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S3 Ep228: VGBD - Emergent Gameplay
90 Plays3 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they break down "playing it wrong" in this week's episode!
Intro:
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Intro:
- Shovel Knight Dig - Spore Judgment (Mushroom Mines)
- Kingdom Hearts - Dearly Beloved (NTSC Version)
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:35
Speaker
How's it going everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake, and I'm joined by my co-host as always Dave. How's it going tonight Dave?
00:00:43
Speaker
All these questions Questions need to have answers. Don't they Jake? No, they don't it's one of the purposes of life is solving these mysteries Anyway, how are you doing?
Life's Mysteries and Hypothetical Realities
00:00:54
Speaker
I mean, that's a little If the purpose of life is to solve the mysteries and they don't have answer I have answers that does say something about life mysteries about life by asking these questions Okay. Oh the first okay. Gotcha the first one
00:01:08
Speaker
I'm doing pretty well. I'm doing pretty well. It is a reasonable day. I can move my microphone up slightly so I don't have to like slouch over, go full, no stridamus. No stridam, I guess is the one, but you know what I'm going for. Yeah, doing well.
00:01:27
Speaker
Good. That's good to hear. This is why it takes me so long to make it through a drive-thru or something. They're just like, good afternoon. How are you doing? Or whatever. I'm just like, well, let me tell you. First, let me fix my posture. Sit up straight in the seat.
00:01:47
Speaker
I love when you know somebody's going to start to like, not pop off, but kind of like hold court because they adjust their posture entirely. They're like, all right, so there I was. And they have their hands up and everything. I guess it's gonna be a longer story than I would like. You just accidentally ask something about some, you ask someone about something that they're actually interested in and you're like, okay, I'm aboard the train now.
00:02:10
Speaker
That's what I like to do when I meet new people. I'm like, what do you like? Let's talk about anything but that. Regardless of what you say, regardless of what they respond with, you're just like, I hate that. And then just continue with the same level of exuberance, talking about something different. Um, yeah, that might be, that might be misanthropy. Probably.
00:02:35
Speaker
It's funny, like a jokey jokey context. I love those fun hypotheticals. You're like, and then this thing happens. He heat, but then never actually in real life. No, yes. Yeah. I mean, honestly.
00:02:50
Speaker
It's mostly mostly hypotheticals at this point. It's very, very little real life. Almost all of this is hypothetical. Or it's last Thursday ism, if you're a last Thursday ist. It's all part of the simulation anyway, so. Yeah.
00:03:11
Speaker
Anyways, I don't know what we talked about. Um, I guess what last time we talked about religion and we've definitely talked about politics.
Social Dynamics and 'Friends of the Show' Analogies
00:03:20
Speaker
We've talked about social situations. We've talked about shows.
00:03:26
Speaker
Let's touch back on social situations. What exactly are they? They've heard about these. Yeah, the frequency is increasing a bit more this month, honestly.
00:03:41
Speaker
a lot more social situations. We've gotten, obviously, good friend of the show, temporarily. That's a temporary title. Pretty much everyone's friend of the show. A temporary friend of the show. Well, so everyone's friend of the show by nature of it. I think we've literally said like Microsoft was a friend of the show at some point.
00:04:00
Speaker
Um, but good friend of the show was like a temporary spot. You kind of like, it's like the burger burger King paper crown that they like put on your head at your birthday. And then like, you go to walk out and they're like, no, no. Like they run up and they're like, that's not how this works. And then you take the crown off your head and they like throw it into the fryer. And you're like, Oh, it's kind of like that. Um,
00:04:29
Speaker
So no longer holds this esteem title. I actually, I probably should attract that and this hypothetical and this alternate reality that I'm creating in real time. Um, but anyways, it's gonna be landed now. I don't know about the previous, um, due to the, the upcoming, uh, marriage looking thing. Yeah. Good on him.
00:04:53
Speaker
All right. So land it until somebody else takes it. Yes. Call in. We do not perform these services anymore. Well, we will. I mean, depending on location, I might.
Marriage Soundboards and Holiday Gatherings
00:05:07
Speaker
Okay. Been around. Jake has married some people before, so.
00:05:12
Speaker
And honestly, I feel like if listeners in particular wanted us to be involved somehow, we could probably like cut together like a marriage soundboard. We'll get you ordained from like the most absurd online site we could, and then just have like a dual marriage soundboard where people can just like push different buttons for like different parts of the wedding, throw some reactions in there and be like, Oh my gosh, they're married. Um, or like, I now pronounce you and then like, they can just fill in the rest. I think that'd be great.
00:05:44
Speaker
Unfortunately, we have a dated version of the software. Our only options are man and wife. You can double up on man or you can double up on wife. That's true. We'll have to throw in some other sound clips there for you and I apologize. Yeah, I think that'd be a good time. But that's been going on. Get back into raiding and destiny. That's been going on. Got the holiday party coming up.
00:06:14
Speaker
watching a puppy, the holiday party now. I mean, no one's going to make a party for Christmas. Let's be honest. I know we kind of we kind of represented. I thought about this after the previous episode when we were talking about holidays and I kind of made it seem like I was favoring Christmas by being like, oh, yeah, the candy and like some of that stuff. And it's like Halloween's got the decor. No, like Halloween's way further ahead. It's got everything. So it's basically the holiday party. So.
00:06:45
Speaker
I mean, it's the one, one holiday party that I care about. So, I mean, I guess I'm invited to a friends giving or two. But that actually says more about Thanksgiving. Cause it's like, we're not even calling it that anymore. That's how low on the role, like on the totem pole it is. That it's just like, Oh no. I mean, I was just kind of hanging out with friends. It wasn't, it wasn't a Thanksgiving thing. Like I don't do that. Right.
00:07:13
Speaker
We got Wawa Gobblers. We hung out. All right. I had a beer too. Did a shot of cranberry sauce out of somebody's belly butt. It was a fun time, but like, I wouldn't call it a holiday. I like the comedic cut off of like belly button because you definitely just had belly butt. And I know that's not a thing, but it's very funny to me.
