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The God Game genre is one of those genres that have not had good luck transitioning to modern markets. Incidentally, city builders which share similar mechanics are also on the list. Last year, From Dust was the latest attempt at creating a God Game and got mixed reviews. Looking at From Dust and the genre as a whole, the problems are similar to the ones a certain "Man of Steel" has fought before.
The idea of a "God Game" is one of those all encompassing terms (which is the same as the term "God",) that makes it hard to set a basic list of rules for. The problem is that looking at the genre; it shares mechanics from other genres. Strategy games, city builders and sand box titles are the building blocks of a God Game. The issue is that the more genres a game is based on. The more areas that must be polished and properly balanced for the game to work as a whole.
Black and White was one of the first attempts at trying to combine all three genres into one experience in 3D, and it faced issues with the design. One of the issues is with power, specifically, how powerful should the player be? If the player can shape the planet to their whim and summon meteor showers, then where is the challenge? That problem is what comic book writers have faced with one of the most popular characters of all time.
Throughout the years, comic book writers have had a tough time creating stories for Superman. How do you write meaningful stories where your character can solve any problem by throwing it into the sun? There have been many "mcguffins" used to weaken Superman, from Kryptonite, magic, red sun radiation and many more, (my only personal knowledge is limited to the Superman cartoons.) This problem has also found its way into the games based off of Superman. If the player has no limits on what they can do, then you have a title with very little challenge.
Some solutions have been basing the threats of Superman away from physical, and more emotional. Such as trying to save the people, or fitting in on a strange planet. The problem for games though is that it's very hard to do emotional or personal stories in games. The attempted solution in Black and White was to base the character's power on the people and was a God game where the player could die. Limiting the player's power is the easiest solution, but saying that "God is Dead" (I had to work it in somewhere) just feels like it goes against the nature of the genre.
As the players got further into Black and White, the freedom of being a god became more restrictive. Players would find themselves limited by belief and force to do things like picking up a rock and throwing it around constantly just to extend their control. The game required a lot of busy work keeping your people fed and healthy while training your creature.
From Dust had the opposite problem, as the game goes on the player's abilities increases. The final level gives the player complete control over the elements, which while awesome, does get boring. Due to the player's only meaningful interaction in the game being said elements with little control of their people.
In a way, Spore may be the most successful attempt at a true God Game, combining all 3 genres into one. However, it fails in the regard that each system is its own sub game instead of providing all 3 at once. Once players reach the Space stage (sandbox layer), there isn’t any reason to return to previous stages with that creature.
Somewhere between strategy, city building and sandbox games, the God Game genre at its best sits. The problem comes down to a simple question: How do you give the player the powers of a God, while still providing meaningful gameplay? I wish I had a perfect answer for this but I'm still pondering this myself. If I can figure this out, I'll let everyone know by simultaneously ringing every phone on the planet.
Josh Bycer
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It's sort of like when men are attracted to women, what do they pay attention to at first? The body right?
Typically hips first.
The proportions must "feel" right, the look needs to "feel" right. Take a look at WoW, commercially driven for appeal, not gameplay, heck not even realism.
I would suggest lumping in Warcraft 2 and Civilization (the not so distant cousins) for some helpful judgement. Because if a game is cluncky, stuttery, and without any decent point of tangible intelligent reference which most God games unfortunately fall into as well as easily recognizable (faux) "God experience" Who wants to take part in that when the game is about details?
Making these games even more accessible and easy just compounds the problem. There needs to be a simple set of rules for them without reading a novel, and watching a 3 hour how to video. But they need to have enough "complexity" not options, not choices, but problem solving.
One game I love going back to in regards to this conversation is Soul Reaver. While it's not a God game in the sense of the mechanics described in the article.
The character of Raziel could "die" but would only shift into the spiritual realm and then shift back into the physical.
