Risk versus Reward versus gaming

 Dicey

Recently I got back into playing Persona, what with the recent reveal of the mobile Persona game rocketering our way, and in doing so I became intimately reacquainted with how heart-wrenchingly 'risk and reward' that game's set-up is. To be clear, on normal difficulties the game is nice and decently paced for your typical RPG player, but on my chosen difficulty (Risky) the game presents a heart pounding escalation of consequence that mounts on the player for every moment they choose to grind for experience by holding a gun to the head of the single most valuable resource in the known universe- time. Which got me really thinking once more about the impact of these sorts of systems outside the narrow scope of Souls-like games because we talk about them literally all the damn time on this blog. In fact, I technically just mentioned them again so time to take my 'bingo' shot, I guess.

So to explain the Persona situation, first I have to preface this by revealing that Persona 4 is one of those rare few titles in which your party based RPG demands the survival of the principal character. Not only is the main hero not allowed to die, they're not even allowed to fall unconsious in battle otherwise you are kicked roughly back to the title screen. Yes, Persona 4 doesn't even send you to the load screen, or a recent checkpoint. In normal difficulties this isn't the end of the world, because the game will autosave everytime you cross a floor meaning that the typical grinder can't expect to lose more than 10 or so battles worth or progress assuming they commit to totally wiping a floor clean before moving on. On Risky difficulty, however, that dynamic changes considerably. Because on Risky, there are no autosaves. Only manual saves. And when battling in Persona, the only place to manual save is at the nexus between dungeons outside of every battle space, which you can only reach by walking out the dungeon through the way you came (which would require passing through roughly 10-15 floors worth of respawning enemies) or to use a limited resource to teleport. (Thankfully the game allows you to pick back up the dungeon from the furthest floor you reached.)

What this system essentially does is place a premium price on how often you can rest and save between runs, beyond the general time limit of the ticking days for which certain story milestones must be met. (or else the game ends completely) Players on this level have to commit to a run in the dungeon and pay the price for not completing it fully, whether because their team are running low on precious resource or because a presented boss simply isn't feasibly killable at their current level. Persona doesn't pull it's punches when it comes to tough bosses, either; being unable to easily beat a presented boss because your level just can't withstand their hits is in no way an unlikely scenario. So grinding runs are a gamble, dedicating your time to wiping up trash mobs for XP all the while being nervous of how many times you can feasibly leave the dungeon to 'bank' that XP (by saving) and the mounting risk of all that grinding time being utterly wasted if you get one lucky mob who slams your MC with a 'god-fist' dealing 900 damage. (That would probably even one-shot someone with a physical resistance shield active- giving that move to trash mobs is just nasty.)

There's nothing more crushing for anyone in life than the feeling that the time you just put into something was wasted. In fact, it's a constant battle with modern game design to try and develop systems in such a way that players feel like they're constantly moving towards some sort of goal. Rougelites are a spectacular example of this, presenting an ostensibly 'one run/ one life' system wherein death resets everything, whilst at the same time typically presenting background systems that unlock new tools or variations for each run; alongside the general game knowledge that comes from mastering those sorts of games. For a title to straight up slap you in face for failure is actually shockingly hardcore for a game of the modern age. And Persona does not care to tell you that have wasted your time by playing poorly. (Thanks Teddy, I'll cry myself to sleep now.)

But when happens when we start turning the dial to the opposite extreme? What happens when the reward comes without the risk? Or, to put it another way, how do you pull off a situation where the amount of work put in by the player doesn't correspond to their reward in an appropriate fashion, because they are either under or over rewarded? World of Warcraft had a problem similar to this early on it it's life cycle, where one of the early game quest rewards gifted a supremely useful utility tool that granted a buff to general world movement speed. However this item was given at the end of a fairly innocuous starter quest, and as a 'choice reward' against a pretty useless alternative. With the lack of purpose put behind the reward, alongside the relative freshness of most players to the game at that point, several people ended up passing on the movement boost not realising it to be a pretty unique enchantment and passing it off as early game trash.

Another example I always like to think of would be Grand Theft Auto Online, which tied it's economy and it's microtransaction store to the same in-game reward money system. This meant that all new game content could be grinded with in-game money to access, all it took was the dedication and perseverance to sit down and do it. Of course, this also meant that there were a few quests that drew people in for how relatively quick it was to do versus how much potential payout it would dish. The high-paying 'Rooftop Rumble' could be finished in minutes if you knew what you were doing, and grinding it endlessly for hours at a time could net you virtual millions, all from blowing up the same parking lot full of bad guys over and over like a zombie. Yes, I was one of those zombies.

To combat this, Rockstar ended up fundamentally changing how GTA Online rewards it's missions, by instead of prioritising the actual mission, the onus would fall on the play time. The longer you spent in a mission, the closer to full payout you would earn, with fifteen minutes or more required to score the most amount of money. Of course, this had the knock on effect of killing momentum on every activity as being good at doing any sort of task ended up punishing you in the long run. Rockstar would make a similar mistake with Red Dead Redemption 2 Online, in which they punished people for completing more than one activity within an hour by heavily cutting each subsequent reward within that cooldown period. It's their bread and butter, so you know why they're trying to thin out grinders, but when you remove that element of reward, the investment of time and dedication to risk becomes utterly moot and momentum killing.

Higher concepts of game design aren't really the things that get discussed when making your bog standard game. A lot of the indistincts have already been figured out and those that want to make a genre title can merely follow those guidelines, but the trailblazers know that messing with these guts of design are what makes or breaks the gameplay formula. And as with everything in art and cooking there is no right cure all for everyone, I'm sure there's many who would find that Persona 4 situation I explained utterly hellish, and sometimes I'm right there with them, but when you know your audience and what they're typically willing to accept and be attracted to, you know exactly how to create the right feeling reward tapered by the exact measurements of risk.