Designing, not controlling, player freedom4

Four page article, so it’s not super important to read, but I thought it was worth the time. Essentially, one of the designers for Red Faction: Guerrilla talks about how they built the game to take advantage of player freedom rather than worrying that the player might destroy something important or kill someone before they’ve served their purpose.

One of the interesting things was the cost/return ratio of time spent building missions compared to building things for the player to do. Building a mission is expensive - you have to have dialogue, an intro part, an end part, an objective, etc. Players sit down and blow up that building because they have to. On the other hand, creating a building, marking it as an important enemy base or something, and rewarding the player for blowing it up costs a fraction of what a mission would cost. Rather than doing a mission because they have to, if someone wants to blow up a building, they’ll go for it and enjoy it a lot more.

So instead of saying “this is what you’re doing, this is why you’re doing it, now go do it” you say “here’s some stuff you can do, I’ll pay you if you do it” and they run around to their heart’s content keeping themselves busy without any need for writing a big script and stuff. It’s a smart idea, and I know it works, because nobody wants to spend an hour collecting widgets because they have to - if you say collecting widgets will get you a cool ability, they’ll spend as much time or more doing it.