Raziel was essentially immortal, yet still had limitations. Superman has a very long history of lore so that could be tricky. But the fact remains, Superman stories haven't always been consistent from one writer to another.
The problem that From Dust had was it was more of a puzzle game than a God game. And it was a game where you had to follow the trial and error formula which makes it frustrating.
Interestingly, Rocksteady has made Batman a badass by allowing a easy to use controls with considerable depth which the player can progress to naturally as they get more proficient.
I could be skillful enough to take on 40+ enemies in a room and not get hit once. Yet, the problem for Superman or only God characters isn't the damage that they want to avoid, but the challenges they face.
Give the player powerful tools and increasingly complex challenges. Give the player more control without having to go through a frustrating trial-and-error cycle.
Now that I think about it, The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time game had God-like elements with the character able to rewind time and avoid death.
There are many mechanics in the industry it is just about managing the right balance.
In Wario Land, the player could not die at all, but instead gain time limited powers by getting hurt. They were used as a form of puzzle solving to find treasure.
While in Kirby, the challenge of the game wasn't about getting through a level alive, but finding all the optional trinkets hidden around.
You're right about the mechanics, it's possible to give a player challenge without having death or failure in the equation. It just requires a lot of balancing and fine tuning.
The idea being that the goal is not to overcome a foe or challenge directly (like B&W has you doing), but rather that you're trying to maintain some sort of increasingly volatile balance. Maybe you are trying to maintain a balance of good & evil in your world. Even with god-like powers this is a believable challenge/limitation. If you simply crush one side, then you're doing something counter-productive to the game's objective. This way you can even include some pretty strong mechanics like rewind time or world ending events and have it work towards the objective of the game.
I think the key to a good god game is not to put emphasis on the player's abilities (like ultimate destruction, creation etc.) but rather to focus on the world's reactivity to the player. From Dust actually did a good job with this and was only really let down by being a bit heavily scripted and compartmentalized. If the player is all-powerful (or nearly all-powerful) then all you can really do is make the player use that power responsibly.
And I haven't played one in a long time because there doesn't seem to be a purpose in a game that is well without a relatable purpose. If I solve the puzzle and save the planet, well why should I care? Why not kill them or really screw them up? It has no relatable meaning so it's a lot like solving a crossword puzzle. At the end all it did was waste my time.
Nothing gained, nothing learned, no reason to care about the subject at hand.
The first two Master of Orion games (and probably most 4X games) limit your power by imposing what are basically bureaucratic obstacles that scale linearly with the size of your empire. The bigger you grow, the more units or worlds you have to personally manage. Oddly, games that try to abstract this activity away (such as Master of Orion III) wind up feeling boring -- delegation may be necessary for managing large organizations in reality, but games need personal agency. The trick is finding gameplay that stays in the middle ground between boredom and micromanagement from the game's start to its end.
There are several ways this might go. One is to externalize the threat -- if you can be a god, why can't there be others? This is common in both storytelling and game design: as your powers grow, you attract challenges from increasingly powerful opponents. The original God Game, Populous, did this by organizing gameplay into several relatively small worlds and ramping up the frequency and severity of disasters imposed by enemy AI. There's no reason why this couldn't work for God Games today, although I suspect it would be necessary to personalize the opposing deities more than Populous did.
Another approach, which I don't know that anyone (including Spore) has used, would be to change the kind of challenge as player mastery increases. Specifically, the game would start out asking the player to solve first simple, then harder tactical challenges -- small-scale interactions won by most effectively utilizing only local resources. Once these are mastered, the game would then ask the player to start organizing groups of individual contests (the "operational" level of conflict resolution). This would be followed in turn by strategic challenges over large areas of space and time, and finally by "grand strategy" challenges that put entire nations, civilizations, or star-spanning empires on the line.
