entropia

I’ve been playing Need For Speed: Most Wanted lately. I’m going through the “challenge series” mode, which involves racing against time through traffic. And it’s annoying me to no end. Traffic is spawned randomly, and if a car is spawned in front of you around a corner or over a hill, there’s no way to avoid it. No matter how well you drive, you can end up losing because of the traffic. Winning or losing depends on the random number generator.

I’ve also been playing Final Fantasy 5. I really like the Final Fantasy series, but one thing has always bothered me: the spells like Stone, Death, and Sleep. They’re extremely powerful when they work, but they only work occasionally. If the enemy casts one of these spells early in a battle, the battle could be either very easy or impossible, depending on whether it works.

I call this being Devastatingly Random, and it’s something games should never do. The outcome of a battle, or a race, should never be decided solely on random numbers. This is a symptom of bad game design and it is always avoidable.

In Final Fantasy, those spells could be modified so they’re not all-or-nothing. Sleep could make you sleepy after the first call, and actually put you to sleep the second time. Stone could slow you down gradually until finally stopping you. And death could be changed to only work after a certain number of calls.

In Need For Speed traffic could be predetermined. Or there could be indicators to show where traffic will be. Or it could simply not spawn in certain places like around corners or over hills.

A game does not need to be deterministic to avoid Devastating Randomness. One could argue that games like Tetris theoretically suffer from this, because a random series consisting only of “S” and “Z” shapes is unwinnable. But this is not the case because today’s pseudo random number generators are poor enough that that can never happen.

Plus, I only attribute the Devastatingly Random term to things that actually have a “good chance” of happening. Spell failures happen routinely in Final Fantasy. Bad traffic happens a lot in Need For Speed. But if something happens only once in a million or once in a hundred, I say chalk it up to “shit happens” and restart where you last saved.