00:07:44
Speaker
Sometimes you talk about video games, rarely, you know, if the mood strikes. How about you get stricken by this mood? I hope I edit that in to sound very, very convincing.
00:07:59
Speaker
Uh-huh. Yeah, I hope so, because that was just silence. So, I don't know. Did you not hear me say kapow? It was mostly kapow. I was covering for you, because if you said that you edited it in, the way I thought you were playing that off was you were pretending that the sound you just made would be part of the edit.
00:08:22
Speaker
And I was like, okay, well, in that case, I'll pretend you didn't make a sound, acknowledge that so that people would believe the sound that was there was the one that you edited in. I was trying to back you up. I'll edit that in as well. Don't worry about it. Okay, good.
00:08:44
Speaker
Anyways, I don't know. We talk about various things.
The Art of Emergent Gameplay
00:08:47
Speaker
One of those is video game breakdown, where we talk about the concepts in a game. It's been a hot minute since we did one. I don't recall what the last one was. Probably Novus or something. But this one... That sounds right. Yeah, that's my guess. That's my guess. This one is emergent gameplay, which, much like a beast rising from the depths,
00:09:12
Speaker
Comes right at you. It makes you play the game different. There you go. The analogy fell apart, but.
00:09:20
Speaker
Have you ever been playing a raft and then I see these changes how you play the game? Yeah. So with a top level definition of emerging gameplay, because every time we have this conversation off, fuck. Every time that we've had this conversation off podcast, my brain kind of makes a vague assumption that I'm like, eh. And never quite exactly lands. So for those who are not aware, like myself most times,
00:09:47
Speaker
Emerging gameplay is where some feature or interaction in a game ends up changing the gameplay or enabling for different gameplay. One example might be you find a glitch in a game. So like bunny hopping in Unreal Tournament. Right.
00:10:09
Speaker
So like custom games have spun off of that. It's like just bunny hot mode using that. Um, or it might be in something that's more of like an open world game. And my go-to is always metal gear solid five, where you have so many tools at your disposal in a very open space. How do you want to approach the situation? Do you want to snipe a mile back? Do you want to run in there with your dog who has a knife and slits people's throats? Do you want to be sneaky, beaky and Fulton, everybody out? Do you want to drop a tank console? Like it's all up to you. Um,
00:10:37
Speaker
But I'd say that those are the two big points of emerging gameplay. That one's emerging gear play in particular, if it's in the MGS universe. I do want to, I do want to, we can talk, we'll talk in a vortex probably of concepts here. But for the second one, it's kind of interesting, I think, to hone in on because open world definitely can have emerging gameplay scenarios, but
00:11:01
Speaker
A lot of that comes down to choice. And that's going to be reflected in some other genres we cover. Emergent gameplay is often defined by, OK, the player took all of these inputs about the scenario. They're surrounded. There's an explosive barrel. And they have the option to move it around freeform. Emergent gameplay is the player making the decision to pick it up, throw it, and then shoot it.
00:11:30
Speaker
Bulletstorm actually remember the name of that now that would be a type of type of game where I think it's almost like Not emergent to me, even though it has all of those aspects Because it's so produced it's over produced to the point where it's like
00:11:46
Speaker
it's expected that you're chaining all these kills and things like that together. Whereas a good old example of emerging gameplay is it feels like you broke the system in some way to some desirable outcome, hopefully desirable.
00:12:04
Speaker
And eventually a lot of this episode is going to be discussing what emerging gameplay is. Yeah. Mm hmm. Because you can make arguments, different cases, because I was watching somebody with like a YouTube hypothetical video talk about it. And he said, basically, this is the guy who was talking about some of the open world stuff. Yeah. But it's allowing for player agency to kind of dictate where the game goes. OK. So obviously, if a game is super linear, you don't really have options.
00:12:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of hard to argue that it has emerging gameplay as a part of it. But the more tools or routes you give a player, they kind of have the option to make their own choices and make it like a different for each time they play through or their experience would be different from somebody else experience if they got the same game. Yes.
00:12:55
Speaker
As you were describing that, I think it helped me hone in on my definition. Something I don't consider emergent gameplay is someone's presented with like a binary choice. Say you're playing like Mass Effect and it's like save the alien or like harvest the alien for Adam. That's, that's Bioshock. Um, but like, uh, that's not emergent gameplay. That's just a decision tree.
00:13:22
Speaker
It needs to be a little bit more complex for me to think that there's more factors at play. It has to be more of a player decision to do something instead of the developer holding up two options. Because that's... I don't know. I don't mean to say that's bad. Binary choices are fine too. And they can definitely, especially slowing it down and making it a meaningful choice, that can be a big moment in a game.
00:13:52
Speaker
But emerging gameplay is much more the player is crafting their own experience, to me at least. Yes. One good example I came across was Thief. Remember the Thief games? One of my favorite weapon options in that game is the Moss Arrow. So costs way too much all the fucking time. But you can shoot Moss Arrow on the ground and it kind of expands like this pile of moss.
00:14:19
Speaker
And when you walk over it, you are dead silent because I don't know if you ever heard somebody walking on moss, but you've never heard somebody walking on moss. So it's always used as a stealth option. But if you're more of a depraved individual, you can shoot a moss arrow into somebody's face and then the moss grows and it chokes them out because have you ever heard somebody breathe through moss? No, you haven't. Also quiet.
00:14:46
Speaker
And you walk on their very silent body. But that's like a thing where you have a tool, but you have options to use it in multiple ways. In the same way, you could use an arrow to shoot somebody or shoot it off of something metal to create a sound, thus creating a diversion or distraction.
00:15:07
Speaker
I think the thief is a strong example because there could be multiple things at play that really drive drives home. Like if this was to isolate the definition, I guess, if this was like shoot man in the face or shoot the ground simulator, that's not emerging gameplay. But they've put you in scenarios where it's like a guard is approaching. Do you shoot the ground behind you and scurry away a little bit quicker to try to escape silently?
