Making gaming fun

During development, some of the features got cut, infamy being a big one. HMR was problematic to implement implicitly, and it basically became H, and the game ended up looking like a lot of other FPSes instead of a deeper game. Not a bad thing in and of itself, and the nine pillars ended up looking like this.

Far Cry 2's actual four pillars of gameplay.

Not a problem, FPSes like this are still fun if done well, right? Yes, unless you have a mission design that was based around the old gameplay that used intentionality heavily. Now the mission was to blow up a rail car for no apparent reason and shoot the guy who came out to look at what happened. Both of these didn't do anything other than take up your time.

Since HMR became H, there was a little health loss for subsequent bad guys, but no morale loss, and no reliability loss for the guns. If you were like 99.999% of the gamers out there playing FPSes, you got to the final fight and went charging in. Planning is for wusses in games like this, right?

If you set a fire, the enemies, not lacking morale, didn't break and run, had great guns, could take a little scorching before they fell. They shot you to bits, and ran you back into your own fire. In level design circles, they call this a 'whoopsie', even thought the level is done right, it is done right for the wrong system, and intentionality falls flat.

This is where the improvisation part comes in. When life gives you a battalion of angry bad guys charging you, improvising is mighty handy, RUN! It was solvable, but not in a way that the game designers intended, or even designed for.

Other than "Don't cut necessary game mechanics without modifying levels", the real lesson here is that the more open a game, the more intentionality breaks down. Intentionality is a very tenuous thing in sandbox games like GTA4, you are expected to do what you want in weird ways, that is the 'game'.

That brings us to the other half of the talk, fault tolerance. In the end, things like malaria, reliability and wounds were put back in instead of more generic concepts like infamy and implicit reactions. People could be demoralised, but it wasn't a reaction to how 'bad' you were, they just basically were. Your gun jammed at semi-regular intervals, and things fell back in line toward the original ideas.

There are two concepts here to be aware of, composition and execution. To dumb it down quite a bit, composition is planning and thinking about how you are going to solve a problem or attack a situation. Things like run up to the rock, duck, shoot the guard, and sneak in below the watchtower while using weapons 4, 8 and 9.