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Quality of life mechanics that are designed in one way or another to ease friction are a cornerstone of game design; it is one of those things that is neither inherently good or bad, but can be consequential depending on how it is applied, and in this video I try to examine uses of it that are more effective than others.
Thumbnail by @hotcyder
Audio Edited by @HeavyEyed
Additional Footage from @eurothug4000, @HeavyEyed, @yakkocmn and @peterspittech
Music Used:
Alpha – C418
Danny – C418
Lurelin Village – Manaka Kataoka, Yasuaki Iwata, and Hajime Wakai
Rooftops of Svartrau – Nikola Kołodziejczyk
Shelter – Yasumasa Kitagawa
Westwardly Winds – Trigg & Gusset
Life at Sea – Brian Tyler
Prolouge – Motoi Sakuraba
The Endless Oceans – Brian Tyler
Summer: Village Life – Hidehito Ikumo
The Trees Will Watch – Hannah Williams
Pictures of the Past – James Primate
Chapters:
0:00 Minecraft’s Perfect Loop
4:15 The Wide Umbrella of ‘Quality of Life’
6:11 Different Approaches to Simplifying Mechanics
10:06 Quality Across The Industry
12:41 Why R1?
17:12 When The “Same” Game Has Different Goals
21:28 Quality For Whose Life?
source
List of games in order of first appearance (unless I missed something):
Minecraft
Dark Souls Remastered
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the WIld
Dave The Diver
Hades 2
Tchia
The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker Remastered
Echo Weaver
The Last Of Us Part 2
Citizen Sleeper
Pokemon Violet
Death Stranding 2
The Blood of Dawnwalker
Pragmata
Blue Prince
Prince of Persia: Lost Crown
Ghost of Tsushima
Hollow Knight: Silksong
Mina the Hollower
Elden Ring
Kingdom Come Deliverance
Rain World
Lies of P
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
Pseudoregalia
Baldur’s Gate 3
BioShock
Assassin’s Creed 2
Grand Theft Auto 5
The Witcher 3
Horizon Zero Dawn
Grand Theft Auto 6
God of War Ragnarok
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced
Dark Souls 2
Demon’s Souls
Dark Souls 3
Assassin’s Creed Origins
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
Final Fantasy 7 Remake
Resident Evil 4 Remake
Shadow of the Colossus Remake
Resident Evil 2 Remake
Persona 3 Reload
Resident Evil 3 Remake
Fields of Mistria
Stardew Valley
Banquet For Fools
aha, there's the rainworld. Love it. I've been playing queen's domain nonstop and it feels like something from a couple decades ago, and not just visually
18:18 Hey, I see what you did there haha, thyme..
19:17 I really like the idea that mystria has those cut out. I got the game recently and haven't played yet. The only thing I didn't like about stardew is to actually get everything done I feel like I needed my excel spreadsheet of what to grow and when and what to do on what day. That being said I really like stardew and don't want my games to homogenize.
13:38
for Sharters
Hey Razbuten, not sure if you'll see this.
Your videos are really calming for me. Often times, when I'm having a tough day, I like to take a look at your channel. Sometimes I don't even watch a video, I just scroll through your account and remember watching your videos. It's weird, I know. But your videos help bring me peace
Hope your doing well in life
I've been playing the Zelda remake and it's been very interesting to me how different the game feels to never have to save and close it (cause you just put the Switch in standby). In the original having to save and shutdown the console and potentially have to re-traverse some part of the world or dungeon (as you would always reset to either the dungeon entrance or a specific place in the world if you didn't save in a dungeon) really makes the game loop feel different.
my main problem with fields of mistria was that eventually all days start to feel the same but i did really like most of the quality of live improvements over stardew
Really interesting food for thoughts as always.
Thanks !
I like games with cheats. You play normally, but when the friction because greater than the fun you can cheat past it. I lastly used cheats in the newest DLC for Warcraft 3, where there was some stages i just hated, but i wanted to progress the story.
I personally don't agree that you can call minecraft bed a quality of life improvement. To me a QoL change is something that allows you to achieve the thing you want to do, easier. I think it could be either an accessibility setting, or a complete change of core gameplay loop as a way to progress the challenges the player has to face.
If my goal as a player is to sell all junk items from my inventory, then quality of life improvement is a button that allows me to do that with a single button press, instead of dreading through, clicking each item seperately. Now, if the designer wanted the player to spend time investigating each item seperately as part of the gameplay challenge, then creating a button that gets rid of the challenge completely, cannot be considered a quality of life improvement, because it gets rid of the main challenge. Now, it still can exists, but I would say that at that point, it would be an accessibility setting, rather than quality of life.
