design, Dynamic Sporadic Games

2019’s Game of the Year is a game with an identity crisis. It is a great many different games, and it is also none of them. Maybe this means it can be all things to all people, but I believe that at its core there is conflict which is holding it back.

The Way of the Samurai

Sekiro is at once familiar and yet original. Soulsbourne veterans will recognise many inherited mechanics, and there are similarities in the combat system, although Sekiro represents the fastest combat that From Software have produced.

It’s major innovation is the Posture and Vitality system. Vitality is your health, but in addition every character in the game has a Posture bar. This fills as they are attacked, or have their own attacks deflected. Should it ever reach its maximum then it is as if they had had their health reduced to zero, and may be struck down with a Deathblow. The two are also linked, as all characters (including Sekiro himself) recover Posture more slowly when their Vitality is lowered.

This system immediately gives the player options. You can defeat opponents by attacking their vitality, or by destroying their posture. Doing damage to their posture can be either by aggressively attacking them, or by reactively deflecting everything they throw at you. At your best, you are moving fluidly between the two, attacking when the enemy isn’t, and deflecting their blows as they attack you. This trade of blows is an interactive dance between Sekiro and foe, and has an entrancing rhythm to it.

More than giving options to the player though, it gives the designer options. Enemies can have fast or slow posture recovery. Small or large posture bars. Deep or shallow health pools. They can be very aggressive, forcing the player to spend most of their time deflecting, or more passive, reacting to Sekiro’s assault. This makes each dance partner feel different to fight in a way that goes beyond simply what their attack animations are.

The Big Bosses

At its heart, the thing Sekiro does and does well is bosses. Bosses take multiple Deathblows to defeat, on top of huge Posture and Vitality bars that take time to erode. They test the limits of the posture system and reward you with some of the most interactive Boss fights From have produced to date. Soulsbourne titles are no strangers to bosses after all, but they often fall into a pattern of Evading/Blocking until the enemy is finished with a sequence, and then dealing damage in a small window before they start again. Sekiro invites you to take the fight to the enemies face, and to not just evade their attacks but actively deflect each them. You can use their own attacks against them, bringing them closer to defeat with each one you turn aside.

Boss fights have two major problems though as the focus for a game. The first is that they are challenging. You aren’t expected to beat them the first attempt, but to work up to overcoming them with time. Second, they are traditionally roadblocks to progress, guarding the door to the next area. Together, these combine to form a game where you cannot progress until you defeat the next boss, and defeating that boss requires throwing yourself into failure repeatedly. This can be exhausting for a player. Worse, as Sekiro racks up over 40 bosses, your reward for beating one Boss is often… another Boss.

It’s the palette cleansing moments in-between where you are rewarded with new areas to explore that stop the game being entirely unrelenting, and give players a chance to breathe in the atmosphere of Ashina.

The Spaces Inbetween

In the spaces between Bosses Sekiro translates it’s mechanics to rank and file enemies. Vitality and Posture work identically, but regular enemies often take just a single well timed deflect to open themselves up for a Deathblow.

It also affords whole other avenues that are absent from the core boss fights; traversal and takedowns.

Sekiro is agile. Incredibly so compared to predecessor Soulsbourne titles. With his grappling hook, he is able to quickly zip to rooftops in a manner reminiscent of the Tenchu series. You can observe enemies from above, and even eavesdrop on conversations. You can also sprint and double jump, and clamber over obstacles, making short work of navigating around any space.

Along with this ability to be the apex predator in an area, Sekiro can also Deathblow enemies from behind if he can sneak up on them. By dropping from rooftops onto their heads, and luring them into alleys with bits of ceramic, Sekiro can clear through many areas of the game without having to trade blows with the enemy.

This actually blends back nicely into the boss fights at times, as almost every mini-boss in the game has at least one method by which you can start a fight by backstabbing them, immediately robbing them of one of their (usually two) lives, and making the subsequent fight less of a hurdle.

There are two other notable differences versus previous Soulsbourne titles. For one, the density of Idols (the bonfire like checkpoints) is incredibly high, to the point that every combat area has at least one, and often two. Secondly, the game affords very few shortcuts, and opening them up does not represent a significant moment.

