DIRECTOR'S CUT- How Dark Souls (accidentally) Taught You Cowardice (Patreon)

Hello hello hello and welcome one and all to this, the Director’s cut, a little bonus bit of patreon-exclusive goodness where I talk about something that I couldn’t squeeze into an already overstuffed video! This time, I want to talk about scoring - and how it relates to all the entry level strategy stuff that I was talking about in the main video.

See, in today’s modern videogaming climate we tend to look down on arcade-era mechanics and design themes, mostly with good reason. Unfair difficulty and punitive failure states are very much an artefact of oldschool games, as are lives - which don’t serve that much of a purpose any more even in games that do still use them. One thing that arcade games prioritized that I think newer games could stand to benefit from, however, is scores.

Everyone knows score systems - you do stuff in a game, you get points and your points give you a position on a leaderboard or a ranking or something at the end, it’s very simple - back in the olden days, score systems, and specifically hi-score tables were mostly used as a way to get people coming back to a game and trying to beat their rival’s scores, something that ceased to be relevant as videogames moved into the home rather than public spaces.

Hooooweeever, I think this may have been an overcorrection. One thing that score systems, and scoring in general were great at was inspiring players to give a game a second try and shoot for a better result, necessitating higher level, more fun play without making a game any less fun or challenging for newer players.

Take Rollerdrome for example, one of my favourite games from last year, it’s an arcadey arena based rollerblading game where you shoot baddies and pull off cool tricks, it’s pretty fun! Actually beating each level is decently tricky, particularly once you get to the late stages, but there is something… motivating about squeaking through a level only for the game to tell you that some made up character got a higher score than you that really inspires you to go back and have another go, working in more tricks to now-familiar level structures and dispatching enemies more efficiently, it’s great! Without that competitive need to place myself at the top of the score table, I never would’ve felt a motivation to practice the tricks and optimizations that make up higher level play, and I never would’ve seen the depth of the game for myself.

Points are also a great way to add some additional risks, the threat of missing out on a point reward for, say, not getting hit or failing to finish a level in a given time gives expert players something more to worry about and keep repeat playthroughs fresh whilst also going completely over the heads of newbies who’ll likely never qualify for this stuff until they’re much better.

By tying these sorts of minute, optional challenges not to power or content but to points, games manage to create the same invisible layers of gameplay that the likes of celeste do with hidden levels without actually having to design new locations at all. Two players of different skill levels in Descenders, a downhill mountainbiking game, will engage with a given level in completely different ways - the newbie will have an exhilarating time just trying to get down the hill whereas an expert, knowing survival is more or less assured, can instead shoot for points by trying to fit in flips, near misses and risky no-handers wherever they can, effectively creating brand new challenges that the new player doesn’t have to engage with at all.

Really, just like I mentioned at the start of the video, it all comes down to motivation, and points are a very safe way to do this because players automatically value those lovely big numbers on their screen, but points often aren’t connected to any other gameplay systems that could be imbalance by multiple styles of play interacting getting different rewards from same challenges. Of course, that’s not to stop some games from tying points into power by turning them into a currency which ends up with skilled players rapidly outpacing a game’s intended difficulty curve, and leaving new players in the dust.

Inkeeping with how the latest video is a little bit of a frankenstein's monster behind the scenes, this is something I *also* wanted to talk about in the vampire survivors vid but could never quite fit it in! Maybe there’s a whole video on points and scoring systems to be uncovered somewhere down the line? That’ll probably involve me having to get good enough at various oldschool arcade games to get footage of hi-scores actually so don’t hold your breath on that one!