Let's assume that you have a challenge for the player in the game, and getting enough money to buy new equipment will help the player beat it. Now, let's say that the main part of the gameplay is exploration, and collecting stuff around the world. The part the designer wants the player to do, is exploration itself, not selling stuff. Now, the use case for the player would be: "As a player, I want to sell all junk from my inventory so that I can buy new equpment and beat the main challenge." Having a button that allows the player to just sell everything, that is considered junk, is great. It's an awesome quality of life improvement, because it helps the player continue with the real challenge.
But let's assume that the challenge is that the player has to sell stuff, but sell it in an optimal way that makes mathematical sense and gives the biggest profit. Now the challenge, is the selling itself. Giving the player option to sell all items in an optimal way, would no longer be a quality of life improvement. As it would interfere with the intentional challenge of the game. But, it could be an accessibility setting for people that are not great at math, but want to see the story, or partake in other challenges in the game. For them, having that button allows them to skip the challenge they don't want to deal with, for whatever reason. For very intense fights, people might just have movement impairments that do not allow them to beat the challenge at all. It's up to the people to decide if they want to face the challenge or not.
Another thing, is that at some point, we learn how to do the thing, and we don't want to do it anymore. Games are about learning. Learning the animations of enemies, optimal strategies, being able to spot an collectible in the jungle. At some point, we learned the thing and get bored of it. That's why we sometimes have to give the players options to skip some of the parts that get less important, switch the core gameplay loop a bit to keep it interesting, and allow the player to learn new stuff. If every boss in DS was the same boss, then it would get extremenly flat and people would call it out as boring. The challenge was beaten, they want something new. Surviving the 1000th night in minecraft is just not that interesting as it was the first time.
For R1 being the attack button: I think the main benefit is not moving the camera, it's dodge and attack being separated, because in the past they used to be both on face buttons. Like in Hollow Knight the attack is on X (xbox layout) and jumping is on A, so you can't hold down charge attacks while moving around easily
Now, dodge on R1 would also possibly work like you said, though in games with jumping it'd still create a hole in your moveset
This makes me think about the mechanic in certain games that ask you to perform a little minigame to achieve some goal (usually cooking or crafting) : often, if you do it enough times, the game will offer to automate the minigame for you (sometimes at the cost of quality). The core gameplay loop used to be about performing the minigames efficiently, but as soon as they are considered to be mastered, they are eliminated, and the crafting/cooking system becomes menu navigation or a single button-click affair.
I feel like games that do this are not confident in the quality of their minigames and the developers realised that they get tedious so eliminated them. It would be interesting to find a game with a competent set of crafting/cooking minigames that can stand the test of repeated play !
Regarding R1 vs square for the attack button. I've just been playing Control Resonant which uses the square/triange attack scheme by default, and remapping it to r1/2 has made the game much more enjoyable, and it's not because of the camera movement while attacking. it's the _dodging_. and jumping really.
The first abilities you unlock are dodge attacks and perfect dodge, and jumping is very important as aerial combos are half the game. That means jump, dodge, light and heavy attacks were all on the face buttons, and you're in constant need of all of them.
Tapping (and sometimes holding) between all the face buttons in fast succession was extremely imprecise and uncomfortable with my thumb alone. As action games have gotten very reliant on dodge i think it pushed the attack button away from the face buttons, since dodge (and jump) are such important actions nowadays.
It's worth remembering that the Minecraft bed also acts as a spawn point, so it being craftable early makes exploration a lot more fun and promotes risk taking. Without a bed players would just being hanging around the world spawn.
For the last few months I was playing Yume 2kki, a surrealistic walking sim where you need to navigate a set of bizarre world and collect 30 or so collectables. The game gives little to no info on what to do and where to go and so I had to make a exponentially expending flowchart just to make sense out of it.
This realy enhanced my experience: having an eurika moment when you realise that that one distant location is actually connected to the main hub and utter confusion of return to the game after multiweek break and trying to deduce what I even meant by "Ominous Grizzlyland" and "Twin Peaks Church".
I know that there is a extensive wiki but I will go there only when I would have no idea where else I could go, which won't happen any time soon becouse this game feels infinite.
I would never have described the things you're talking about as quality of life updates.
To me, quality of life features are things that reduce busy work without affecting the core gameplay. A system that removes the need to look up information on a wiki, a crafting selector in which you can select recipes that have already been discovered instead of dragging the right materials to the right slots, a clone tool that allows you to place a copy of a city block in one go instead of clicking a dozen buttons to build a copy yourself.
To me, quality of life is about removing the friction between the player and the game. It's about reducing the way the interface gets in the way of playing the game.
Finally someone said it (I'm bad at words)
The food version of a "modernized game" is chicken nuggies
I think we fundamentaly have different definitions of quality of life. Minecraft's bed isn't QoL – it's a mechanic that player do or don't engage with based on their preferred experience playing sandbox game – a game about choices. QoL otoh is there to reduce or remove boring, repeatable, menial tasks like moving materials from chest to chest. Neither are progression systems that reduce or remove obstacles – they are rewards or ways to evolve gameplay beyond played out patterns. When the game (ie. Dawnwalker) lets player skip too much of core gameplay, that's bad design, not bad QoL.