A Clash of Swords

With these things established, the main contention I feel in the game is between the bosses and the spaces inbetween. The game is, undoubtedly, made for the boss fights. The core innovative mechanics bend towards them. A game is not built on bosses alone though, and the arenas between them need to provide some respite before springing another on you.

Not only is this space non-existant in some cases, the affordances the game gives you for dealing with these spaces render them almost frictionless to encounter. If I were inclined, I could easily use the movement tech to all but skip each area, dancing across the rooftops to the next Idol. That does mean I would miss out on all the loot temptingly sprinkled around the area though. Therefore, the most optimal way that Sekiro can collect that is to stealth kill every single minion. This never gets harder than it is at the start of the game. No new mechanics to have to deal with when being stealthy. No patrol routes to have to observe and digest. No new enemy designs that make it awkward, or require new tools. Just a swathe of immobile opponents to dispatch.

Both these mechanics actively work to shrink the areas between bosses. These areas actually often contain new, tougher enemies. Movesets you’ve never encountered before, offering new challenge. Except the movement and stealth allows you to ignore or sideline any of that in favour of efficient progress. From Software have produced content that simply isn’t helping players pace their progress through the game, and a lot of the effort is completely wasted as players never even stop long enough to find out what makes them special and unique.

Part of this is due to an absence of a core loop of Soulsbourne games. In it’s brethren, you would find exploring a new area to be fraught with peril. New foes that you don’t know how to fight competently. An area that has a layout you haven’t discovered yet. Shortcuts unopened that will make passage through easier. Sekiro neatly slices through all of this; you don’t need to know how to fight enemies if they never get a chance to draw their sword, you have an easy ability to get up high and get the lay of the land, and traversing through is already trivial.

This also fouls one of the other core mechanics of Soulsbourne games; the Flask. Dark Souls is a battle of attrition, as you work your way forward against the world and the enemies in it. Every so often you stop to take a swig as the environment saps your lifeforce. Each time, you get better at fighting the enemies along the way and get a bit further, until eventually you find another Bonfire at which to rest. The more times you die along the way, the bigger the cache of Souls builds on your corpse as you pick it up over and over. When you finally do break through, this cache will surge you forward in power, trying to balance out how easy you should’ve found it. The flask represents how far you can push forward. But with Sekiro’s freedom of movement it’s no longer a linear battle of attrition through a level. Scooting through is easy, whether stealth killing enemies or not. In boss fights, it feels even less relevant, as the balance of vitality and posture is almost completely lost on the player character. If your flask upgrades were all just in your health bar, you could feel the posture recovery become tougher as the fight went on, and have other consumables that factored into buffing that.

There are other vestigal mechanics from Soulsbourne titles. Money and Exp (both used to “level up”) have half lost on death. Loss of progress on death is almost the critics definition of a “Souls-like” game, but it almost always comes with some way to recover it. Sekiro doesn’t, it’s just lost. So unlike a Soulsbourne where every run to the Boss increases the payout for victory, Sekiro just flattens out any progress you have and won’t let you get any more until you beat the Boss. I don’t see any reason to punish the player in this way other than simply because it’s a trope of these titles.

Hero of a Thousand Faces

In the end, Sekiro is a mix of different titles. It’s part Dark Souls, part Tenchu, part Super Punch-Out.

For me the Boss battles, it’s Super Punch-Out DNA, is where it’s at its strongest. To support that, it needs the space between to help efficiently pad those out. The movement options and stealth trivialise and shrink those sections, and the vestigal mechanics from Soulsbourne titles almost feel there by default rather than designed to work with the systems of the game.

It could lean more heavily into just being straight up Samurai souls, with less movement and stealth and a more attrition based focus in those spaces between Bosses, but i’m actually glad to see From Software spread their wings a little, and hope they will go even further in future.

Sekiro could also be a great stealth game, but then it’s arena and enemy design needs to vary and build into that in the way a series like Arkham does, with many tools for stealth takedowns.