00:15:37
Speaker
Do you kind of panic and you're like, okay, well, this is supposed to be a no kill run and shoot him in the face. Like that is, that is emergent gameplay. It's like a, a conflux of scenarios that cause you to make a decision. So I think thief is a great example because.
00:15:58
Speaker
Everyone wants it to go super smoothly, and then the no detection. And the game puts tension on you by putting you more into scenarios where maybe it doesn't go perfectly. How do you recover now, right? Like that recovery stage where it's not like a payday to pre-planning, right? Where it's like, OK, we've got it all here. We put the body bags here. We'll get the key card here. We'll get the extra drop here.
00:16:25
Speaker
It's not really emergent unless you had to make a choice along the way to recover, to me at least. With thief though, I remember you could always sprint away and enough for them to be like, Oh, I guess he's dead. I don't get paid enough for this shit. And then you kind of be like, man, fuck it. I'm going back to my patrol route. No one can run 15 seconds and not drop dead. They have my methodology of exercise. I appreciate that. Yeah.
00:16:55
Speaker
But in like a similar vein, I know we mentioned MGS five. I feel like with that, like there are so many options for how you approach it. Oh, yeah. That can almost be argued. It's kind of similar to Skyrim where like, oh, you have to defeat the boss. Do you use magic to use this weapon, use that weapon and how different is each thing actually?
00:17:17
Speaker
But one thing I remember specifically about MGS5 is between Dunkey's multiple videos on it, between when I played it, between when other people played it, we talked about it. It's always just like, hey, did you ever try this dumb thing? Or you just watch the hand of Jehudi, you know, rocket punch off and like hit people.
00:17:37
Speaker
And just giving you that dumb option makes you want to try it. So you will try and almost choose a very narrow option of approach because you're like, oh, I have to try this one thing. And then it usually goes horribly because you've never used it before. And then how do you recover from the situation? Do you run away? Do you try and kill everybody? Do you lose?
00:17:59
Speaker
There was a I'm glad you mentioned donkey because that was literally I was thinking of one particular scene from from the clip he did on that, which was something I didn't even know was possible in game, which is something that I think is a great indication of emergent gameplay.
00:18:15
Speaker
is he surrounded an enemy with snake decoys. And they were just saying like, you're pretty good, you're pretty good. And he was just sitting down here, he was like prone, like within sight, basically. But the AI is programmed not to really know which one's real if there's decoys in play. So the guys just like running around like meleeing these balloon snakes that are surrounding him.
00:18:39
Speaker
And he's just like freaking out and they're just saying, you're pretty good. You're pretty good. And it's like it's freaking amazing or like sledding down the sand and the cardboard box like on a hill or something like that, like. Stuff I never thought to do completely possible because they're like, what if someone tries this? Oh, yeah, we should put it in. And that's like the best type of play box or play box sandbox for that type of game.
00:19:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's always nice when you as a player have like a, not a harebrained idea, but would it be cool if X interact with X in a certain way? And then it does. I know like a very common thing in shooters is anytime that you are shooting the floor or the ground, you're like, I want to see bullet marks. I want to know that this is interacting in some degree.
00:19:27
Speaker
Or if you're in Overwatch and you're waiting on attack, you get to shoot some things and break them or knock them over. You're like, okay, I'm interacting with things. I'm glad the game's accounted for that in my OCD boredom. So when you get to do other things like, oh, if I put a fire arrow here, will this set fire to stuff? Will it cause an explosion?
00:19:49
Speaker
All that stuff really becomes fun because it takes it out of the theoretical, wouldn't it be cool if, into, oh, that's an option I have to now utilize. Absolutely. Into the realm of possible tools.
00:20:03
Speaker
Yeah. The world, the world feels better. Games will also always feel more immersive if it reacts to your actions. Right. If I were to take like a kind of bad example, I think like, like mass effects, going back to that for a second, not actually Bioshock this time, like in the third game, they're like, cause you can import your save across all of them. Uh, you start to get some of the consequences in quotes. I'm putting this in massive quotes. You can't see it, but just absolutely gigantic quotes.
00:20:32
Speaker
consequences of your actions. And there are some real ones, you know, your, your, your crew might not be the same people you started with, you know, depending on choices, but you also just get like messages in your computer terminal. They're just like, Hey, thanks for saving me to get you two games ago. Or like, ah, you suck. You killed my brother two games ago. Right? Like, and that I, I had no attachment to that whatsoever. But like contrast that to something like,
00:21:00
Speaker
uh, like breath of the wild, just trying random crap and then being amazed when it worked. It's just like, Oh geez, I'll freeze to death in this area. And I don't have any warm clothes.
00:21:15
Speaker
I'm gonna catch myself on fire and just literally burn through my own health for a period of time to see if it resets my permafrost counter or whatever. My frost counter literally works. Good idea? No. Better ideas out there? 100%. Don't do that. But it works and you can try it.
00:21:33
Speaker
Yeah. And so many of the things in Zelda, cause it's big Zelda sandbox. A lot of those tools are like, Hey, in this one dungeon, here's how you solve this puzzle. Like it's meant to be used outside, but then how you use it really varies. Like do you use the thing to like pick it up and drop a boulder down a hill to take out an encampment? Do you freeze a box and hit it multiple times, then launch across the map? Uh-huh. Speedrun strats have come out of this stuff. Um, yeah.
00:22:03
Speaker
But it's all about how you're using the tools that you're given and the more option you have and the more feasible interactability versus just, Oh, I can do that thing. And it doesn't really have any effect with anything else. I think your tools need to have interactions with the environment.
00:22:22
Speaker
to some useful degree to really get you in that direction. Yeah. And you feel the absence of it. I think like for how cool it feels when you try something and it works out because it seems logical that it should work out, I feel it's even more detrimental to a game when that isn't present. Right. It's like, what if you were freezing in an area and you were supposed to have warm weather clothes and you're like,
00:22:50
Speaker
That's it. I'm going to run across a bonfire and maybe that'll help me get there. And then you still see the cold debuff ticking down and you're on fire. And you're like, I mean, it's unfortunate because like in my head, it seemed like it would work, but it didn't work here. That feels infinitely worse to me because it makes it seem like your ingenuity is not being rewarded.
