Over the years, I’ve taken feedback notes for a LOT of playtest sessions.
Several studios I’ve worked for, notably Ensemble, relied heavily on an iterative process. Team playtesting was a factor in decision-making and identifying the next steps. It was an “agile” process (small-A) before there was Agile. While the weekly sessions could sometimes get contentious, I saw first-hand how regular playtesting improved the quality of the final game.
One of the things you learn while taking playtest notes is that folks can’t always articulate why they don’t like something. They’ll say a feature feels “off” or “not fun.” Part of being good at taking playtest notes is asking follow-up questions, rather than just blindly writing down “the game is bad.” If you’re going to make changes based on the feedback, you need to clearly understand exactly what the problems were.
So a comment like “it’s not fun” requires follow-up questions. Every player finds different things subjectively “fun.” Sometimes you’ll realize that the person giving the feedback dislikes the genre or disagrees with the core vision. In those cases, there’s not much to do, and that’s another core lesson – the team doesn’t have to “do something” with every comment.
When a playtester says something “isn’t fun” it often has to do with the player experiencing too much friction. Friction is a more concrete, objective concept than “fun” and is felt by players due to some combination of unclear or incomplete mechanics, user interface problems, or user experience issues.
Friction has a few loose categories: the player is trying to get the game to do something, and 1) the game is not doing it, or 2) the game is taking too long to do it, or 3) the player can’t figure out how to do it. Some friction is necessary. Good gameplay itself is friction – barriers to the player’s progress have to be overcome. Monsters have to be slain; levels and gold have to be earned; choices have to be made. In rare cases, a game is made purposely obtuse and friction-heavy in service of an innovative design; the punishing mechanics of games like Pathologic 2 spring to mind.
But many games have a host of unintentional “bad friction” issues. Maybe a critical user interface function that the player’s doing all the time takes two extra mouse clicks to get to. Maybe the balance is so far off that the difficulty spikes unexpectedly. Or maybe it’s a technical issue – a save game takes over a minute to load, and the friction of long load times is magnified by a design that requires players to frequently reload saves.
Too much bad friction will kill an otherwise well-designed game. Players have many choices about how to spend their gaming hours; if every time they start to have fun with a game friction gets in the way, they’ll quickly set the title aside for something that respects their time.
A Masterclass in Reducing Friction
This brings me to Age of Wonders 4, the latest iteration of a long-running 4X franchise developed by Triumph Studios and published by Paradox. It’s not a perfect game – there’s plenty to quibble about on the balance, pacing, and some of the victory mechanics. But it is overall an excellent game, with the crucial “one more turn” factor that a good 4X needs. In large part, its steady addictiveness is attributable to how smartly and elegantly the developers removed friction from the player’s experience.
When you fire up Age of Wonders 4, the first thing you’ll notice how polished the overall package is. It’s all beautiful to look at, from the menus to the characters to the background art. Beyond that, the game makes it easy to start playing. On half-decent hardware, the game loads almost immediately; assuming you skip the opening intro cinematic, the time from launching to the main menu is at most 10-15 seconds.
This technical snappiness extends into the game itself – saved games load virtually instantly, and (rare for a 4X) the AI’s turns execute quickly even late game. By comparison, Old World – another recent 4X by Mohawk Games, which I also love for its complexity and interesting mechanics – bogs down significantly in comparison.
There are a few design tradeoffs made in service of this snappiness. One of the ways Age of Wonders 4 keeps the AI turns quick is by limiting the size of the map based on starting player distance and the number of enemies, resulting in shorter, tighter games rather than the epic sprawls of the competition. But there’s never a long delay after hitting the “end turn” button before you can make your next interesting decision.
Try, Try Again
Age of Wonders 4 has great lessons to teach any aspiring UX designer. From the opening creation of your player’s wizard avatar right through the final tense moments of a game six to ten hours later, every interesting choice the player makes – and there are many – is able to be made smoothly, precisely, and with consistently very little friction.
One example of friction reduction at its finest is what happens when you auto-resolve combat. Like most games that blend a strategic game with a tactical combat option, Age of Wonders 4 allows you to auto-resolve battles. The auto-resolver is among the best I’ve ever seen, with the expected result happening in most cases; however, like any auto-resolver, it sometimes gets it “wrong.” Even on victory, you might lose more important units than you want to in a game where force preservation matters.
A lot of games would force you to reload if you commit to an auto-resolve and didn’t like the final result. But the very first option on the auto-resolution summary for Age of Wonders (win or lose) is Retry. With a single click, the player immediately refights the battle in the tactical engine – a “whoops, my bad, I should have not auto-resolved after all” option that’s player-friendly and friction-free.
Game designers tend to overthink obvious solutions. (I can say this with authority because I was a designer, and I’ve made that mistake a lot.) I imagine a passionate meeting discussion about forcing the player to accept the consequences of the decision to auto-resolve – how the mere presence of the retry button makes it too easy for the player to rewind a bad choice. I bet the Old World developers had a similar debate about their (very good) decision to put an “Undo Move” option in their game.
Choice and consequence are the heart and soul of games. Unless you’re making Cookie Clicker, player decisions have to matter. What Triumph Studios demonstrates so well with Age of Wonders 4 is how, by reducing player friction for the decisions that don’t matter, players stay engaged, focused, and interested in the ones that do – where to fight, which cities to conquer, and which magic tome to choose next.
To eliminate bad friction, one of the best things a studio can do is devote dedicated schedule time to polishing. When people say a game is “polished” – think triple-A titles like Nintendo or Blizzard’s best work – they are speaking both about the overall level of quality, as well as attention to detail in the timing of mechanics, the look and flow of menus, and a consistent and relatively bug-free experience.
Teams that frame design discussions in terms of objective “friction” instead of subjective “fun” will focus more on polishing their game from the perspective of the player. Making it so players have to reload a save to refight a bad auto-resolve result isn’t a meaningful choice – it’s just wasting the player’s time.
The presence or absence of a retry button seems like a small point, to be sure. But too many small points of friction slow down the player’s experience – and in the aggregate, will grind the engine of your otherwise promising game to a halt.
What’s a game that you liked, but quit playing because of friction? What’s an example of a developer that understood the importance of minimizing friction, and made it central to the design? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.