With Elden Ring on the horizon, and the possibility of more titles in a Sekiro franchise, i’m eager to see what changes and focus those titles receive. I just hope that they make some sharper cuts to define the edges of what those games are, so they can truly revel in the parts that make them excellent

Cryptic Past

At the start of 2020, Bungie set the Destiny community one of it’s most unique challenges yet. In turn, that led to some of the most unique interactions within that community.

Bungie is no stranger to setting cryptic quests up for it’s playerbase. The Reddit community /r/RaidSecrets is founded on these mysterious puzzles. This time last year, the Niobe Labs Torment caused almost insufferable pain to the groups who attempted to unravel it’s complex clues. Even 15 years ago in 2004, they were starting along this path with I Love Bees. It’s one of the many things that keeps Destiny exciting as a live title for some. There’s always the possibility that some hidden Quest or Lore is kicking around in the game just waiting to be discovered, and every new update could bring undocumented changes that hint at them. The rewards for this vigilant dissection of every piece of the game have also been wide and varied, including a real-life replica spear hidden in the woods in upstate New York.

But Niobe Labs may have been the breaking point. Dense, esoteric references and clues slowly drove those solving it mad. Were they making progress? What was the next wild theory they could try? The community was rife with suggestions, at time becoming increasingly frustrated that those leading the charge would ignore their ideas, resolute that their revelation must be the key.

The Corridors of Time puzzle is, from that perspective, Bungie’s greatest riddle yet.

Let’s Do The Time Walk Again

The Corridors of Time are a new location added as part of Season of the Dawn. They are a non-euclidean space where you walk through time itself. Previously, they had only been used as a space between combat zones as part of the main Story missions that comprised this Season. However, as of January 14th they became available to access freely. Walking aimlessly through them would lead nowhere though, and on that day Bungie also gave us directions.

This would be Step 1 of the puzzle, and would follow Bungie’s design philosophy from Raids. They first introduce an idea, and by encounter design ensure you have fully understood it before you can progress. This lets them build on that idea later, because they know that you have learned how a mechanic works.

As soon as the weekly reset occurred, and Osiris granted players access to the Corridors of Time, it was noted that Obelisks (a key feature of the Seasonal activities) were displaying symbols on them that correlated to the signposted doors in the Corridors of Time. Players quickly realised that following these symbols in a specific sequence would lead them to a mysterious grave in the corridors themselves. A new Lore entry would be acquired, the first of 19 in a Lore Book. But approaching the grave itself would teleport the player away out of the room. With every passing hour, the sequences changed, more Lore was acquired, and every time the grave remained out of reach.

However, a new pattern was also emerging. Each tomb had, below the floor, a unique motif. Experienced Destiny riddlers knew that there was more to this than met the eye. As the day progressed, those 19 designs would become key to the second learning. Each subterranean pattern was a jigsaw piece. The complex codes on the edges showed players how to put them together, and that completed 19-piece jigsaw formed a map. Along the path from the Entrance to the Exit, the route passed over 11 symbols. When players followed this route, they would find a final resting place, receive an Emblem, and once again observe an arrangement of symbols under their floor. Unlike the first set of puzzle pieces though, it seemed that every player was getting their own unique set of symbols.

Taking what was learned from before, the next step seemed obvious. We were going to build a bigger map, together. But nobody was prepared for quite how big that map was going to be.

Piecing it all Together

Producing this map would be an epic undertaking, and there are 6 major steps to doing so. First players had to Run the corridors, and take a Screenshot at the end. They then needed to Upload this, where it would be Transcribed, and put into a Spreadsheet, from which a Map was formed.

These six major steps would form the basis of various bottlenecks and optimisations over the next week, and I found what happened here particularly interesting. First though, I want to give respect to a lot of the unseen and unheard people who made this possible. They acted as Producers, helping everyone organize towards this common goal. Forging an efficient team and process in a week is a monumental task, not least of which when that team numbers in the thousands.

In the beginning, there was chaos. Numerous different spreadsheets, publically open for any and all to input their data from their own runs. Transcription notation differed from group to group. The amount of data available was small, and quality low, so anyone even attempting to do any mapping was getting nowhere.