00:23:14
Speaker
And that's one of the key things about emerging gameplay. You'll see this like across the entire list is people they either accomplish what the game wants them to do in a novel way or they accomplish something the game very much does not want them to do in a novel way. And various games have different amounts of how much they enable that. But we'll see in some of these examples that
00:23:40
Speaker
It's fun, especially when you get into the social aspect of how people play games differently. I think that's fun. Cue my Elden Ring tangent. But I was going to say really quick, something I always thought of with emerging gameplay is even going back to TF2 days, not even invoking that name, but rocket jumping, for example.
00:24:05
Speaker
I'm sure they had it accounted at some point that people could rocket jump, or maybe it was a bug in another game. It was quick. OK. But having that, oh, it has a knockback radius. Oh, I can knock myself back without dying. OK. So now you have this new platforming mechanic, and you can put it into other games. And you see remnants of that. And back when we did Halo 2, we would always do, we wouldn't always do, but like,
00:24:32
Speaker
even in public maps, have you got like overshield and you're playing pubs? I forget the map, but it's like a small island with like a little bastion tower in the middle. It's very odd. It's one of the DLC maps from the first set. But if you went on to like a little
00:24:48
Speaker
sand shield in the, I don't know what the fuck they're called. It's like a small barrier, but it was like a wall up front and then like a little thing on the back, just to counterbalance it. If you stood on that little stick, shot the wall with a rocket and you had the overshield, you would get yeeted into space. You could go on top of that level and you could snipe people. And it was great fun for me. Um, or if like you saw somebody else are trying to glitch, you're like, nope, shoot him before he does it. Yeah.
00:25:17
Speaker
But it was a nice, diverse way to do it, because it didn't feel like people were cheating, per se. It was a very high-risk, high-reward thing to try and pull off glitches, especially in a pubs map, where if they see you, they're just going to shoot you. But it's just nice to add that option into the mix, because that's what a lot of my gaming became after a point. It's like, oh, I've done Halo 2 multiplayer so much. I just want to hang around with friends and find other glitches we can do.
00:25:46
Speaker
Right. Yeah, that's you've reached like the mastery stage. You're like, I've, I've played the game. I've gotten what I want out of the game. I want more from this game. How far can we take it? And you know, that's, that's really where speed running and things like that come into play. So if you want to see my fan art, it's on.
00:26:04
Speaker
As you were describing that, I just thought of a very, very recent gaming memory. And I'm not sure if you were there for this particular run or not, but we were running. It was Destiny. So dares of eternity. I've seen you do it so many times, Jake. Well, so that one, actually, I wasn't even thinking about that. That one's true. There's a glitch that you can do some moves rapidly, and you just fly forward ridiculously fast. They might have fixed it in the last patch, actually. I haven't tested it yet.
00:26:32
Speaker
But there's also an issue where if you get hit with like a melee attack, and usually this is to your detriment, you just go flying. And it's not really, it has something to do with the interaction with you jumping while it's happening. But anyways, I was in the last area of Dares of Eternity, which is just big boss battle arena, basically.
00:26:54
Speaker
Um, and I get hit with one of these melee attacks and I go like 300 feet up in the air. And as a, as a warlock, I'm just like, okay, I'm immediately gonna like eat my grenade. Basically you don't eat it. You like hold it in your hand until it bursts, but it makes it so you can just like float around kind of like a hovercraft at your current altitude.
00:27:13
Speaker
And I was just like, this is where I live now. And I just told everybody else who was playing with me, like, look up. And I'm just like all the way up here. And I have a rocket launcher. I had yellow horn actually at the time. And I'm just like bombing run basically people on the ground until I until I dropped. And it was it was really after I dropped.
00:27:32
Speaker
It might have been the round after that. Oh, my God. But it was it was really entertaining. And I think in a way I can completely agree with, you know, that that older like Halo, we found a glitch. We're just going to play it out. Right. It doesn't always have to be super advantageous, but it's endlessly novel and it feels good to pull it off.
00:27:54
Speaker
Yeah. Like, I don't know how many glitch videos you've watched in other games. Well, let's again, go back to elder ring as a cheap example. Um, like, Oh, you can kill the spouse bathroom and walk off of an edge. How many times do you try and do that? You're like, Oh my God, it is possible. Yeah. Um, and you might do it just to like cheese or part of like a speed run thing, or maybe you're doing like a low level run or something.
00:28:20
Speaker
I don't know. It's just, it's fun to try those things and realize that it is possible and then go off and do more with it. Cause I feel every time I watch people play games that I'm currently playing or I'm about to play, smash being a good example. I'm like, Oh shit. I didn't realize that interaction was possible. Let me try and use that. Let me put that in the banks.
00:28:43
Speaker
I like this idea of kicking people off ledges is a tried and true staple of video games, I think. But as you're describing that and how you might be able to try it on bosses in Elden Ring, my brain immediately goes all the way back to DS1 and Law Trek, getting the Ring of Favor and Protection FAP.
00:29:06
Speaker
you just kick him. He's standing there, you can talk to him while he's sitting there at Firelink Shrine and you're like, you're a tough enemy. You have these like sword breaker type, like sickle and the sword breaker or something like that weapon that's pretty dangerous to you at low levels. And you have to be like pretty good at the game. So that's not an option I was taking. Or you can kick him repeatedly.
00:29:27
Speaker
towards the direction of the cliff, and as long as you haven't kicked him too many times, he'll fall off the cliff, die, and you automatically get his loot. And that's emergent gameplay right there. Is it the way the developers wanted you to play it? Probably not. Is it something that maybe someone did in QA and they're like, huh,
00:29:49
Speaker
Yeah, sure. Leave it in. You know, there's a good chance. Also an equal chance. No one did it in QA, you know, based off of how DS1 originally launched, but at least for PC.
00:30:01
Speaker
But it's, it feels good to feel like you've gotten one over on the game and that you're helping push it. IGN actually does a, I'm not shilling for them. They don't pay us any money. But they have a sequence where they'll like get a speed runner to do a live speed run of somebody's game and they'll bring the developers in and talk about it at the same time. And I love that.
