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Sorry I didn't get to this sooner! Let me lay out how I feel about, let's generously call it emergent gameplay, using wall bounces as a starting point. https://twitter.com/opmusicnerd_/status/1359983263108853764
For those unaware: a wall bounce is a movement trick in Apex Legends where you sprint-slide into a jump at a wall, let go of all inputs for a moment, and then press jump as you hit the wall. The result is a pretty noticeable bounce off the wall.
Wall bounces can help you climb faster, they make you more unpredictable, and they just look awesome for a highlight reel. To jump right to the thing that some people might be terrified of, we have no plans currently of touching this mechanic one way or the other.
I call these mechanics emergent gameplay because to the best of my knowledge no one here at the studio consciously designed these mechanics. They emerged from the way that movement works.
Now the original question was do I consider this cheating and obviously the answer is no, but the more interesting question is why don't I consider this cheating.
After all, players are doing something we didn't plan for, getting an advantage we didn't design around. But here's the main thing I want you to take away from this thread: game design is never black and white. It's never entirely one thing or another.
When you make complex systems and give players freedom within those systems, the majority of things they'll do will be things you didn't plan for. That's amazing!
The thrill of discovery and creativity is a big part of what makes games with this degree of freedom so exciting.
As a game designer you have to look at each interaction that someone tells you is problematic and break down what it adds/how it hurts. And sometimes you have to take into consideration things that are very much not part of the game itself, like player expectations.
My favorite example here is from league of legends: the character Lee Sin has an ability that allows him to jump to an ally character. Also in league there's a thing called a sight ward: an invisible object you place that reveals a location.
That sight ward is technically an unit, and so very quickly Lee Sin players discovered they could place a ward for instance across a wall and then jump to that ward, giving them a free target dash that Lee Sin's kit was not designed around.
In esports, a crafty Korean player pulled off a move where he used his enemy targeted dash to jump to a high value enemy, placed a ward behind that enemy, used his ally targeted move to jump to the ward, and kicked the enemy into his team. The move was named after him: the insec
So when riot tried to clean up the design of Lee sin, removing the ward jump, there was a lot of outcry from the community. No matter how much power riot tried to give him back in other parts of his kit, the ward jump was too iconic. So in the end, it stayed in.
I'd argue the wall bounce in Apex is in a similar spot. It's an interaction we didn't design for, but it's flashy and cool and a lot of people have spent a lot of time learning and mastering it. I can pull it off reliably while practicing by myself...
... but there's no way I'll ever be able to do it mid fight. And that's okay. It's a subtle bit of power but usually it doesn't win fights.
For instance, the way revenant's passive is coded makes it so he can't wall bounce. (We want to fix this eventually) And he's still picked in very high level games. In Japan he's still picked in esports as far as I know.
If anything, I'd democratize the tech: make it easier to pull off so that more people can do it mid combat. But that's not urgent either. Currently... it's fine. It's cool but not overpowering.
There are emergent things we classify as bugs or exploits and remove: for insurance being able to place Ramparts turret on Crypto's drone. But please understand that these are always judgement calls and there's usually good arguments on either side.
Game design is messy. It's misleading to think of game design as something that is programmed into computers. Game design runs on a different, much less predictable type of hardware: human brains.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