One of the early attempts at optimisation aimed to condense 3 whole steps of the process. A web-page allowed players to recreate the pattern as it appeared on their screens, and would turn that into one consistent notation to be added to spreadsheets. This ultimately failed, for numerous reasons. A small bug in it meant that the generated notation would actually differ between different browsers, but whilst this could be fixed there were two greater problems. It left no paper trail, and depended on the community to be able to accurate read and copy the patterns from their screens. Without any original screenshot for verification, the validity of any notation could never be cross checked in the event of conflicts found. There are also many intricacies and ambiguities in reading the symbols, which was easy for an expert eye, but incredibly difficult for an untrained one.

It was bridging over one of the main divides across these activities. Some of these tasks were easy for anyone to do. Some were difficult for the untrained, but easy once they had experience. Finally, some were trivial for a computer, but very difficult for a human. Running the Corridors, taking a Screenshot and Uploading it were all relatively trivial for every single player of Destiny. Analysing those screenshots and correctly notating them required expertise, but also discipline to be able to do it for longs periods. Finally, finding patterns and matches to assist those entering the data and build the maps is a task best done by software.

By the first weekend, these divisions were clear. Optimisations were happening for the wider community; Running became a matter of getting a streamer to the end of the route and then having viewers join and leave their party in succession, avoiding having to do a time consuming run. Submitting uploaded screenshots became more routine through Forms (although many were still collated by hand). However, it placed a huge bottleneck on exactly one part of the process; the transcription. Transcription required accurately turning an image into 49 pieces of data and entering them correctly into a spreadsheet. As the number of unique hexes grew two things became clear; this jigsaw was a gigantic 5,000 pieces, and increasingly screenshots being transcribed were simply duplicates.

The first major optimisation came in early detection of duplicates. The spreadsheet had already had automated duplicate detection built into it, but now that was triggering much earlier in the process after just a couple of links. They could stop transcribing duplicate hexes earlier and move on to the next. But as the map grew and became more complete, one act of brilliance massively accelerated the final stages. Bounties. Key pieces which help build the critical path across the maze were being requested, with the spartan information known about them. The link codes around the outside were known, but the walls which would form the maze itself and the symbol on it were not. This leveraged the huge power of the community, and the response was phenomenal to behold. 20,000 viewers on the stream being asked to see if they had found the pieces needed in their traversal of the Corridors, and within minutes each was found. A huge step above hoping the next screenshot would be the one they needed.

Throughout this, mapping code written days ago continued to give everyone involved hope. It was the visual end of everything they were doing, and it’s almost organic growing form gave everyone the impetus to surge forward and do more. A shout out to @tj09, who built awesome automated tools for this which meant that the map could be seen growing with every new line transcribed.

In the end, at 9am on Monday morning some 130+ hours after it all began, the solution was found and players surged to collect their prize. Nothing could live up to the expectations built up over the week though.

A Legacy

Whilst I doubt that the reward will live on long in players memories, the process by which it was obtained certainly will for those involved. The Corridors of Time represents a significantly leap forward in how Bungie designs their puzzles.

First and foremost, it was an inclusive collaborative affair. The previous ones were competitive. Who would get world first? Clues and discoveries were secrets to be hoarded for fear of giving other teams an advantage. Here it all but forced those teams to work together and share data to find the solution. More importantly, it allowed the wider community to be a useful part of the process from beginning to end.

Second, they learnt from themselves with how they designed Raid Encounters. Each step built upon the previous, and required complete understanding before moving forward. But the next steps were logical, methodical, and followed on as well. Rarely was it unclear that the path we were on was correct.

Finally, the solution was continuous, not discrete. It didn’t come about all at once because someone suddenly got it right, it was everyone getting it right hour after hour day after day that moved it inexorably forward to it’s conclusion.

I’m eagerly awaiting the next iteration of Bungie’s cryptic riddles, as they continue to improve and iterate their own quirky and unique way of interacting with the community.

Sekiro : Old Habits Die Twice