Infinite Spawners

November 23, 2010 2:40 am Sir Haxington Game Development, Gaming

Hey! Non-fiction stuff for a second!

I recently finished Call of Duty: Black Ops on Veteran difficulty. Yep, the game I left during pre-production.

It’s interesting leaving a game two years ago and finally getting to play it. Overall I thought the game was a good experience. However, one thing that stood out was the use of infinite spawners in various places throughout the game.

It made me think back on a time I was being interviewed for a design position. Someone asked me what I thought of infinite spawners. I told them I didn’t care for them in general but that they can be used in the right context.

They thought I was wrong. I’m glad I didn’t end up working for them.

Now, I don’t think infinite spawners in COD:BO really added anything to the experience. In fact, I think they were misused. The two clear examples are the indoor area soon after you shoot down the giant rocket from the sky. Immediately afterward you enter into a building and guy after guy floods into a hallway until you move up. The other was the defend Khe Sanh level, where you have to move down the hill and stab barrels with your knife.

The trick of course is that there’s a trigger that prevents more guys from spawning in, or at least some script condition that needs to be met. Once you hit that trigger or that condition is met, you’re good. But until then, enemies will spawn in and move to the cover point you just killed his predecessor on. Forever.

The problem is use of infinite spawners in the improper context will break immersion and frustrate the player. In the case of COD, the developers are trying to provide players with a hyper-realistic experience. Sure, there are arcadey elements to the game (the HUD, button prompts, zombie modes and so fourth) that always impose the risk of immersion breaking, but players by and large ignore these affordances and accept them as part of their regular experience. Once the player is immersed and is accepting your experience, the last thing you want is for them to start noticing that… gasp… they are in fact playing a video game! Please stay and enjoy this wonderful thing we made for you. Please continue to eat out of the palm of our hand.

So when are infinite spawners okay to use? When it won’t break immersion. For example, when we made Nazi Zombies, the intention was for the player to always die at the end. Hopelessness. Survival. Endless waves. In this case, infinite spawners add to the experience, even though there are breaks between round and so on. But there is no end until YOU die, so technically, infinite spawning is what defines the core experience. This isn’t to say Treyarch could add an end to the infinite rounds (like Horde mode in Gear of War) and the experience would be weakened, but it would definitely change it.

Another example? Borderlands. You can leave a zone, come back, and the zone will be repopulated with more AI to fight. This is of course to continue the main gameplay loop involving sweet loot. Taking out the respawning of AI would break this loop and make the game less fun. You’d just be running around an open environment with a bunch of corpses not getting rewarded. Immersion would be broken if infinite spawns were taken from Borderlands. To be fair, you still get a feeling of accomplishment when clearing an area. But you’re not mad when the AI come back… because you want treats.

One more? Bioshock. Again, another loot loop there, but this one is on the borderline of immersion breaking. I’ve been in numerous discussions where gamers thought re-spawning splicers have bothered them. They initially bothered me as well, until I got used to the game and accepted it. However, I’m with many others in that their spawn system violates my basic desire to have a feeling of “I cleared this place, it should be safe now.” Bioshock 2 wasn’t as bad since the backtracking was limited compared to the first. I think this bothers people in this series because the game has a heavier narrative influence, unlike Borderlands. Guys popping back into the world breaks the narrative flow a bit and reminds you it’s a game.

As a player, I know the frustration first hand of seeing guy after guy after guy go to the same cover node. The experience then becomes “try to beat the system” not “Assault the Vietcong!” or whatever universe I’m immersed in at the time. Now I’m only worried about “getting to the next part” so I can “advance the game” instead of “playing the game” and “enjoying the story.” It’s a mindset players get into, but it’s important to recognize. Sources of frustrations are typically not a good thing in games.

The easy fix? Do what was done in the rest of the game. Set the wave counters to like three or five instead of endless and forever. Admittedly, five is high probably too high for most COD encounters. Plus, it has high potential to feel just like an infinite spawner. In fact, the player will begin to think it’s an infinite spawner.

Which is another problem. On WaW, we consciously avoided using infinite spawners as a design directive, but gamers accused us of using them anyway. 99% of players can’t tell the difference between a infinite spawner and set of enemies with five spawn waves built in. By the time most players see the fourth guy go to the same spot to die like his three buddies before him, they’ll be trying to move forward anyway. The fun has been exhausted. Time to move one and see the next thing.

On Veteran difficulty in COD games, the problem of infinite spawners are compounded because players are forced to move slow and methodically. An infinite spawner sticks out like a sore thumb.

Where am I going with this? Really think about the experience you are trying to offer. Consider if putting infinitely spawning anything in your game is really worth it. Sometimes it is, usually it isn’t.