14:07 I actually started playing claw because of ds. Has served me well over the years, especially with the souls like boom we have had recently
What does QoL add? Starting with that, then rambling about other spots in the video in a reply.
QoL is meant to either make the game more accessible, or just more fun. Fun is subjective. Great examples relatable to a lot of us, Speed Runners and Hardcore players. I don't find fun in either of those categories. Do they add to the game? Oh yeah. The players use things an average player probably wouldn't, both intended game design and pushing it past its limit as well as game breakings bugs and exploits. But I won't touch these features still.
Options, customization, difficulty modifiers, accessibility… I don't care what you call it, there's a variety of things I think more games should be implementing more features the players can choose to use or not. I have a number of friends with varying levels of gaming experience and interest as well their overall competence in games. Different tastes, different frustrations. What do these things add? Well it may be the difference in actually hooking in one player for like 4x the standard playtime because they're really enjoying how different the game feels thanks to something like a global 2x speed or just quitting the game without finishing it. Guilty of that. (I cut out a rant here)
Yes, there are QoL features that have direct impact on gameplay. They change mechanics or possibly even hurt the atmosphere. A QoL thing I love, checkpointing a boss. As in you walk into boss, get the cutscene etc, then it checkpoints right there. As the fight starts. If I die, I don't need a big gameover screen, and I definitely don't want to walk back. These add nothing to my value. Dieing, immediately trying again, awesome. The fight can be frustrating but now I have virtually no downtime. I can just focus on doing and be kept in that headspace. Gameover screen adds atmosphere though. There's a frustration people knows builds up at seeing it, and it helps add to that sense of triumph and satisfaction on winning. I get this. But I don't care. Between the two, I explained why I like what I suggested.
I think there needs to be a consideration for a few different things for deciding on QoL. If you have a toggable option. How does it affect gameplay? What does it do for the gameplay to have the feature? What does it hurt to not have it? How stressful is the point of question to different players? How greatly does this affect the devs' intended vision? Either for the game, atmosphere, or to appealing to specific player types?
Options are great because the dev can straight up say "This is the intended game experience. You can change these settings but we encourage you to try our vision first!" I've seen it in games. Sure maybe everyone's gameplay isn't consistent and the challenges are therefore drastically different. But you can still do presets; Easy, Normal, Hard, and Custom. You can find discussions over this, people complaining of a feature/difficulty and others ask the difficulty then give tips. More people are free to enjoy the game as they want, making it much more meaningful to them personally. And we can easily distinguish or describe our difficulty if we care about bragging rights or just looking for help.
What does it take away to have these options though? People may choose not to play the game in the intended way? You're always going to have that. People skipping cutscenes, looking for exploits, using mechanics in ways you didn't expect or intend… And people will also quit out of frustration of your design, or straight up refuse to buy your game. I doubt having options will hurt more than help. The big thing is differentiating in making QoL a feature that can't be turned on/off versus making it a toggable option. And I understand some QoL things will affect gameplay and making them an option is simply too demanding or changes the gameplay too severely, it needs to be part of the game at its core. Just making an overall point.
Can you get quality of life out of games?
Amazing title. Maybe your best work
Quality of Life is Link being able to swing his sword while running in Twilight Princess. Removing time based mechanics from a gameplay system revolving around time management is streamlining the game out of your game. You can do that type of streamlining if you have another part of the game, another time bound aspect that is highly demanding that you are really building the game centrally around, but if you aren't doing that, if you aren't limiting the gameplay interaction in one area to highlight it in another, then you really are just nerfing some of the gameplay out of your game.
Sometimes people and companies confuse streamlining cheat codes and mods into regular gameplay as quality of life, when it really just isn't. Quality of Life is when you adjust the design of the game to enhance the core gameplay loop and experience you want the player to have, not when you remove or limit the demand of the features of your core gameplay loop. That's just a built-in nerf
I love games that have limited questlogs and no markers. Stuff like go find the information about a murder and it give you a short transcribe of the conversation.
Or in stuff like adaca (zone patrol) or project silverfish where you get stuff like find the dead drop near the docks or in the police station and then give you the level that it is located in. You first have to navigate to the level and then find the location and finally have to find the dead drop. It forces you to actually pay attention to the world design.
This is how I felt about Bloodstained ritual of the night
Early in the game is when you need to hunt for save rooms and healing items often.
You don't get a healing ability or health regeneration until very late in the game.
Even then they're rather slow so gathering materials for potions is still worth it.
My point being rationing healing items is an obstacle you gradually step back from.
Vintage Story has a more interesting approach to beds than Minecraft. There are several tiers of beds and higher tiers allow you to sleep for longer. Additionally you don't just skip the night, time is only greatly accelerated, so you can get up whenever. And there even are special nights where you can't sleep at all.