00:30:29
Speaker
The confusion and astonishment when developers realize like how broken their game really is to these people who are tearing it apart. But the best ones are the people who also like. They don't feel it's offensive, it's more of a. What would be the word they they they appreciate the effort put into figuring it all out.
00:30:54
Speaker
I think for a lot of speed runners, speed runners, it's a passion project of utilizing certain tools in the handbook. Plus honestly, just grinding and figuring some shit out. Cause we're only supposed to be one person who like has spent a ridiculous amount of time to find one dumb thing and then posts on a Wiki for somebody else to use. Um, by the time you've read it as a non-speed runner, you're like, Oh, that's cool.
00:31:21
Speaker
And you might try it yourself, maybe less likely because it's very mechanically nuanced. But I like that it exists so much to the point where speedrunning has been a thing for a while. Glitch abuse has been a thing for a while, which is why you have glitchless runs. But I know with certain games like Celeste, they literally planned all of their seasides. You have to do some very specific mechanical stuff.
00:31:51
Speaker
And if you go back and you do all the in-game content and you come back, you realize you can abuse some of those mechanics earlier in the game. So I think they had all of this in mind to a degree to give you like, hey, do you want to do this jump that makes you go a lot faster and further? Do you have to precisely do it? Or do you want to just dash off frame and then keep going up the screen? Because that's an option.
00:32:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's a beautiful thing. Absolutely. There's a game in particular that you saw that people.
00:32:29
Speaker
Hmm. That's a great question. Cause it's been a while since I saw some of their videos and now I can't work. Oh no, I do remember when, um, outer worlds, uh, had a, you can kind of, um, I'm not going to go into spoilers, but, uh, there's a way to end the game extra early. If you do something really stupid, like
00:32:55
Speaker
You know how in using Metal Gear Solid, for example, if you like break continuity, the game's like, hey, game over. Time paradox, right? Yeah. There's something that exists in outer worlds where it's like.
00:33:11
Speaker
We gave you every single possible hint that trying to do what you're about to do is a really, really bad idea and you did it anyways, game over. And the speedrunners count that as a legit ending to the game. So I think combined with some early game tech and some skips and some saves, they beat the game in like nine minutes.
00:33:33
Speaker
And it's normally like a 15 plus hour long game and like this long form RPG thing. And the developers were pretty humbled, I guess, by that, because they were like, we put so much effort into all these other parts of the game that you absolutely are destroying right now. But no, they were really good sports. One of the reasons I like obsidian. It was cool. Yeah. Do you have a. Did you say obsidian?
00:34:04
Speaker
I'm proud of them. So anyway, Division of the Original Sin 2 is something that I remember watching a speedrun of, and it is also a very long game. One of the few RPGs that I've actually enjoyed, played, and played through like three times now. I might take a break until Baldur's Gate 3 is finished, and I'll check that out.
00:34:27
Speaker
But even when we did our initial playthrough, do you remember? This is still on the first island. There was a cathedral we had to fight in. Yes, yes, I think so. A bunch of paintings and stuff there. So I think initially on the island, we also figured out that
00:34:46
Speaker
pretty much whenever dialogue happens with an NPC and a party member, it freezes for the NPC and the party member. Everybody else has free action to do whatever the fuck they want. So if we stole an item from somebody, they'd go, the NPC would be like, who stole this from me? They go to the first possible person, the closest one. And then they'd go to like the next closest possible person. So if the first possible person did not have the item and somebody else did,
00:35:12
Speaker
as soon as they were done talking, you just give it to that first person again. Cause they're not going to go back and talk to them again. And so you just play, swap the stolen item around. And then there's like disgruntled, like, where'd my item go? Yeah, not free. And now it's cool. We're like, okay, if they're talking and they can't move, we're good. Oh, also physical objects have, you know, they take up space. Mm-hmm.
00:35:38
Speaker
And we had something called telekinesis and we took the paintings that Jake was describing in his cathedral. And I essentially, before the fight, while Jake was like mid conversation, I moved all these heavy paintings and like encircled like three or four people and then put like my melee brawler guy in there with like a lot of AOE options and I'm like, let's go. You made the Thunderdome.
00:36:02
Speaker
Yeah, I built the Thunderdome and then invoked the Thunder. We spent way too long setting it up, but it will always live on for me as a fun memory of, hey, wouldn't it be funny if? And boy, it was fun.
00:36:18
Speaker
Oh, yeah. No, it's it's absolutely great. And it really like the description of even just passing around stolen items like that. Like it seems reminiscent of old like what what were those those old comedies where like people are just running around slapstick sort of like Three Stooges or
00:36:41
Speaker
silent films. Anyways, I can't remember the term. It's right there. But listeners, please let me know what the term is. But like people just passing this item around while someone's running around, you know, trying to find the thief. Right. It's just it's really hilarious and fun to play out in the audience. But yes, exactly. And absolutely, we're going to take advantage of stuff like that. You know,
00:37:10
Speaker
It's fun to play games like that, and especially harder games, where it's trying to kick your butt. So you're like, I'm going to take whatever advantage I can.
00:37:21
Speaker
Yeah, the amount of times I've tried jumping up hills or mountains or any terrain to be like, let's see what's friction is these bad boys have got. And I consistently have done it in every single game ever. Right up here. Can I jump up this thing? Can I somehow get around it with my expert traversing? A lot of times the answer is no. But sometimes it works and you're like, oh, oh, oh,
00:37:49
Speaker
Uh-huh. Now what do I do? I'm stuck.
00:37:56
Speaker
I was just saying, it's a fun thing. Because I think jumping in video games in general is always just a fun, idle thing. Yeah. I don't even know if you played WoW back in the day, but just being in a trading hall, waiting for the party to group up, or LFG, and you're just dicking around. You've emoted already. You're like, I'll jump on stuff. Can I jump on top of stuff? How many things can I jump on top of?
