Hades II: Focus in Action Game Design
In my previous post I mentioned the simplicity of Hades II's action verbs. Specifically, I mentioned the 3 offensive action verbs of Attack, Special, Cast; but we could add 3 more verbs in Move, Dash, and Hex, the final of which I somehow forgot to mention in my bit about resource management.
Hex, which does not necessarily make an appearance in every run of Hades II, is a new game mechanic you can access mid-run if you happen upon a boon from the moon goddess Selene. Most Hexes are conceptualized like a rarely used ultimate attack. Spending your mana on Omega moves charges your Hex meter, which can be unleashed when full with a dedicated button, encouraging players to spend their resources so that they are, well, forced to manage them.
Still, Hades II's set of verbs remains quite simple, and indeed you don't need to add Hex as a 6th thanks to the essential Hades formula of offering the player an either/or choice at the end of every encounter - don't want it, pick the other one, you'll at least get a conciliatory something.
The Hades series is one that could be said to be doing "a lot with a little," especially Hades the first. It's an admirable distinction that it absolutely lives up to, reflecting a careful and focused design philosophy.
However, is the contrast to this only failure? Doom Eternal, one of the most exhilarating action games I've personally ever played, certainly could never be said to be doing a lot with a little.
Doom Eternal's Action Verbs
Okay you got me, this post is secretly about Doom Eternal. This game's dictionary of action verbs could certainly be described as head-spinning. You don't have to read all this, you can just scroll past and say "wow, that's more verbs than Hades." Each is a dedicated controller element.
- Fire: Shoot the gun
- Aim: Unlike Hades, separate from the "Move" stick
- Switch weapon: You'll need to in order to manage ammo and to switch to better options for the situation
- Alt Fire: Something different with every gun - you just have to remember
- Switch weapon mod: Changes a weapon's alt fire to an alternate alt fire
- Chainsaw: Can be used on lesser demons, which makes them drop ammo to shoot the gun
- Move: To get to good places from which to shoot the gun
- Dash: You can have two in quick succession, but they'll recharge faster if you only use one
- Jump: Mobility, vertical edition
- Melee attack: Context-sensitively can either result in a wimpy punch that can only briefly stun the weakest demons, a finishing move to use on near-dead demons to extract healing pickups from them, or a strong shockwave punch that is charged up by the previously mentioned finishing move
- Flamethrower attack: Light enemies in front of you on fire, which makes them drop armor pickups when damaged
- Equipment launcher: Launches a grenade, good for controlling crowds
- Switch equipment: Switch equipment launcher between the damaging frag grenade and freezing ice grenade
- Crucible: Late game rare resource that can usually be used to remove one or two problematic demons from an encounter at the click of a (dedicated!) button - choose wisely
Whether you bothered to read all that or not, I'm sure you get the picture - Doom Eternal is a game that is doing a lot. So, how can it be focused? Well, let's start moving down the layers.
4 main goals achievable through all these actions could be described as Get Ammo, Get Health, Get Armor, and Relieve Pressure - the final of which is how I would sum up the process of identifying threatening targets, prioritizing one, and dealing with it. I could simplify this even more into Don't Die (Get Health, Get Armor) and Kill Demons (Get Ammo, Relieve Pressure). So, why all of this insane breadth for something that seemingly boils down to so little?
Every one of Doom Eternal's action gameplay mechanics is directly in service of one over-arching goal: make the player feel like the toughest badass that ever picked up a controller through their actions, not through the context of the setting or narrative. The game practically bends over backwards in an attempt to make the player find a pathway from something to "Get Health" to "Stay Alive" to "Be The Doomslayer," or from something to "Relieve Pressure" to "Kill Demons" to "Be The Doomslayer," with the caveat that the something must feel insanely cool.
On higher difficulty levels, this looks like every game mechanic coming together in a frenzy, tension beating up and down near its peak as you monitor cooldowns and resources, trying to extract every drop of Stay Alive and Kill Demons as possible.
In theory, lower difficulty levels allow the player to pick the pathway that feels most comfortable to them, trimming off the options that don't click with them or represent an undesirable mental load. Notably, regardless of difficulty level, all actions that replenish your resources are short-ranged, necessitating you to get into the danger rather than keeping it at a distance for the entire experience. Glory kills, one way to recover health familiar to veterans of Doom (2016), offer you invincibility throughout its animation much like chainsaw kills for ammo, leaving the player with a brief moment to collect their thoughts. Additionally, glory kills yield more health the less of it you have, keeping you safer than you always think you are, inspiring the feeling of constantly touching the razor's edge of defeat on the way to victory.
In practice, it's easy to see how this could still be disconcerting for players - it's not as if the games states its design philosophy to them in explicit terms, and being constantly drip-fed new buttons on your controller for multiple early levels can be overwhelming, or seem ridiculous or pointless in its detail. Nevertheless, the game offers paths to its core for those interested in trying it for what it is.
Okay, I guess we can talk about Hades II again
Hades II's mental map can be visualized as the inverse of Doom Eternal's - rather than a broad assortment of verbs that all lead to its center, a small assortment of closely-related verbs explode outward into many possibilities. What if I bring a different Keepsake at the start of my run? Maybe a Cast build this time? What if I try a Cast build with Hestia instead of Zeus?
This is a seemingly necessary action outline for a game in the action roguelike genre. Constantly looping through the same context is essential to the genre, and a diversity of bumps along the way to the same outcome does much to prevent this loop from overstaying its welcome while still preserving action simplicity.
I dunno how to close this one, I just thought it was interesting that "doing a lot with a little" and "doing one thing with a lot" are two kinds of focus but you don't hear much about the latter. Maybe I'll do a follow-up with a logical conclusion one day. Here's a cool Doom Eternal video.