew game mechanics to meet false expectations rather than conditioning expectations through better, honest mechanics. "Cake is a lie," should be an unsettling statement, fellow test subjects.

[@haveiszalfaroqie]

Daniel Brooks But we do, right? I mean, who won't take the 99% chance on basically everything? Besides, the only one who skewed are ignorant people.

[@kirareilly3699]

But what if it just says 99% but because of all the aftermath that it doesn't show you it works out closer to 75%? That's a pretty scummy way to screw the player imo.

[@alecchristiaen4856]

This reminds me of the option in Civ games of disabling the biased start. For those not in the loop, several factions in Civ have abilities dependent on the geography (the Celts generate faith in forests, for example), and barring that, not every tile is equally viable to settle (presence of rivers, nearby resource deposits, coastal access, etc.) so the starting position of each player is chosen pseudo-randomly, making sure that the RNG doesn't lock them out of their abilities or puts them at a distinct disadvantage. disabling this stat bias can mean starting in incredibly harsh terrain, grouped up with several other factions (while other stretches of the map are empty), or having just the worst luck when it comes to resources. What's interesting, however, is that Civ is upfront about this, and presents this as an option to offset unfairness, even though it also falls under player-preferrential cheating.

[@segevstormlord3713]

"Lies and cheats as much as a conservative politician?" Wow, that's way more honest than I thought it would be. (You'd probably have been better off leaving an affiliation off and just saying "politician," as that way you're more likely to get agreement in general, rather than insinuations that the other affiliation is worse.)

[@adams13245]

Hey, at least he got something political right; "a lot of the time fairness... it just isn't very fun."

[@dandre3K]

There's a literal book about Obama's 1375 lies. Don't be an intellectual coward.

[@sophiejones7727]

@@dandre3K irrelevant, the video maker is British. When he says "conservative" he's talking about the Tories. Who, well, actually do lie and cheat more than most politicians.

[@dandre3K]

@@sophiejones7727 lol no

[@lonestarr1490]

@@sophiejones7727 Or maybe he's talking about Nigel Farage in particular, who doesn't do anything but.

[@Chariot_Rider]

I think the Telltale games are a good example of games that lie to you in a good way. Sometimes you need to make a choice between 2 characters and one of them will die. However an episode later that character dies anyway. There are also situations where the players choice doesn’t matter at all and the situation plays out the same no matter what the player does. Ultimately the player’s contemplation of the choice and how they respond to the situation is more important than the outcome of that choice.

[@nicholasrandall3507]

That is why I stopped playing Telltale games. I realized that the choices were futile, none of the sacrifices I had the characters make matterred, and it was headed for the same ending regardless. "Fun" is subjective, not objective. Cheating in the player's favour undermines the sense of accomplishment, and denies lessons. We will never gain an accurate feel for numbers if they are deceptive. These lies feel more like a crutch for bad design.

[@yppahdalg2397]

@@nicholasrandall3507 While I agree, I would like to think that you enjoyed the first game because you didn't know how stuff worked under the hood, but found out through repetition. This is partially the reason Tellale went under, as it became stagnant and predicable.

[@nicholasrandall3507]

@@yppahdalg2397 While that was a factor, GoT was the only one I played, and the one that got me to quit. The game telegraphed consequences and character motivations, but the way the scenes played out was the issue. Choices where sacrifices were made ensed up being for nothing. Meaning nothing narratively, forcing conflict to create a dichotomy. There were better options, consequences, and writing in Dragon Age: Origins. Telltale's GoT was worse written, but more narratively focused. It reminds of the early arguments about Dragon Age 2 and the discussion about whether to make the combat portions optional. It's interesting to see where we grew and what we sacrificed as gaming has evolved.

[@claudio-9097]

I liked the video but I feel like tge analogy between the "destiny 2" lie and the actual topic of the video was a bit off point

[@gregoryfenn1462]

Coming back to this after seeing your 2021/22 videos and it's amazing how improved your videos are (not that this is bad per se, but it's a bit rough and underconfident and less technically detailed as your recent stuff).

[@SkepticZaq]

I don't buy it. There is a very big difference between a game explicitly telling you something that isn't true, like displaying an inaccurate XP reward, and a game just not mentioning specific mechanics. Lying is different from not volunteering full information, and really the full information about how the game works often isn't even known to the developers what with glitches and stuff. Most of your examples fall under the second category, which is something that has to happen always in everything anyway. The only outright lying examples you gave (game tells you something that isn't true) made me want to not play those games. So I don't buy the claim that games can and frequently do lie to you in a good way.