00:38:21
Speaker
And it's really just your idle brain looking for something, but you simply get like your own mini game for yourself with that. And even when we're playing Destiny, I will always like abuse my jumps to go explore somewhere or try and make a certain pattern with my jumps consistently while we're waiting on stuff. And again, it's like my own little mini game. It doesn't affect the gameplay, but I'm getting enjoyment out of it because I'm fucking around with the game, finding stuff that is possible and then utilizing
00:38:53
Speaker
Yeah, I can empathize with that entirely. I didn't play WoW in its heyday, but I played Star Wars Galaxies around the same time. And it had a technical jump. I don't even think it was bound by default. It didn't change your actual vertical position. It was just an animation. If you wanted to climb something, you had to run up it. Jumping didn't do anything. If you walked upstairs, sure, your height changes. But as soon as you would walk off a ledge, you just instantly drop down because it just translates you.
00:39:23
Speaker
I don't know why the game was that way. It was one of the janky things about it. I still ran around jumping all the time. Literally accomplished nothing. It made the game look super janky. Like it's flailing your arms, you know, with a blaster rifle in hand while you like jump in the air. It's absolute absurdity, but it's interaction. And although maybe it's not the most complicated or
00:39:48
Speaker
a glamorous form of emergent gameplay. It's still people playing the game the way that they want to. A lot of those early MMO like behaviors basically determined how MMOs played, right? Like if you were talking about kiting enemies, that's emergent gameplay. That's actually like a separate behavior. The game doesn't tell you normally, hey, you can run away from this and shoot the enemy repeatedly. And that way he's not going to like,
00:40:17
Speaker
run up and kill you right and maybe if you run too far he'll leash would be the term right run back and get all his health back so it's like run him around in a circle don't run too far but like run around run him around in a circle and that's all emerging gameplay too and
00:40:37
Speaker
I actually have one last one last example. So hopefully you're thinking of a good follow up because I have no segue off this. But Guild Wars, the original Guild Wars had this. I don't know why it was in the game. I think it's because NPCs and PCs were coded the same way in certain aspects. But basically, if an enemy NPC killed you, it got experience.
00:41:02
Speaker
And the beginning of the game, this is a spoiler for Guild Wars, no one cares. In the beginning of the game, it's like a pre kind of apocalypse before timeline jump area where everything's really nice and people liked it. So they kind of started to develop this group of type of player that would never finish a certain quest. They would do the time skip to like the more desolate, darker future where almost the entire game actually took place. They're basically in the prologue.
00:41:30
Speaker
But enemies don't level up. Like normally they're all really low levels and you'll stop getting experience so you can't max out a character in the prologue. Unless you die to an enemy repeatedly in order to level it up and then you kill it for a little bit of experience and you continue to do that all the way until you hit level cap.
00:41:54
Speaker
Dave looks like he's in pain. That's so much. That is so much murdering an NPC, letting NPC murder you to then get like minimal gains. Uh-huh. Like, do you remember that one, that infamous, I shouldn't say infamous, there's so many episode of South Park with the wow.
00:42:12
Speaker
Oh yeah. I sound like an old person with the wow, but basically the player killer character who was hacking was killing everybody everywhere else. So they stayed out like the lowest level possible thing and killed things for like two XP and then grind it for weeks. And that's how I imagined that going. Again, for the gain of like, I don't want to leave this area. Okay.
00:42:36
Speaker
Now ArenaNet is the company that owns it. They did actually recognize the players that made it and they gave them titles. There's an exclusive title and it actually carries from Guild Wars 1 to Guild Wars 2 and it's only attainable by hitting maximum level in the prologue.
00:42:53
Speaker
So they ultimately did get some sort of compensation. But the first people that did it, they just they liked how how pleasant the world was. And they were mostly social players, I guess. Some overlap with insanity if they're going to death grind in PCs. But yeah, there's. I love my friends, but I can't play games with them constantly. I just need like a change of pace in time to time. Did you think of a segue, though?
00:43:21
Speaker
What? Another thing I did think of back in the older Diablo 2 days, if you drop an item on the ground, it takes up a place, right? So if you drop gold, it's like, oh, it was golden ground. You can drop a gold at a time or up to, I think, stacks of
00:43:45
Speaker
a couple thousand, what the cap was. But I remember in high school, we were like, oh, we should like drop some gold and see how much it would, how long it would take to like fill up an area. Because it takes up like a discernible spot where if an item is already there, you can't have another item there. So it has to fill a different spot. Basically hex grids, hex grid kind of on the map. Yeah.
00:44:08
Speaker
So we spent three hours with three separate people filling up the rogue encampment with single pieces of gold until the entire thing was filled with gold. Because if you just keep dropping it in place, it does the traveling salesman problem of like, hey, where's the next available place I can put this? Because immediately adjacent is not an option.
00:44:31
Speaker
So you just kept dropping like single things gold and eventually the whole thing was just gilded. It looks so dumb, but I was so weirdly proud of the amount of effort we put into it. You were also playing Guild Wars. Different type of guild, yeah.
00:44:51
Speaker
I mean, that's early that's early gameplay, though. One of my early fond memories was literally. Against Star Wars Galaxies, I was playing with my friend at the time who got me into the game and then he quit. So maybe that's where I learned that behavior, actually. But I kept playing the game and we had nothing to do. No fixed goal. We just went out and we made a camp on.
00:45:18
Speaker
I think it's like indoor or something like that. And we're just literally sitting there with a little campfire and a tent and we're just like talking about random crap in a game, not actually doing gameplay things. And that whole social thing is really what I mean, that's what made MMOs, including wow. Were those the ties that bind? Even more so than the grinding, I think the grind that binds.
00:45:47
Speaker
Mm hmm. That's good, though. I like that. You brought up
Game Mechanics and Notable Incidents
00:45:51
Speaker
Wow. So I did have one story about it that I think pertains to emerging gameplay. And maybe you're familiar with this one. It's actually really popular because it's been studied. But are you familiar with the corrupted blood incident? Yep. OK, so maybe you have more details than I actually have. But the part that I recall, because again, I didn't really play well, but I read about it because this was kind of a big deal.
