Deadlock: Silhouettes and Emotional State

Okay… I’ll admit ahead of time that the writing of this blog post got away from me a bit, but I hope you’ll stick around to the end.

I think that part of what I’m trying to wrap my head around, in terms of why I don’t like Deadlock’s design as it is, is that it violates the “Unique Silhouette” mechanism made popular by Team Fortress 2 (notably, a Valve project)–not that it fails to adhere to its specific tenets, but (I believe) it generally misunderstands, and violates the principle or spirit of the design. Generally the point of that mechanism is that you can recognize what a character is at a glance, and use that to inform your decision making.

MOBAs, and the Real Time Strategy games that they were originally based on, generally embrace hidden information, and that’s equally valid. Units and characters in these games may be recognizable, but they also have unknown upgrades–upgrades that you can estimate, but not know. This transfers into Deadlock’s wide variety of purchasable upgrades and abilities; I think that it’s fair to say that you no longer know enough about your enemy by seeing their character model to know how to deal with them.

Now, to a certain extent, that’s… probably completely fine. Maybe even some people appreciate games designed that way, instead of ones where they’re supposed to figure things out by looking. But I think part of the reason why I continue to prefer my own version of a similar design is that the Deadlock visual language provides no mechanism onto which you can graft visible or audible cues about how a character’s abilities have progressed. Even if you expect the game design overall to still contain hidden information, or for the information to be generally too complex to be conveyed with simple visuals, or if you think the general aesthetic is better kept stoic and serious… there’s still a difference in the game design and its overall implicit structure based on whether or not the game data can be represented and simply isn’t, or whether it can’t be.

I acknowledge that the game is still in its earliest design iteration, and I know that I’m essentially arguing that the early, temporary mechanisms are bad. But… they do bother me. I argued in my post about Overwatch’s Sombra overhaul that the core of every multiplayer game is rotten–that fundamentally the idea of death being non-canonical, something that only barely punishes you, the player, encourages behavior that makes no sense in-world. The more a game shows that it is meaningless and detached from reality, the harder it is for any lifelike skin to be added on top of it.

I think that may be part of why Battle Royale, as a genre, did relatively well in the current game design era. In a world where many multiplayer games make no effort to provide any consequences, Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds created a very simple and robust narrative through-line: canonically speaking, everyone only dies once. If you shoot your shot and fail, then it’s over for you. Likewise, scavenging weapons and upgrades from a battleground that was clearly set up for the purpose… however disturbing the narrative through-line might be, of one survivor in a pool of a hundred, it still had a ludonarrative resonance that few other games had. And the takeoffs since then, like Fortnite, have tried to add “fun” to that design without ruining the core of it.

Now… because MOBAs as a tradition are a manipulation of real-time strategy, that informs its fundamental design. The lane mobs that are a trademark of the genre represent common soldiers: fundamentally disposable and replaceable, sent on a mission with an absolute certainty of death–a cynical take on the use of soldiers in war, but not an unwarranted one. The player-controlled characters, the “heroes” of the game, are the few people who can make a difference in the overall war–whether you consider that to be generals, super-soldiers, or just the lucky and elite few. Whether you agree with the great man theory of history in general, it’s an appropriate basis for a game, because it’s much easier to have a few important characters and a lot of chaff than it is to have a whole load of important people, any or all of whom could be the key player that determines the outcome. A design with too much chaos doesn’t feel like a “game” that you can win, so much as gambling on which side you chose (or were placed on) at the beginning.

But team-based games, in general, deny that a single person is the one to decide everything, without falling into such chaos. One of several problems with Deadlock as a design is that it doesn’t have much in it to make each side’s “great men” work together as a team.

In that sense, fundamentally, Overwatch beats it as a design. I’m not a Blizzard apologist–I’m not arguing for the company or the current dev team–but the game design tackled that problem from the beginning. From the earliest versions of the game, they were trying to find a way to make disparate characters that were nothing like one another, each seriously flawed in their own ways, work together for a common purpose–but making that narrative occur with game mechanics, not by writer’s fiat. (Overwatch 2, in my opinion, utterly and completely fails to live up to this legacy, but that’s a separate argument.)

In any game, ultimately, you’re looking for ways to make players’ choices feel important, and in a team-based game specifically, the currency you have to work with isn’t merely winning or losing in the overall game–it’s how players feel about themselves, their teammates, and how the events all came together in the end. The narrative that players have in their head matters–there can be an easy narrative in single-player games, because it’s you against the system. Even then… the game can make it hard, by having systems that don’t …

Shit, this is emotional state all over again, isn’t it? I genuinely didn’t intend for this blog post to go in this direction when I started writing it. Took me by surprise, even. I should explain.

In my blog post about Starbound I wrote about the difference between Starbound and Terraria being about how the former failed to live up to its spiritual predecessor by misunderstanding what made it interesting, and failing to add what I termed “emotional state” to the game–data and systems that demonstrate for the player whether they are being successful or not. Deadlock does have emotional state–at least as much as MOBAs in general. The irreversible destruction of the enemy’s defenses, and your own ability to prevent the same on your side, plus the general emotional state that comes with multiplayer games: not only winning, but getting revenge, overcoming long odds, preventing disaster, working together, and so on.

But a game’s systems either work with the player or against them, in terms of making the player aware of their current progress. Hidden information is an entirely valid design choice–but there’s a difference between choosing to hide information, and acting like it doesn’t matter what that hidden information is. If you want the player to feel like they’re progressing, then on a fundamental level, they should be progressing, and the game should make it as obvious as possible, or at the very least, have that information packaged and ready to go, even if the player has to fight to reveal it. Ideally, the internal state and its representation as presented to the player should resonate–this is ludo-narrative synergy, even in a game design without an explicit narrative.

This brings us back to the “Unique sihouette” mechanism, and how Deadlock violates it in spirit. Characters having a unique silhouette is a mechanism to inform the player’s decisions–a reconnaissance ability, cleverly integrated into the game’s fundamental design. Recon abilities exist to reveal important details–and telling one player, or player character, apart from another at a glance is arguably one of the most crucial ones. But the character’s form tells you much more about their abilities at the beginning of the round, compared to the end–this “recon” ability is quickly reduced to nothing more than being able to keep track of a specific player, whether enemy or ally. All the rest–keeping track of what abilities they have unlocked, what upgrades they’ve purchased, how powerful they are–that’s all on the player to keep track of.

Again–the game is in an early state. What I’m saying isn’t that the design is awful and needs to be condemned–but rather, that something should exist in its finished state. It needs a language to convey internal information at a glance. Something similar in spirit to Team Fortress 2’s unique silhouette mechanism, but which represents the current state of a character, not merely their initial state. Something that is more useful in the late-game than merely a way to tell which player you’re looking at.

My argument in my previous blog post–the alternate design that I have in my head–that’s all me theorizing about how to do, essentially, that. It’s… essentially a thesis, about how to add that emotional state to a design in an elegant fashion. I didn’t think of it in those terms at the time–but this question of emotional state is basically the same one I’ve been wrestling with for a while.

It’s… not, specifically, any kind of condemnation of the design of Deadlock. I’m an idealist, which makes it easy for me to criticise others. I can always say that people should live up to ideals, conform to designs, rules. I… try not to let that cause me to lose perspective. Deadlock as it is today is already far better than I could design on my own.

I just wish I could be a part of something similar.