This is the model I wanted to see used in Star Trek Online. As your rank increased, you wouldn't keep getting the same kinds of tactical, hand phaser-resolvable challenges that were appropriate for an Ensign fresh out of Starfleet Academy. Commanders would have operational challenges; Captains would be expected to use their ships and crews to solve strategic problems; and Admirals would be faced with the political/diplomatic/procurement challenges of grand strategy. Again, there's no reason this couldn't be used in a God Game. The main concern (other than finding a designer who appreciates these levels of action and can find the fun in each one) is that some players prefer particular levels. Most gamers, I suspect, are happiest with purely tactical challenges, while some prefer strategy. Expecting all players to enjoy shifting from one style to another may be asking too much. (This is why I also suggested that rank advancement in Star Trek Online should be voluntary -- if you like tactical play, you can become a legendary Lieutenant.) So adapting this form of scaling challenge in a God Game could be difficult.
This is an interesting design question. (Along with, "Why aren't there more God Games these days?") I'm looking forward to seeing more responses.
Populous is the only game where I really felt like a god. Why don't I have direct control over my units? Why, free will of course! Part of the fun of being a God is watching all those little creatures run around, taking direct command of them . . . that's something a human would do ;) Also, the various pestilential abilities felt perfect. However, without the opposition, the game would quickly becomes pointless as From Dust proves by running out of ideas after a few levels, while Populous goes on for hundreds.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073341/
You're a human and you arrive on a world with primitive intelligent life. You have a one time use device that allows you to change your appearance to resemble the natives (like the Triluminary device in Babylon 5 that transformed NO-SPOILER into NO-SPOILER.) Perhaps you can pick between several rival species of intelligent life on the planet to guide and rule over.
With other advanced technology, you are treated as a god. Thanks to a "powerful" satelite you've installed in orbit prior to landing, you can perform all sorts of "miracles." The satelite must recharge X amount of time inbetween uses (perhaps variable depending on what you used it for.) The satelite also provides you with a map of valuable mineral deposits, ancient ruins and burried artifacts... maybe even ancient alien tech and the mystery that surrounds them. With lesser portable tech, you can vaporize the disloyal or those who would try to depose you or prove you a fraud.
The goal of the game is? I don't know... to amass wealth that you can then take home? To create a utopia?? To inter-breed with and create a new sub-race? To enslave and feed your own ego and delluded sense of superiority?? To merely survive in luxury since you have no way of ever returning home? Maybe you can choose between various victory conditions. A key difference here is that because your character is the "god" mistook for a living diety you have an actual avatar presence within the world you rule. You are not super human. If your avatar dies through assasination, your game is over. Also the foreign invader taking over through deception is a powerful narrative. You must help "your" people overcome various challenges in order to preserve them as well as your own power and divinity within their eyes. You can create an elite guard / secret service to spy on everyone and root out dissenters/heretics. You're battling both external threats and internal which is perhaps a bit novel for the genre.
Anyway... just a 5 minute idea I got while reading this thread. It's mostly full of scifi cliches, but maybe somebody will find it useful for their next god game. :)
I think the drift towards scripted narrative counts against the genre, but I sense there's a lot of work on, and support for, emergent narrative currently, and that fits pretty well with god-games, since designing the reactions of the populace to your actions (e.g. Civ, Dwarf Fortress, SimCity) is actually a lot easier that getting individuals to react realistically in more detail (e.g. Facade).
Not true. Because when players have no limits on what they can do... players define challenge for themselves. As they do in real life. Game designers can't comprehend the concept because they view and think about games in Machiavellian terms. They must always be god, never the player. So the fact that designers don't view specific forms of play as challenging or meaningful does not mean there are not huge numbers of players in the existing and possible audiences who would actually find them challenging, extremely meaningful, highly immersive and fun.
I could have a Judeo-Christian face. Where the player tries to fix the world and then starts with a country and then attempt to spread it while other nations seeth with anger and jealousy
Then again, if it's my nation and God powers vs. a regular nation, should there be any challenge or could I just summon a flood to wash them all away?