Degenerative design in video games, generally, is characterized as design that lowers the scope of context sensitivity, limits the complexity of available systems relative to a previous work, or ultimately simplifies a system(s)
Despite the negative connotations associated with the word “degenerate”, this isn’t always a bad thing in video games. Sometimes, the scope of a game’s design is just too wide during early development, leading to a game that has far too many systems that do too little well enough to warrant playthroughs, whereas later on it might be a game with fewer systems that function with more depth.
In this respect, a degenerative design philosophy has a place to better a title and, ultimately, make it more complicated and more enthralling in fewer and fewer areas as time goes on.
Inversely, this concept can serve to hinder video games as a whole or the entire gaming industry. And we can see this in real-time through the lens of Gothic 1.
Gothic 1 is a game from which Pirana Bytes (RIP) gained a lot of attention. The studio has a knack for creating interesting worlds that complement their “3 camp” system of open-world design, but we’ll leave that aside for now since you, dear reader, and I, are here to talk about the combat system of Gothic 1.
Left click, swipe sword. Left click, shoot gun. Left click, attack thing. That’s the formula most games follow today. Gothic 1, despite being ancient by gaming standards, has a system that is infinitely more engaging than these common systems of today:
In Gothic, a Left click engages a context-sensitive menu that responds to a large number of variables. If a weapon is being held and you left-click, nothing will happen until other variables are introduced. For example, a low-level player with a one-handed sword who holds left click and taps the “A” key with a standard WASD configuration will swing left. The player can then, still holding the left click, tap the “D” key and swing to the right, provided the original swing to the left was completed. And so you have the ability to swing left and right: simple!
Moving forward and engaging the left click will start a forward swipe, gaining ground, but exposing the player to a close-range counter. Left click and “S” will cause the player to hold his weapon up defensively. Additionally, a low-level player will do all of this using two hands instead of one, despite the weapon being one-handed, and, of course, this changes when the player levels up.
This system, while somewhat hard to envision while reading, is fairly straightforward in-game. Simply, instead of moving left, you swing left using context-sensitive inputs. You’d assume, then, that studio developers of today would take that idea and run with it. Taleworlds has managed to make their own ideas come to fruition using this idea, Kingdom Come: Deliverance has managed to make a similar system more complicated and whole, but other than that there’s very little to talk about by way of exploration on this frontier.
Instead, games have reduced themselves to engaging with the “left click, attack” method of combat. One-handed engagements in Skyrim, through a 100-hour playthrough, will be the same from level 1 to level 50, regardless of what the player does. It’s in this way that I find the modern combat systems of today to engage in far too much degenerative design, and why I think that Gothic 1’s combat system, plainly, is genius that’s awaiting someone to come along and perfect it for the modern era. (Perhaps the remake will manage?)
GLHF,
-E