So instead I'll talk about a bit of game design. Today I wanna talk about random loadouts. By this I basically mean random gear, weapons or tools for a player. There's lots of different ways to implement this across all genres, but I think it's really cool to play with for a variety of reasons.
Random outcomes in games are common, they're a good way to make a game more replayable. If a situation is less predictable then it'll play out in different ways more often and be more interesting in the long run, in theory. There are pros and cons to this though, a big one is bad luck can really ruin an otherwise good experience, bad rolls in an RPG, unlucky bullet spread in an FPS and other factors can take away from a players experience. The main reason being that the player had no control over those factors.
I'm gonna go a bit tangential for a sec but bear with it. Another problem in games is optimum strategies. Even in well balanced games there's often one or two strategies that run rampant and shut down a lot of alternative strategies. At high level play many games end up being very boring, with maybe 20% of the content actually being used since the rest is just straight up inferior. You can fight this with balance patches and effort, but that takes a lot of work and even a mostly balanced game can suffer from this, even in very tightly balanced games there is often one or two characters or units or whatever that just don't make the cut and nobody ever uses.
So what if I told you I had a silver bullet for both randomness taking away player control, and optimum strategies causing a game to become boring? Well you'd be right to be skeptical, but I do have a proposition. Random loadouts. Now, randomising the tools a player has doesn't quite solve both problems. The random factor will still often result in nearly unwinnable scenarios, since a player has no control over their gear, and dominant strategies will still exist to some degree, but in my experience it's a very interesting design space that isn't thoroughly explored.
So what are the pros? Well a random loadout actually mixes things up quite a bit, since your player has no control over their gear they have to really change how they look at your game. There is no weapon or class a player can "main", they have to adapt on the fly and use their kit to the best of it's ability, no matter what it is. Give a player a shotgun and even if he likes playing a long range careful game, he'll have to get up close. Give a player a stealth item and he'll be more inclined to be sneaky even if he's normally the aggressive player. I think that mixing up strategy and forcing players into certain roles outside their comfort zone is both a good way to keep the game fresh and interesting.
Another advantage is it's honestly addictive. I've designed and played a few games like this and in the right environment it really gets you wanting to stick around. If there's a specific tool or weapon you really like or want to try out you have to wait for the dice to favour you, and the suspense of an entirely new loadout really makes you want to stick around to see what you're going to get next. Additionally if the enemy you fight (in particular PvP) is also dealing with a random loadout it can be really cool too since you're excited not just for what you're going to bring, but what you'll be fighting against.
Finally, it lets you be a little bit, well I don't want to say lazy... But cheeky as a game developer. You can do things you could NEVER do in another game when players can't reliably choose. I worked on a small project called extraction point and we had a railgun that shot through walls, we also had a player class that could see through walls. In a normal game such a combination would be utterly gamebreaking, you'd choose him every time and the game would be awful. But with a random loadout players can't force it every game. Admittedly, occasionally it does randomly come up and certain combinations felt unfair or imbalanced, but since you knew it was very unlikely you'd see it again such problems were not really worrisome, and it let us have both of those awesome abilities in one game, without having to worry about abuse.
There are definitely downsides though. In such a game you still have the issue of lack of player control. While a random loadout makes you think on the fly, it can also leave you with a crappy loadout with no real chance of victory. As a developer you can mitigate this by making sure every tool and weapon is useful to some degree on it's own, or do what we did with our game and make it a team based shooter, so if your loadout is very narrow or unusual, your teammates can still back you up (usually). All that said, it still sucks when you get the worst possible combination, so be careful with it.
Another problem is high level play, lack of consistency turns competitive players off (and rightly so). While your casual players might enjoy the thrill of random loadouts, you'll never pull the esports crowd to your game if it's heavily random. It's also really damn hard to put in a progression system of some kind. A lot of games lock tools off from you until you progress, which is good for learning and is often (misused) to pad out a game. With random loadouts you kinda have to give the player everything from the beginning, or they can get an advantage through probability. If the stock weapon is really powerful, and a level 1 player is more likely to get that weapon he has an inherent advantage and nobody wants to get higher level.
All up I think randomized loadouts are an unexplored design space, particularly in PvP games. I'd love to see more games try it out and see where we can go with it, there are problems for sure but the advantages it lends, and problems it solves really makes me feel that with the right system it could make for an excellent mechanic. Time will tell if I'm just rambling or if it really has potential. Maybe next time you go to a game jam or something you can give it a shot?
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