00:46:16
Speaker
was there was a boss and it applied a dot as part of the raid. But what someone discovered is if they had a pet out and the pet was afflicted by the dot and then the pet was put away. When the pet was then brought back out, the dot was still in effect on the pet, which would be fine, except corrupted blood spreads to nearby players or NPCs. Exactly. Do you remember the fallout of this? You want to tell the second half?
00:46:47
Speaker
So TLDR, somebody got their pet with corrupted blood, and they put the pet away. And not knowing about the bug, I assume, went to a small player area where it's like, hey, this is a hub for new players or something, or a massive trading hall, whatever it may be. But essentially, the dots spread to a bunch of other people.
00:47:14
Speaker
And basically it kept happening where something would always be afflicted with corrupted blood based off of going to a pet and the peckling back in the inventory. So I don't want my pet to die. And it just kept going consistently until I think they had to restart the server.
00:47:31
Speaker
Yeah, they had to like hotfix it, I think, to purge it. The thing that was, again, I didn't play it, but I saw screenshots of this. And this was like, this was prime Kotaku slash the golden days of gaming news journalism, I guess.
00:47:47
Speaker
And there were screenshots of just like cities that were just covered in skeletons from all of the players that died due to the corrupted blood plague because it could extend the big thing was like cities were normally non-combat zones. Yeah.
00:48:03
Speaker
But it doesn't matter. You can't cleanse this, I guess, outside of certain abilities or mechanics in the raid. So it's spreading against people who are there trying to hawk their wares or ERP or doing whatever nonsense here in the city, like killing everybody. And it was just it was so cool that the the big takeaway I remember was that
00:48:26
Speaker
people used it to study like the behaviors of epidemics. That was something that came out of it. That was also a tell for how many people were playing wow at the time, right? But yeah. Well, I'm glad that we used that information to, to great effect in recent years. Um, yeah, that's what they should have called it. They should just called it corrupted blood too. And people would have paid more attention.
00:48:54
Speaker
That's what I'm going to start calling it now retroactively. Sorry, I kind of corrupted the history books anyway. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think the reason that's kind of emerging is past the point, they actually started to study the different player groups and some players wanted to spread it. They were the agents of chaos, right? There's always going to be, there's always going to be somebody to be like,
00:49:21
Speaker
Everyone's trying to do this one thing. I'll be a counterculture. Exactly.
00:49:27
Speaker
Yeah. And it's just like, I don't disparage that. I know I gave that person like a funny evil character accent, but in the context of it just being a game. Yeah. I like that it exists. I don't know if I would necessarily be that person. Yeah. But I like that it exists. I like when microcosms emerge from stuff like that.
00:49:55
Speaker
No, it's absolutely legit. That's probably one of the top behaviors. Obviously, I don't want to spend so much time talking about MMOs, but you see a lot of emergent gameplay in MMOs because people spend their lives in them. So obviously, they're going to find weird things to do. You could talk about Evaton. You could talk about other stuff. One that I know that you're also going to be more familiar with is Left 4 Dead,
00:50:24
Speaker
And it almost has like by definition, emergent gameplay in the form of the AI director. Do you remember what the director did in Left 4 Dead? It was kind of publicized. I remember I feel like Gabe Newell himself was talking about it as like a selling point for the game.
00:50:42
Speaker
I think the director is basically a compensation. So like if you're running through an area really hard, just kicking its ass, it's going to be like, Oh yeah. More likely to spawn more enemies or more difficult enemies to try and match pace.
00:51:01
Speaker
So it was like a reactive thing. So it's not just, oh, I'm really good at the game. I can burn through it versus these noobs. Ideally targeting that the noobs and the experienced players are still having the same level of relative difficulty for their own skill set.
00:51:20
Speaker
That's a really good way to put it. I didn't have it refined to such a good sentence, but that's a really good summary, I think. Well, Jake, use the thing. You're not an English major. That's true. Are you an English major? No. Maybe an English comedy major. There you go.
00:51:40
Speaker
That should be something, I think. Yeah, it tries to balance out the gameplay. I think I remember sometimes we'd be really struggling, and then I would see multiple med kits, maybe. And I was just like, oh, I mean, on one hand, great, because we're not going to wipe this run. On the other hand, the AI director actually figured out how bad we are. And it's figuring out how to compensate our gameplay here, which I think is humbling.
00:52:10
Speaker
compared to like, Hey, we spawned in a bunch of extra special infected here. It's like, here's full heels. Cause you need every chance you can get. It just gives you four defense. It's like, yeah, road ahead is going to be bumpy. Yup.
00:52:29
Speaker
Um, so I think that one's good and that's a good like mesh that goes back into like the developers being part of the emerging gameplay. You're trying to get the players to play the game to full enjoyment, but keep your, your, your tailoring the gameplay in such a way that they'll be more reactive. Um, which I think is cool. Um, yeah, I like that. And with Left 4 Dead as an example, it always has like a really
00:52:55
Speaker
I don't know how much it shifted since. Um, but I always had like a decent meta game in my opinion. Right. Like talking, starting about, uh, what the fuck's the hospital? Not mercy. Cause we're talking about here. Left 4 Dead 2. Oh, Left 4 Dead 2. Oh, um, I'm less familiar with two. I'll look it up though. Like the loudest fucking helicopter in the world. And you're in this building and you have to go down the building.
00:53:22
Speaker
I need to buy more time. I'm trying to type slowly. So I'll explain while Jake's looking this up, but you're basically in this building and you're going down a hallway. It's like a big apartment building. Um, both certain parts of the hallway, it's like, Oh, are they going to be hiding boomers behind a door to try and assault us? Oh, are they going to try and put a charger out the window? Was that a hospital? I thought it was like an apartment. Maybe it was a hospital. I can't remember.
00:53:59
Speaker
The apartment map. Certainly apartment became more advantageous, so to speak, as far as like alleging somebody, because then you could be a smoker and you could go downstairs, and there's way to the ledge for somebody to round the corner ever so slightly, you tongue them off and just that little bit, they're now stuck on that spot and somebody has to go help them.
