I had an interesting conversation this September at PAX West that’s been on my mind. I was chatting with a guy about some of the choices we were making, being an indie PvP game in a turbulent game industry. And I ended up rambling on a bit about how I miss an era of PvP games we seem to have moved past. It’s something I’ve been thinking about since long before we started work on Stars of Icarus. I love PvP games, and love talking about why! So short of catching my time at another convention, I thought it might be a good idea to put it down here in a dev log.
Stars of Icarus is a PvP game, front and center. I know that’s raised a few eyebrows, and I totally get it. PvP has gotten a bit of a bad rap lately. There's no shortage of PvP games that burn through goodwill with predatory design and monetization, or are full of angry players ready to flame you for your every mistake. But I don't believe these are intrinsic problems to PvP. Let’s dive into how we’re building something different, with influences both old school and new. This is going to be a bit of a long one, so we'll have it in a few sections:
1) The slow loss of social PvP games
2) Indie, Community First development
3) The elements of good PvP
4) Toxicity and Game Design
The Slow Loss of Social PvP Games
Now, there’s all kinds of PvP out there. Recent years have seen a ton of experimentation in the space, from free for all Battle Royales, to PvPvE Extraction Shooters, to asymmetric and hidden role social deduction games. But there’s been a slow, quiet walk away from the thing that makes a good PvP game so special for me, and that’s the social side of the game. Nothing has really captured that element better, for me, than Team PvP shooters.
A team shooter is a great place to hang out, be it with friends, or with people I'm meeting for the first time. What makes them great? A few key elements. First, I think it’s important to remember to build a great game first, *before* the social elements. There's a time and place for both, certainly not a knock at Second Life and VR Chat. But I think it's self evident there's a difference in what attracts players to a social game vs an action game. A good multiplayer shooter, they're fun on their own, even in a dead silent lobby. But the greatest? They say, if you really want to succeed, get the most out of them, they all require just a *little* bit of communication.
The best shooters go "oh, actually, you need two players for this super move" or "there's two capture points, you should all pick the same one if you want to win". They probably give you some quiet ways to say it, a ping or a text chat. But the most powerful thing that all the great ones give you is a **microphone**. They get people *talking* to one another. They make talking the best way to play the game, and open the door to all sorts of other conversation. A good team shooter is, itself, the ice breaker. That’s the key element, that you’re all already talking about the game, which opens the door to talking about anything else. Humans are social creatures, we want and need to communicate with others. But sometimes we need a bit of a kick to get started.
Yeah, I know a great hangout spot. Ever hear of a game called Team Fortress 2?
https://wiki.teamfortress.com/w/images/a/a3/TF2_Dustbowl_Map.png
So what’s changed? Why is it hard to make friends in games again? I think there’s a couple forces at play here. The first, I think, is a doubling down on hardcore competition as the only experience, even outside of ranked modes. With it, the stakes of games got higher, and the tension ramped, and it became harder to just have a casual conversation. If each and every game feels like something is at stake, then the games encourage you not to chatter. A game constantly awarding or shaming you for your performance, is a game without a lot of room to breathe. I love a good and healthy round of competition, but when it’s the only experience getting pushed, it can get really overbearing.
Another factor I think played a big part, is that the team shooter genre grew massively. The biggest shooters become almost synonymous with video games in general. And popularity on its own isn’t a problem (although it *can* make it harder to compete in a saturated market). But the popularity and that drive to grow even bigger caused these games to change in a few ways. At those extreme budgets and scales, and in an effort to reach an even bigger audience, these games started to shave off any friction. Instead of a server browser, which takes some time and decision making to navigate, you got quickplay. Games shaved away at downtime, where you used to be able to socialize while nothing important happened. One of the last sources of friction remaining in some games was other players. So some games even started to shave away at social features, taking away your mics, and reducing the amount of social interaction. It’s a lot harder to flame someone on mic if there’s no mics, right? And so a lot of team shooters started to feel almost hollow to me, surrounded by other real people, yet anti-social and isolated.
And thus, people stopped making the team shooters I loved, where I could hang out and chat, while still having a great time playing. In its place you certainly got some very interesting ideas. The vast world of co-op games is rich with games to play with your existing friends. As are the worlds of Battle Royales and extraction shooters. There's been a shift from making friends, to supporting small pre-existing groups. The emphasis moved to cooperation against increasingly depersonalized enemies. But... it's not what I love. It's not what I want to make. There has to be a different path forward.
