the player character’s past and changes how the characters in the present speak to him.
As a horror game, the plot was kept somewhat vague on purpose, with players needing
to fill in many of the blanks themselves. Furthermore, each player was likely to have a
different subsection of the overall story, since much of the story is contained in optional
side areas. Indeed, players who blaze through the game full speed ahead will miss a lot
of the plot, while those who play normally will probably see about half of what there is to
be found. This means there are many different ways to experience the story and players
will have different impressions of it depending on how they play. Indeed, during devel-
opment there was a lot of concern about players missing too much of the game by
running through it quickly since there are relatively few bottlenecks to block progres-
sion. In the end, though, through gameplay testing and the feedback we received after
the game shipped, we realized that almost all players will explore the game more than is
required of them merely because they are interested in it. Similarly, players will fight
creatures they don’t strictly need to. It is important to remember that players want to
play a game to have fun, and only the most masochistic will deliberately ruin their play
experience. Thus you don’t need to worry about the game’s exploits quite as much as
making sure the game is fun if played by cooperative players.
On the puzzle side of things,The Sufferingis somewhat less successful in terms of
non-linearity: many of the puzzles have multiple solutions, but an equal number do not.
Though most of the objectives were planned to have multiple ways of completing them,
we had several situations where one solution would involve an exciting payoff while the
other did not. Our producers were concerned gamers would miss too much by choosing
the alternate solution, and thus we ended up cutting some of the less exciting alterna-
tives. This leads to an important rule of thumb: if you want to have multiple solutions or
paths, they should all be equally compelling so players will not feel cheated at having
picked the much less spectacular path. Another failed bit of non-linearity inThe Suffer-
inginvolved a particular level that was initially designed to be extremely non-linear. In
this level, there were originally three separate paths leading to the level’s end.
Through our gameplay testing we learned that players were extremely confused by the
three paths, with almost all players looping back to the beginning of the level and then
being confused as to where they were. Admittedly this particular problem was due to
poor level design, but this is a case where non-linearity ended up hurting the player’s
experience, and we ended up reworking the level flow in the final game.
Non-linearity is an extremely powerful tool to use in designing a game, and the
above descriptions of the types of non-linearity a designer can employ may seem obvi-
ous to the reader. What is astonishing, then, is how many games fail to provide any
substantial non-linearity for players, instead insisting that players play through the
game on a single line from point A to point B. One reason for this is that creating all of
these non-linear elements can be quite time consuming. Consider that between point A
and B, we have the aforementioned challenges X, Y, and Z, but players only have to
overcome one of these challenges in order to progress. Players can then continue play-
ing through to the end of the game having never interacted with challenge Y or Z. As a
non-linear game, that is the players’ prerogative. The problem arises when a cost
accountant looks at the game and tries to figure out where the game’s budget can be
trimmed. Well, obviously, if Y and Z are not strictly necessary, why bother having them
at all? Why spend a lot of money on the programming, art, and design necessary to get Y
122 Chapter 7: The Elements of Gameplay