00:54:14
Speaker
Oh, okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. I was looking for a hospital. I have no idea what it's called, by the way. I'll try again.
00:54:20
Speaker
Okay. Now we're going to situate a spitter over here. So somebody does try and go help them. We'll spit acid on them. So the person's kind of stuck there and you kind of focus all the survivors together and maybe you get a nice charge off or something, but it was always a game of how fast can we go through? Can we assume where they're going to be spawned? Can we react fast enough versus the infected trying to set up these death traps repeatedly?
00:54:48
Speaker
Because it's usually hard to get in one unless it went perfectly. Yes, yeah. You'd have to have absolutely everybody incapacitated and usually that's not the expectation. If you got somebody down like a health state after your attack, that's usually pretty good. Two people, you're in a good spot.
00:55:06
Speaker
But I think it's dead center based off of my reading. Yeah, that's the one which is not a very memorable name either. Right. Like they kind of gave up at that point. They're like dead air. OK, that means something dead center, I guess shooting. Maybe that's like shooting. I don't know. Didn't think about that until right now.
00:55:30
Speaker
There was a particular spot we tried to, I probably told this story at some point, probably in the Left 4 Dead episode, where you can instant kill people near the top of the hospital in No Mercy in the unfinished cement area once you go up the elevator. And there's a left ledge where for some dang reason, if a survivor is affected by knockback, they don't grab the ledge, they just fall.
00:55:55
Speaker
off of the top of the hospital. And we were both scared and also very opportunistic whenever the versus campaign entered this little space, because we're like, we got to be very careful. Yeah, that was great.
00:56:18
Speaker
I love finding little stuff like that. And you're like, I'm going to save this for later. That little piece of information of this interaction is possible in this way. And then you pull out of the back pocket later.
00:56:31
Speaker
Yeah. And there was the Hunter meta, right? Like people started the game and they'll just jump at you, right? Like I got to get you on the ground so I can get some scratches in and stuff. Then you're like, okay, well, we'll start to coordinate with other infected. Okay. Now Hunter has evolved to the point where the goal is no longer to jump straight at them. It's to like launch yourself up in the air from a very high spot and maximize your pounce damage, your initial impact damage, because you do the 89 degree shot.
00:57:00
Speaker
Uh-huh. Because there was so much, um, it was so much more reliable. You'd expect the survivors to be able to shoot you off so fast that the best play was now this high risk high reward air shot. Um, it's freaking great. Yeah. Got to love some metagame in there too, to help mix things up. Yeah.
00:57:28
Speaker
My list is starting to run a bit low. Some others I want to just rapid fire. Obviously tribes skating, I love tribes. And skating was a physics glitch that they put in the game. And then a piece of trivia. Apparently combos, the very ability to hit multiple times and for it to be true is what we in the biz call it. Without the opponent being able to do anything in response.
00:57:50
Speaker
That was a glitch. I was in Street Fighter 2 and it was like an exploit players used that the developers did not originally intend, but you can't really patch games that come out on an arcade cabinets that easily. So. Combos, and that's what we have now. They've been around ever since. Well, you're not taking you're probably not going to take them away at this point, given that it's like the fighting game community is a little bit addicted to them now.
00:58:21
Speaker
Yeah. I can't imagine they would have taken off otherwise because like without combos being an option, it's, you have like your light punches, like kicks, heavy punches, heavy kicks, and a grab in there. So people don't lock themselves in like a block position, right? Right.
00:58:42
Speaker
You could just imagine how much less engaging a lot of these games would have been though. If as an industry standard, there was always the option to block after you were hit, right? How much less interesting would these games be? Yeah. I'll be playing the character Riot Shield. Yeah, pretty much.
00:59:06
Speaker
Okay, you said Riot Shield. This is my actual last one. Call of Duty. Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 2. I think it's Modern Warfare 2. Yes, that's the one that had Riot Shields. What a great way to play the game.
00:59:22
Speaker
Shield in front of you. No actual weapon equipped outside of the shield. Slowly approaching as they like just pepper the shield full of bullets just so you can like maybe bash them a little bit if they choose not to retreat for some dang reason. Love it. Prime gameplay. You can also put it on your back and it could catch bullets sometimes then. Excellent. Excellent. The way combat is meant to work.
00:59:51
Speaker
like swords, that was a period of time, guns, that was a period of time. The future is just army versus army. Right shield on back, right shield in hands. Let's go for it. That's my last example. It was always fun to like try and hold the shield and get close to other reloading knife.
01:00:14
Speaker
Uh-huh. Throw it, like throw the knife real quick. Yeah. That was an actual viable build though. I like that. Anything to counter than like 19, not 1911 sets of pistol, but the shotguns, you know, the ones I'm talking about the dual wheel, the Kimbo single fire shotguns that are like lever action. I've probably seen it in a video, but I remember really doing a Kimbo myself.
01:00:37
Speaker
Yeah, there wasn't that many in modern warfare too, but one of the chemical options were these single fire shotguns and people just had speed builds where they just ran through the map and they're like shotgun, shotgun, shotgun. It's like the dumbest playing scout pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Um, no, that's emerging gameplay, I guess. Yeah.
Humor in Gaming Glitches
01:00:58
Speaker
That's it. Oh, the other example of emerging gameplay, um, the Dick and cyberpunk 2077.
01:01:05
Speaker
Ah, because of the close glitches. Because it would glitch outside of the path, therefore it was emerging from the...
01:01:13
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's emergent dick play. That's a different thing. So anyways, I'm just going to end the episode. So bye. I'm just going to thank you guys for listening to this one. I know this one was a little bit of a weird one, but hopefully we brought you down at least one nostalgia trip and got you thinking about some of your favorite forms of emergent game playing games besides the cyberpunk one, obviously.
01:01:40
Speaker
Outside of that, should you have ideas for future episodes, we're always excited to hear them. You could send those in to soapstonepodcast at gmail.com or you can join the discussion on Facebook, which is a social media platform at Facebook.com slash soapstone podcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good day.