Stars of Icarus is my attempt to crack the problem, by relying on the lessons of so many games before, but also relying on what made Guns of Icarus such an amazing place as well. So let's figure out how we get there.
Indie, Community First Development
Our first opportunity is simply that we’re an indie studio. We’re making a more niche game, for a focused audience. We don’t have to shave away every interesting edge. And we get to take some risks that we just couldn’t without a ton of investors peeking over our shoulders. (Not that we aren’t pretty deeply invested in this project ourselves!) I wish we saw more indie development in the PvP space, but it’s a tricky place to be. We’re lucky to have over a decade of development and experience with multiplayer, and access to cutting edge technology and tools that are making it possible for us to build this game. I wish every indie dev team had a shortcut to good PvP tooling and experience, because I'm sure there would be an endless number of the kinds of games I love! But we’ve got a shot to take real risks in PvP, so we’re happy to take on the challenge.
Now let's get specific, what do we get to do with this flexibility? First, let’s look at one of those first things to go, community servers. Community servers immediately bring focus to a different way of solving multiplayer problems. By letting players themselves craft spaces, they get to build strong, long running communities focused on common interests. Letting players setup their own spaces and expectations as a persistent place means other players can come back, they can find people with the same interests and sensibilities. It also empowers players to moderate spaces for their own needs and own communities, rather than us the developers trying to craft and enforce an out of context one size fits all policy. So let’s let our players build their own communities!
Hey guys, anyone know how to prevent my server from breaking up on re-entry?
Looking forward a bit to what modern games get right, we find a useful construct in “Ranked Competitive” modes. I mentioned a bit how *forced* competitive drive can be harmful to games, but that doesn't mean you can’t do a ton to make a good experience for players that want to chase rank, and take the game more seriously. Giving a specific space for competitive play sets a strong expectation on when it’s appropriate to tune down the chatter and turn up the intensity. Where I think this falls flat in some modern games, is that the opposite doesn’t exist. Many casual queues are simply “ranked lite”, with no real difference in gameplay, community, or expectations. We want both, and we want it to be clear what you’re getting.
And so that’s our new split, a community focused and community run classic server experience, and a modern and competitive ranked experience. But that’s still just a piece of the design puzzle. The game itself has to support those ambitions. Which is why we’ve been working on, and testing in our alpha, the Bounty gamemode. In Bounty, the value the enemy earns for killing you goes up and down based on your own kills, incentivizing teams to target better players, and spend less time killing newer players. It’s a great fit for more friendly and relaxed communities, and for drop in and drop out server gameplay. We still plan on showing off our classic Team Deathmatch in our ranked mode, where it’s a better match for the intensity. We hope bounty mode helps smooth out the experience of joining a server with a big range of skills, and have it be less intimidating, more fair, and more fun for everyone. Of course, these are your servers, and if you want to go back to classic deathmatch, or other gamemodes we’re experimenting with, feel free!
These server and gameplay decisions are also connected to our new ship sizes. While we wanted to support smaller ships from the very start of the project, we’ve been factoring it into our decision making around match flow from the very beginning. Smaller ships make drop in and drop out servers much more viable. If we had a different system of ships, we’d likely have come to a different solution. But instead, we’re leaning into the opportunities that some game design decisions have enabled. It’s also influencing some decisions around ranked matchmaking, and how a range from solo players to full parties queue into ranked matches. We’re still working on a few details of ranked flow that we hope we can show off in a future test before release.
The Elements of Good PvP
And in a lot of words, that’s the opportunity. So let’s talk about what goes into building a great PvP game. I think what you need is pretty straightforward. It needs to be: Balanced, Fair, and Deep. Let’s define each of those, and break down the consequences and constraints.
Balance
For a game to be **balanced**, in short, it means that players attempting to win must take risks that can be exploited. To win a game you **must** gain some sort of advantage on an enemy. But gaining that advantage must also give you a weakness, something that can be exploited. A classic example is a sniper rifle, giving you an instant kill option at long range, but leaving you unable to react properly if an enemy gets too close.
Balance is both holistic, and asymmetric. That is to say you can’t just compare 2 numbers to say a weapon is balanced. A gun that deals 1 billion damage sounds better than a gun that deals 5, but if it takes 20 minutes to charge a billion damage shot, you might change your mind. Those advantages and disadvantages can be in nearly any part of the gameplay of the game, and so balance can never be a purely numeric analysis. You have to look at how all the elements interact, and if the theory actually works out in practice.
