On the cast and various posts, I’ve brought up the term “system heavy” games as a style that I like to play. But looking back, I don’t think I ever defined what that is. It’s not just a type of RPG, or FPS or whatever, but a game design philosophy.
The Gears Are Turning:
When I think about any video game, to me there are two distinct and broad groups that any game designed can fall into.
First are narrative based games or any game that was designed to tell a story first, gameplay second. Obviously we can fit games like Gone Home and Dear Esther here, but it may surprise you that I would also put Uncharted, Bioshock and Mass Effect in this grouping.
The reason is that while the latter group has far more action and mechanics compared to Gone Home, their design was meant to serve the narrative or lore of the world first. Playing Uncharted for example, it doesn’t matter what my skill level is as the game mechanics play out the same way every time no matter what in keeping with the story.
The same goes for Bioshock, there was nothing that I could do from a gameplay perspective to change the game to anything other than what the developer’s have already prepared for.
System heavy games on the other hand are designed less around hand holding or locking the player into a specific track and are more about issuing the player a challenge of figuring out and mastering the unique systems at play. These games more often than not, will not captivate the player with an epic story other than: “Save the world, conquer the castle, etc.”
City builders are all about managing chaos through multiple interacting systems.
So while the story may be as linear as it can be, the game mechanics offer the player flexibility in how they can go about playing, while rewarding players for mastering the systems.
“Mastering” is the important term and why not every RPG can be considered system heavy in my opinion.
I’ve talked about in the past my dislike of Skyrim and Fallout 3 from Bethesda, despite being massively huge RPGs where you can pretty much go where you want and do whatever. The problem for me with these games is that the basic mechanics didn’t offer that much in terms of mastery: How I control and operate my character at the start, is pretty much how things will be until the end.
This is why I keep bringing up my love of the Etrian Odyssey series as an example of system heavy design. The story for these games are as basic as they come and the path through is linear. However, I have complete freedom in developing my party as I see fit and that’s where the challenge of mastering the game systems come from.
Figuring out team compositions, how to build the characters and using this customized team to take out the bosses is where the challenge of the game comes in. And this is why I’m really interested in The Darkest Dungeon as it’s also going for this kind of “choose your party” design.
A hallmark of system heavy game design in my opinion comes from this level of player control and allowing them to make use of the game mechanics in whatever way they see fit to succeed. CCG based design is another example as it’s all about figuring out what type of deck you want to build, tailor made to your preferences to use.
The more control the player has over the experience or the mechanics, the better. Another great example of system heavy design would arguably be city builders as they practically are a collection of systems for the player to figure out.
In one of my first posts that was put on Game-Wisdom, I talked about where my love of the genre came from: That a great city is like watching a bunch of different systems and functions working in unison like a model train setup. To me, it’s thrilling to be able to essentially control chaos and make everything work correctly.
While I do enjoy system heavy games, they do have their downsides. For being so focused on systems and abstraction, as opposed to player control, it does limit how much you can play them.
The reason is that when dealing with abstraction, there is a strict limit of how much you can play them before you figure everything out. This goes back to the Chick Parabola and how once you master a system heavy game; you’re pretty much done with it.
Action games, despite being player focused are not examples of system heavy design. As the gameplay is only meant to push the player through the plot.
Because system heavy games are so rigid in their design, it becomes very easy to find ways to break the game: Where one strategy is the absolute best option.
And once discovered it takes a lot of the desire out of playing. As once you know the best way to play a system heavy game, there usually isn’t anything else to hold your attention.
This is why I find myself more often than not; stop playing a system heavy game even if there is more content there. As once I know what to do to win, I don’t feel like spending any more time on the game. This is why I don’t play a lot of grand strategy or 4X styled games which are incredibly system heavy.
System heavy design may not be for everyone or the “perfect” form of game design. But when I want to relax and dig deep into a game, there’s nothing better.
