Back To School 3
Lesson 3 – Don’t push the your player’s patience too far over the limit or they might stop playing altogether!
Game : Castle Crashers ( Xbox Live Arcade)
Castle Crashers is a pretty awesome and popular game but it does contain one solitary game sequence which really tests the players patience too much and crosses over the dividing line between fun and frustration. Even though this game contains no other design errors (unlike some other games out there ), I have chosen this example to illustrate a very common fault in game design. It’s mostly unintentional, often caused by the fact that people who are testing the gameplay already know the game inside out and back to front and therefore don’t approach the gameplay the same way someone new to the game would. It may seem a trivial matter but pushing the player’s patience too far because of badly thought out game design achieves exactly the same effect as the developer sitting down next to the player and banging the player’s head repeatedly with a hammer and screaming repeatedly in his/her ear “give up, stop playing” !
The sequence in question occurs halfway through the single player game when the player gets captured by a spaceship contolled by mini “Alien Hominids”, a hilarious character from the behemoth’s previous game.
After escaping from the laser cage and fighting over 100 mini “alien hominids”, a “big strong man” spots you and proceeds to destroy the controls of the spaceship setting off an alarm that gives the player 60 secs to escape before it blows up and the game is over.
Bearing in mind that death means starting the WHOLE level from the beginning, the sequence goes as follows :
(1) You begin your 60 second escape by moving to the right to be confronted by a laser barrier. To break the barrier you need to fire 3 or 4 arrows at the the control box.
(2) Moving further right, you confront 3 enemies who need to be eliminated in order to progress.
(3) You need to tread carefully through a series of “smoke lasers” that switch on and off at different times. If you are unlucky and get hit, you are knocked to the ground , losing valuable time.
(4) You then face 4 more enemies, all of which need to be eliminated to proceed further.
If you manage to get this far in under 60 seconds , then you have done well. Most people would need to play this level 3 or 4 times to get this far but its not over yet … here comes the “game breaker” :
(5) You are confronted with a maze that leads to the exit and the end of the level. Its admittedly not a complex maze but with a few seconds on the clock remaining , you don’t have the time to sit still and work it out. Oops , too late, game over!
Here is a you tube video so you can see for yourself : bear in mind a few things before you watch it though:
(a) the player has leveled up quite a lot , more than the average player at this point in the game.
(b) the player has obviously played this level quite a few times already
(c) the 1 minute sequence doesn’t start until half way through the video
( 1 minute 50 secs to be more precise)
2 things i have the urgent need to correct:
’smoke lasers’: they’re no problem if you walk slowly. only if you insist on running blindly over them you need luck.
and: to call those little barricades a maze is somewhat exaggerated. there’s no time needed to ‘figure it out’, because there is obviously no ‘wrong way’ or dead end… or maybe i’m just a genius for figuring it out within a glance… i’ll go for that option ^___^
i’m not saying that castle crashers had no difficult levels at all, but they weren’t the alien ship.
greetings ~_^y
guess it was a little exaggeration to call the “little barricades” a maze! but coming right at the end of the level with a few seconds to spare makes it go from a barricade to a maze. There is actually a “wrong way” : you can get stuck and have to turn back, maybe you didnt go that way?
re smoke lasers – walk slowly ? with a time limit hanging over your head? fair enough but walking slowly wasnt in my mind when i was attempting the level for the 3rd or 4th time .
Lastly , it wasn’t that the level was difficult but that it was unfair and frustrating. Not for everyone but its a moment that easily tempts non geniuses to give up. However I salute you for your fair points. Which level did you reckon was the hardest ?
really, i never saw the wrong way! O.O
guess i was just lucky then…
the biggest problem were rather the fellow players (we mostly do a local multiplayer), so even if someone gets perfectly over the smoke, he has to wait for the other three.
the most frustrating levels for me were lava world and the guys with the razor wheels coming out of the floor (guess it was industrial castle?). but that simply because i never upgrade my defense (more the speed and strength person), so with all this magic floating around i get easily killed
but maybe that speed helped me with the alien ship, so…
You were lucky, believe me!
Playing this level with 3 other players in local multiplayer must have been a complete farce? I only played it single player but i can just imagine the frustration of having to wait for the others who messed up in smoke section! Its a very tight 60 seconds !
I thought the Lava world was hard but not “frustrating”. Defense and attack were my priorities.