Balance isn’t just stats, but stats are one of the most important balance tools.
And lastly, balance shouldn’t lock you out from winning a game before you’ve even gotten into the match. If you’ve picked a reasonable loadout, you should have a way to victory against your opponent. A well balanced game will make many strategies valid, even if they require more difficult skills, better decision making, or proper discernment of the enemy strategy. Selecting an extreme strategy and loadout should certainly give you a large advantage if you can execute it, but equally a large disadvantage that can be even more easily exploited. Good balance should put the onus of complex execution on the team that’s chosen to take the risk.
Fairness
For a game to be **fair** I mean that in the big picture players have access to the same advantages as everyone else. Another term might be equity. We want everyone to be on an even playing field. A fair game is one where the players win based on the decisions they make, and the skill and experience they use during the match. In practice, that means we want to avoid doing a couple things.
To remain fair, we can’t be selling players advantages and options that other players can’t access. You’ve bought the game, it would be unfair to fight others that have paid more to do things you can’t. Even if you can buy options that are *balanced*, and don’t let you win more often, not having access to the same options isn’t fair. You simply don’t have the same strategic options as other people.
Cool sunglasses aren’t a tactical advantage… but they make me feel tactical
Another area where fairness comes into play as well is matchmaking. Bad matchmaking can become unfair because you’re pitting players against each other with simply no chance of victory. Although players in theory have access to the same tools, in practice it takes time and experience to build those skills, and good matchmaking should work to mitigate those knowledge gaps. In areas where we don’t have matchmaking, like on community servers, we can use design and mechanics like our Bounty mode to even the playing field in different ways. We can work to achieve a fair feeling even in an uneven match. In competitive matchmaking, Bounty mode would feel unfair, because it gives comeback mechanics that can lead to unexpected swings in score. It’s important to match the tools you use to achieve fairness, to the context you’re using it in.
Now, my last opinion on fairness might be a little more controversial. Personally, I believe that a primarily PvP game shouldn’t feature progression unlocks that impact gameplay. It simply accentuates the uneven playing floor new players are already on. I understand the desire to simplify the game for new players, but I think it does a huge disservice to those players. Instead of being able to learn the game at their own pace, and follow the advice of newer players and guides on how to counter enemy strategies, they are instead encouraged to try out new options at an arbitrary pace that does little to actually teach them how to make critical decisions. I find PvP games that do this massively frustrating personally, because they’re preventing me from trying things I find interesting. Even more cynically, some of these games feel like they’re trying to string my interest along instead of providing me with actual depth that keeps me interested in the long term. So, what *is* that depth I’m looking for?
Depth
Depth is the ability to have multiple valid strategic options, and for strategic choices themselves to have nuance and options. You want there to be multiple, balanced, interesting options for defeating your enemies, and also in the counterplay against your enemy strategies. You also want your options and strategies to be interesting to master in themselves. In a deep game, you can spend your whole time on just a small set of the game, and become a great player just mastering one small segment, or spend your time learning the upsides and downsides of all your options.
Now there’s plenty of great singleplayer games with depth, and many games don’t need depth to be great, but depth is important because of how it reinforces both balance and fairness. A balanced game without depth gets boring and one note, because you aren’t making interesting choices, you’re just reacting to your opponents. A balanced game with depth lets you change your strategy to win, taking different options and a different gameplan, or it lets you change your tactics, making smarter decisions with your mastery of the game to win a fight, even with a weaker matchup.
Similarly, a fair game without depth becomes a stagnant and stale experience. Since we choose not to drive long term interest with buying or unlocking more content, we have to make sure to give you enough content and interest in that content to stick with it for a long time. A fair PvP game also reinforces depth in the other direction. Having opponents with a large variety of options means you get to test your choices against all the possible choices and playstyles your enemies bring to bear. A game where your opponent has less options, is a less deep game for you!
Now, that covers some of those key design principles, but there’s one big topic still haunting a lot of PvP games, that has more to do with game design than you might expect.
Toxicity and Game Design
One thing I’ve seen drive people out of PvP games more than almost anything else, is toxicity. At first blush, I don’t think most people would categorize toxicity as a game design issue. You would more likely call it a player issue, a community management issue, or write off competition as inherently toxic. And it’s true that individual problem players, bad community management, and the pressure of competition can contribute. But game design is all about which feelings and behaviors you’re amplifying, which means toxic behaviors can absolutely be amplified by design choices. In my experience, the key emotion that underlies a lot of toxic behavior in otherwise friendly players is frustration. Feeling totally powerless and unable to do anything about your situation makes you a lot more likely to lash out and look for ways to blame others.
