I’m Declaring War On Tedium

Over the course of the last year I have gone and devoured every beat-em-up I could get my compulsive hands on. It's been a lot fun because I love these games to death, but it's also been very frustrating because oftentimes I am required to perform very trivial tasks in order to progress. I realize this problem extends deep into many other genres as well, but it's particularly sticky with modern beat-em-ups because the features and mechanics that have been stacked on top of them to make them more appealing and engaging are inherently tedious.

The worst offender of these modern mechanisms is story, and the cutscenes that so frequently accompany them. Designers have taken the perfectly scant stories of the old arcade action games and erroneously assumed that the player needs a plotline and cutscenes and dialogue to stay engaged inside an action game environment. This simply isn't true, all the player needs is a motivating concept, i.e. save your girlfriend or clean up the streets. None of these require intricate explanations or drawn out custscenes, they just need to be openly stated. It is very important to note that I am addressing beat-em-up gamers here. If you were to kill the story and the cutscenes in a Final Fantasy game, you would alienate the people who play those games and consider those features to be core components of the experience. But no one has ever picked up a great beat-em-up with great gameplay and said "I don't want to play this great beat-em-up because there just isn't enough story." And while we're talking about it, let me just say this; I simply cannot excuse the hugely offensive decision that many designers have made to not let the player skip a custscene.

Feature unlocking is another huge distributor of tedium in action games and it must die immediately. It makes plenty of sense in other types of games for other types of players who are motivated by Pavlovian reward structures and love to see new things come into their possession at regular intervals. But again, the typical action gamer is playing your beat-em-up in the first place because they want to experience the sensation and thrill of combat. Anything and everything that is put behind a locked door in a game of this nature is something the player could have been given right from the start to increase their overall enjoyment of the game. I'm assuming the popular logic here is that you want the player to be motivated to complete your game or to perform certain tasks, and that unlockables act as a carrot in front of their face. This simply isn't true, all the player needs is a fun game. No one has ever picked up a great beat-em-up with great gameplay and said "I don't want to play this great beat-em-up because there just isn't enough things to unlock. There's too many features and mechanics available to me right from the start and I'm overwhelmed with fun!" And while we're talking about it, let me just say this; I simply cannot excuse the hugely offensive decision that many designers have made to make me unlock amazing weapons and gameplay modes for absolutely no reason.

Game structure is a much more subtle problem but no less important, both in and out of the main gameplay mode. There are just too many places in a typical game where the player must sit through something that takes way too long to play itself out. Why must the player sit through a bunch of logo/loading screens and then push a bunch of buttons and watch some irrelevant cutscenes to start playing the really fun game? Why does the player have to complete arbitrary chores over and over again? Why is this vehicle segment or quick-time-event so lengthy? There are too many times that the game puts the player in this awkward position where they are up against a tedium stack and that's when players stop playing. Quit doing this to the people trying to enjoy your game! No one has ever picked up a great beat-em-up with great gameplay and said "I don't want to play this great beat-em-up because there's just not enough time in between the fun parts of this great gameplay." And while we're talking about it, let me just say this; I simply cannot excuse the hugely offensive decision that many designers have made to make me run through an entire section of level just to make another attempt to defeat a monotonous boss.

I intend to circumvent these problems entirely with Aztez. The player is not going to have to sit through anything they don't want to. Anything that can be turned off or shortened CAN be if the player chooses. If a mechanic makes the game more fun, it will be available from the start. The goal here is to eliminate all of those moments where the player just wants to get back to having fun.