[@retanoab]

Hey, I get your point. I think it's valid to say lying is different from not disclosing all the information, but I also think that's up to interpretation. For instance, "Coyote time" contradicts our common sense that says "if my feet are not on the ground, I should fall". Tomb Raider and Uncharted's "falling bridges" segments contradicts the one that says "these are dangerous situations and they don't wait for anyone to keep up". Hellblade's case is also a contradiction of a common sense, that we can trust texts that pop up on our screen. We can choose to see all those cases as lies, 'cause they go against what we think are universal truths. But can't we consider all those hidden mechanics as well? Also, Doom blatantly lies by saying you have less health than you actually have. But if they changed it to show health accurately and cranked up the damage dealt by enemies when the player is at full health, they'd achieve the same results (it'd be harder to implement and balance, but let's not consider that). Then it could be considered an undisclosed mechanic as well..? In the end, these cases are made with the games' best interests in mind, making them more effective in transmitting whatever the devs wanted them to.

[@SkepticZaq]

No, it is not up to interpretation. A mechanic that merely fails to match my assumptions is objectively distinguishable from a mechanic that doesn't match what the game explicitly stated, because my assumptions are objectively distinguishable from what a game explicitly states. In fact the two are trivial to distinguish, because my assumptions are exactly the things I believe that were *not* stated by the game. The coyote time and falling bridges stuff are *not* lies. They are omissions. While they achieve the same goals as lies, they do so while respecting my intelligence and autonomy. Whatever goals you want games to achieve through lying, they are better achieved through omission. A game that only achieves deception through omission without ever lying gives you reliable jumping off points for figuring things out (by giving you reliable mechanics information to start with). Once a game starts spewing incorrect information, you lose that jumping off point. You now need to test not only your assumptions, but also everything the game tells you about its mechanics. And at that point, why is the game bothering to tell you anything about its mechanics at all? In contrast, your Hellblade example *is* a lie, because text is explicit communication. Whether or not I assume the text is reliable, it is still a lie if it is false. So in this case you have something that is both a contradiction of common sense *and* lie. In fact, the common sense being contradicted is "the game's not lying." Does Doom display an HP value that is less than you actually have, or does it secretly scale down enemy damage while you're low on health? The two could produce the same gameplay for anyone who doesn't look at the code. (Please note, this does *not* mean there is any "up to interpretation" going on. As soon as you look at the game's code the difference is objectively identifiable.) In these sorts of cases, where an outright lie cannot be distinguished from a false assumption without looking at the code, I think it's okay to pick the lie for purposes of ease of coding or whatever. But problems arise when a game outright lies and gets caught doing so. That's when I lose trust in the game, which seriously hinders my enjoyment. Far better to just use omission to get the job done.

[@thoughtpolease7183]

100% agree. Video is wrong.

[@joshuahijs]

​@@SkepticZaq you've completely contradicted yourself with that paragraph about Doom. if Doom telling you an outright lie - your actual HP doesn't match up to the HP value you're being shown - is fine because you can't distinguish it from a simple omission - enemy damage scales down with low health - then surely Destiny lying about how much XP you receive is also fine because it's functionally indistinguishable from simply scaling the XP needed to progress and omitting that fact - which by your definition doesn't count as a lie.

[@SkepticZaq]

@@joshuahijs No, the Destiny example was an outright lie because the numbers the screen displayed were just plain wrong. It is distinguishable because you can see the game display the same XP value multiple times and notice that it's not actually doing the same thing each time. The comparison would be if Doom displayed damage values whenever you were hit. That would make the "your health is inaccurately portrayed" version distinguishable from the "enemy damage gets scaled down" version. From a "don't lie to players" standpoint, the Destiny fiasco would have been "fine" if it just never bothered to show any actual XP values,. That said, the actual design goal of throttling advancement probably still would have pissed people off once discovered. In the real world the fiasco combined a shitty design goal with an outright lie to try and hide it. Remove the lie and it's better, but a shitty design goal still lies underneath so it's still not good, just less bad.

[@evilbarrels2506]

I think an example of fake XP values don right can be found in Eve Online. The game uses a realtime training model for player levelling in the main game, but there's a minigame in Eve that uses a more conventional method of progression. Every time you complete a Project Discovery puzzle, you get some XP, and a bar at the top goes up a little. It doesn't increase much, except at the very end when it takes a massive leap to completion. Seeing that bar rush through the final 15% in one go as the rewards appear on screen feels really satisfying, especially compared to the "slow" progression you normally experience.