Finding Agility in the Random

Speaking at Montreal Games Summit, the Flagship Studios director of technology Tyler Thompson discussed the advantages of using algorithms over hard-coding.

“All RPGs are a little random,” Thompson began, explaining, “You can’t imagine a bunch of guys getting together to play D&D without using dice.” As almost every RPG uses some basics, such as random damage ranges on items/spells/skills, or random selection of item drops, it’s worth asking — why do players like it?

“First, it kind of fits into a gambling mentality,” said Thompson. “Random combat is similar to craps or roulette, where you take your chance and see what happens. Randomness can create excitement — a weak character could randomly manage to beat a much stronger character, and vice versa.”

The downside? Said Thompson, “Too much randomness can be frustrating – if even the lowliest zombie could kill a level 50 character with a critical hit, that’s not fun.”

Random item drops, he explained, are more like a slot machine wherein every, say, 3 or 4 seconds, the player has a chance to get lucky. “This is a very important part of slot machines. I remember reading that somewhere, maybe Denmark, the government discussed for something like 10 hours if the gap between pulls should be three and a half seconds or six seconds,” continued Thompson.

“Now, the drive in a slot machine is for ‘˜the big win’ — but a lot of things we do include the ‘almost win,'” Thompson said. “If you see on a slot machine that the big win is 7777, and you get three sevens and half of a seven, you still get excited and it drives you to continue.)

He described how in Hellgate: London, players can find (legendary) items which contain multiple random (and good) attributes. Getting one could be a big win if it suits the player’s character well, or an (almost win) — it doesn’t, but the player still got a legendary item.

He went on to argue that randomness gives a unique experience: (You can tell stories to your friends, because they won’t have experienced things in exactly the same way, and if your items are random and unique, you will take a greater pride in them.”

Another reason is replayability, not only allowing but encouraging the player to play the game over and over again, to gain a different perspective and experience each time.

I’m not so sure myself. Sure, it works fine for action RPGs, but when you’re talking cRPG, carefully plotted branching gameplay tends to work better than a bunch of random levels.

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