I’ve mentioned before that we’re designing some changes intentionally for more casual modes, which certainly helps make a more explicitly relaxed atmosphere in some situations, but even in our most competitive modes there’s some fundamental elements of PvP game design that I think have some big effects here too. I want to talk a little more about the dangers of power fantasy design, and weakest link teamplay.
Avoiding Power Fantasy
Power Fantasy design is a classic design tool for games. A power fantasy in a game is where the player gets to be significantly more powerful than their enemies. Sometimes this is a limited experience, a power star in a Mario game, or the supercharged gravity gun at the end of Half Life 2. Sometimes the entire game is a power fantasy, like the Just Cause games. But appealing to power fantasy in a PvP game can be very risky. First and most obviously, you don’t win all your matches! If the game is constantly trying to deliver on power fantasy, and you’re still losing, you’re just in a dissonant design space that is going to fail to achieve that fantasy. And even if you scale it down to just heavy power fantasy moments for everyone, you have to be very careful on how those power moments affect the enemy players.
Everything you let a player do to an enemy, is something that can’t simply be miserable for players on the other side. Pressing the “become immortal and kill everyone” button might be really fun! But is getting killed by someone because they pressed that button fun? Probably not! It’s probably driving that frustration that turns toxic. So, maybe you make that ultimate button have some downsides? Maybe you make it so an enemy can counter it, cancel its effects, and give you some control over your situation. But now, you’ve added frustration elsewhere in the game too! If a player charges up their ultimate all game, and it gets cancelled, they don’t even get the power fantasy moment, they just get disappointment and frustration! With power fantasy mechanics in PvP, it’s really hard to have your cake and eat it too.
Weakest Link Teamplay
Now, on the other end of the power curve, is a design I like to call “weakest link teamplay”. When designing teamplay, it’s easy to push it to an extreme, where the only way to succeed is through every single player succeeding at their job. And that can certainly be rewarding and fun. Guns of Icarus could get pretty close to that level of teamwork in competitive play. But that kind of design can also open up a clearly correct, and clearly unfun strategy to win: kill the worst player, repeatedly. If all you have to do is take out one enemy to make their team fall apart, then it’s the right strategy. And if you’re not really careful in that design space, that’s all that’s going to be happening all game. And that’s going to be frustrating for almost everyone! Your weak link isn’t going to radically increase their skill level throughout the course of the game, but it is, factually, that player’s fault that the team is losing. And it can be very difficult, or downright detrimental, to try and divert resources to defending your worse players. And, again, it’s a team game, so you *should* be communicating to your teammates and telling them what your team needs to improve. But in the case of a weakest link design, that means a lot of negative feedback on already overwhelmed players. Sounds like a recipe for even more frustration and toxicity to me.
As I talked about in one of our first dev logs, one of my biggest goals for Stars of Icarus is to take a different approach to teamwork. I want well executed teamwork to enable your best players into accomplishing more. The fantasy isn’t one of individual, unstoppable power, but of a struggle to bring together just the right ingredients to succeed. And I want that to be fun, even if it doesn’t always bring you victory. Because working together is fun. Struggling against a real opponent with real weaknesses to uncover, rather than just one weak player, is an experience that’s extremely rewarding.
Conclusion
Looking back at the team shooters I’ve really loved in the past through these lenses has been really interesting. Looking at my playtime on Steam, I’ve been drawn to games where a good player, and good teamwork, can really elevate a team, but never become unstoppable. I love games where I can experiment with all my options up front, and jump in a server to talk to other people about my strategy. I love games where a losing match can be more fun than a winning one, because the mechanics are enjoyable, and the company is even better. But I’ve been pushed away from games where singular bad players can have a disproportionate impact on a team’s performance, and your teammates are frustrated about it. I’m frustrated when games are unfair and I’m getting beaten by options I’ve never been able to try myself, and have no counters for. The design, the community, the fun times you have, are all deeply connected. To get any of it right, you need to do all of it right together.
So, we’re trying to build… all that! A great PvP experience. Balanced, Fair, and Deep. With community servers and competitive queues. We’re taking our unique crew gameplay and making sure it supports all those goals. And we’re hoping it all works together to make a game that brings players together. Because social PvP games are great, we want more of them, and we’ve thought long and hard about how to do it right.
Thanks for taking the time to read!
Matthew
For the Muse Games Team