Just the right level design.
Text/Chen Hao
At the just-concluded TGA 2021, The Death Loop, which received 9 nominations, won two awards for Best Game Direction and Best Art Design.
Arkane, the developer of Deathloop, is a Bethesda studio, preceded by the Shame series and Plunder. Shortly after its release in September, the game received a perfect score from both foreign media IGN and Gamespot, and only 10 games that achieved this achievement were only 10 in the 23 years before the release of "Death Loop".
Such achievements make me wonder, what is the magic charm of "Death Cycle"?
01 Loop around time
Play experience
Clicking on the single-player game, I was pressed to the ground with a dagger around my neck. The woman in front of me questioned me, "Why can't you remember!" Then he stabbed the knife into my throat.
I immediately woke up on a beach. This is "Black Cay Island", the location of the story of this game. Black Cay island is not big, I killed all the way in the first two levels, and parkour sneaked in the last two levels. Soon, I finished exploring the 4 parts of the island and couldn't help but sneer at the screen with a "just this".
It wasn't until the game put on a cutscene and explained to me that in order to break the time loop, you had to get rid of the eight "Prophets" – and I reacted to the fact that I had played all afternoon and had only completed the "prologue" of the game.
As the game progressed, I learned that the game's plot and gameplay revolved around the concept of "looping". The player dies instead of ending the game directly, but "loops" back a few seconds before death, with three chances in each level. After three times, the player loses all of their weapons and equipment while moving on to the next day.
Such a game flow may seem rambling, but it is not. Because the plot is also connected through the concept of "loop", each time you enter a new loop, the level will change or unlock a new scene.
For example, when I first explored the city center, I found that there seemed to be an isolated island on the other side, but there was no way to go. It wasn't until later that I unlocked a bridge to that side.
The 4 parts of Black Cay Island, or the 4 giant "box-style levels", perform differently at different times. For example, there is a fireworks party in the city center every night, so that every evening the enemy will come out and patrol the streets; in the morning, the enemy will relax his guard, leaving only a few scattered sentries.
Uptown in the morning
Uptown at night
Players can travel to any location at any time, even without the order set by the game to kill the Prophets. The sense of difference in box-style levels encourages players to explore different ways of playing, achieving a high degree of freedom and rich exploration.
As a Game of Bethesda, narrating the plot through words is also a major feature. Every text in the game has meaning, and the player needs to peel back the cocoon to solve the puzzle of the time loop.
In addition to the log, audio, and letters providing plot information, the game will also see some information appear on the wall, some of which provide guidance for completing the level, and some of which are just complaints about the "prophets".
It can be said that this work has changed the cool and elegant tone of the "Shame" series and created an absurd and magical Black Cay Island full of black humor. The protagonist will also humorously pinch the "Prophet" on the walkie-talkie from time to time in the game, and in these dialogues, the player will gradually understand the relationship between the protagonist and the Prophet and the death cycle.
02 Ingenious and rich
Level design
For immersive simulation games, the level design focuses on two things: one is to make the game reflect a clear goal, and the other is to achieve a free decision-making process for players. Both of these things Are Dead Loop did.
Before entering the scene, the player can select the task target to be tracked in the inventory system of the main interface. There are many ways to accomplish this core goal, and in the "box design" level, players also have to play the same scene repeatedly to complete different game goals. From this point of view, Death Loop seems to have absorbed the essence of open-world games.
For example, the game's ultimate goal is to kill eight "Prophets".
In the level map, the position of the Prophets at the same time is fixed, except that they have a thicker amount of health, and they are no different from ordinary enemies. In this way, the player's goal is clear and fixed. Players then need to track "clues" (i.e., complete side quests) to get information about the Prophets, making it easier to kill them.
The game's mechanics then add time and space limitations to the player - eight Prophets must be killed in one day. To achieve this, the player needs to go through multiple cycles to understand the location of each Prophet at different times, and then arrange an assassination plan. In other words, the difficulty of this game is not how to defeat the powerful enemy boss, but how to overcome the challenges brought by the level design.
Based on the above design, the game establishes guidance on the map design by lighting, composition, etc. For example, the scene of the map changes at different time periods, leading the player to different routes.
Early morning entrance to Fristad Rock Island
At noon, Iwajima shows the road on the right side of the picture with backlight
Similar to open-world games, some of the more important locations are placed along the player's route to the game's objectives. For example, on their way to the protagonist's apartment, the player may see a library full of weapons. In addition, in some of the more remote corners of the map, the game also places some secret paths to reward players with a strong desire to explore and willing to break the rules.
In addition, some items in the scene that will only be unlocked by the subsequent process will also appear, arousing the curiosity of the player and also hinting at the possibility of repeatedly playing here.
Like these sparkling things
It is worth mentioning that this game also added a multiplayer part to the level. Similar to the Souls series, players may be invaded by Juliana, who is played by someone else. Juliana is one of the Prophets who can kill the player with a variety of skills to prevent the player from breaking the loop. This mechanism can be said to be the finishing touch of this game, it is not only consistent with the game plot, but also tests the player's understanding of levels, weapons, skills, etc., which greatly increases the playability of the game and the richness of the level design.
The player kills the intruder disguised as a normal enemy
All in all, the game unabashedly places the game's objectives in the level, while guiding them to ensure that players do not fall into confusion. In this way, the designers completely handed over the power of "what to do" to the player and asked to solve the challenges posed by the game's levels and player invasions.
As Harvey Smith, the level designer of the Shame series, says, the narrative, the level design, the game system are like instruments, and there's only one way for them to play the music: understand it, master it, and become a performer.
03 3A to innovate in gameplay
Circled up?
In my opinion, Death Loop is an AAA game that wins by gameplay.
Although the content of the game is not very prominent, and even the concept of "loop" is not new, Arkane has successfully innovated its gameplay around this concept. Every time players enter Black Calyx with different mission objectives, they will experience the freshness of different gameplay.
Beginning with the Shame series, "clever level design" has become the golden signature of Arcane Studios. When the player accidentally discovers that there is more than one way to complete the level in the process of exploration, the flow experience will reach its peak, which is the aha moment created by excellent level design.
In the past few years, the development of the AAA industry has been like "dancing in shackles". With the development of technology and the growth of the team, manufacturers have gradually solidified a set of industrialization thinking with content as the selling point of the game. Players are seeing larger maps, more detailed graphics, and more complex plots, which for manufacturers means increasingly high development costs.
Luckily, Death Loop isn't lost in this arms race. The high resource reuse rate visible to the naked eye not only did not cause the game's reputation to collapse, but highlighted its just the right innovation in gameplay, and finally received unanimous praise among the player group. And this may be the way for AAA manufacturers to go in the future.
In Death Loop, I seem to see the fundamentalism of game design:
Fun is the most important thing.
Game Grape Recruitment Industry Reporter/Content Editor,
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