As game designers, one of our most powerful dramatic tools is the rule break:
Those moments when we break a long-established rule for the purposes of punctuating and aligning with a dramatic story moment
This was a key philosophy for, say, Undertale’s game design, but you see it everywhere.
This may sound obvious to some folks, but I think it’s worth looking at more closely!
First:
- I think it’s often good to surprise players
- It’s often good to expand boundaries. IE every time we give access to a new tool, or a new area.
But I’m talking about something more specific–I’m talking about having an established expectation or boundary, that you unexpectedly shatter in a sudden way, for the express purposes of story dramatics.
If it’s a natural progression of a pattern the player has already seen or expected–like a character who suspiciously had no upgrade tree dying, or getting a prestige class for character #3 at a climactic moment when characters 1-2 already did–then it doesn’t achieve the effect I’m talking about.
The boundaries we break are synonymous with player expectations. Which means we must set the expectation first! It has to be AFTER the player feels like they know how the game works and what to expect.
The longer a rule has gone unbroken, the bigger the surprise when it happens.
Note that “long-established rules or expectations” CAN include rules and expectations players bring with them from other games in the genre, or from previous games from your studio or in your series.
This means that you can start a game off with a bang by immediately breaking rules.
Let’s look at some examples of this kind of thing in action, used for dramatic story impact.
Spoilers for Undertale, Chrono Trigger, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Golden Sun: The Lost Age, Suikoden 2, Elden Ring, Metal Gear: Revengeance, Pokemon Snap, Final Fantasies 6 and 7, and Nier Automata!
Undertale does this a lot:
- Every boss expands or breaks the literal boundaries of the combat box (breaks expectations set by the game)
- The fact that when you defeat Toriel with violence she dies (breaks expectations set by the genre)
- Art style fidelity suddenly increases for Flowey fight
Crono’s death
We never really lost a character once we got them in CT, ESPECIALLY not the player-insert silent protag. But they killed him off 3/4s of the way through the game!
O course, you can get him back. But this was a shocking moment accompanied by a major shift to your party comp.
Health bar UI, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Towards the end a boss has a 2nd phase where the health bar in the UI expands waaaay longer than the otherwise-standard health bars. Shocking! You’ve likely played for 100+ hours and this has never happened before! It’s so small but people talk about it all the time.
Isaac’s party, Golden Sun: The Lost Age
Late in the game, after a major dungeon and story beat, the entire party from the first Golden Sun 1 joins you all at once. Up until this point–1.5 games in–you’ve never had more than four party members. Now a whole system for swapping parties is added.
Luca Blight, Suikoden 2
Throughout the game this boss is portrayed as a monster, stronger than anyone.
3/4s of the way in, the game has you set up 3 6-character of your best characters. Each party does a different phase of the fight. It’s hard! Swapping parties was entirely new for just this fight.
World Map in Elden Ring:
When you start Elden Ring, you can see a large world map. Most of it is blank. It encompasses a huge area. It’s easy to think it’s the entire game.
At some point you will leave this starting area and the size of the world map will expand. It’s mind-blowing! Repeat 1-2 times.
A lot of JRPGs do this and it always works on me:
Throughout the entire game, when you enter combat, the BGM stops and combat BGM plays.
And then at some point they have a climactic dungeon with intense BGM, and the music just continues through combat.
Climactic genre switch:
I’ve seen a few games where the final boss is basically a different genre of game. A recent indie JRPG swaps to a SHMUP. Metal Gear: Revengeance I hear swaps to a fighting game?
Pokemon Snap has it’s only “fight”-style encounter with a Pokemon for Mew.
Final Fantasy 6: World of Ruin
In a climactic story moment, the world is destroyed. You cannot ever go back to any of the places you’ve been. There’s a new (ruined) world though! Absolutely mind-boggling.
Final Fantasy 7: Aerith’s death
Oh, a party member can die? ANd take their equipment with them? And cause all their quests to become unfinishable? Damn. Nothing in the game and few things in the genre prepared you for this mechanic!
Nier Automata: So many!
- The finale mechanic with the save game. Holy shit!
- The fact that your CPU is an equipped item and if you unequip it you get a special game over ending
- Every time the game swaps you between camera or gameplay modes when you’re not expecting it, as part of level design
Some hypothetical/general ones:
- 60% of the game your max party size is 4, you even have to swap characters out. Mid-game climax adds a 5th slot
- Any metroidvania upgrade that makes you look at things differently (recontextualization). Oh, those decorations are actually SWITCHES?
These are alll over the place, but do you see the throughline?
Purposefully set expectations and teach rules (like we always do). Then purposefully break them. Use this inherent mechanical drama to enhance narrative storytelling. It’s so powerful!
A lot of these are UI, but all of those examples are from Japanese-made games. Are Japanese studios’ UI teams more nimble? Or is this just a side effect of smaller teams?
I’ve almost never been able to request UI work in any game I’ve worked on. But it can be so powerful!
Staff your UI teams pls
In most games I’ve worked on, we set pretty firm conventions about what’s allowed to happen. We establish consistency and make sure player learn it. We make, in a word, formulas for the content. I used to work on the destiny “frameworks” team; setting those constraints was literally our job.
And that IS important! But equally important is to then break them. That’s easily overlooked or hard to do in massive teams, where breaking the formula may require getting a whole gaggle of folks to align on exactly how and why that’s being done, and every lead or director has a chance to veto.
In general I would say that setbacks in power, abilities, progression, and the like can achieve this kind of dramatic mechanics-storytelling connection, but they’re a dangerous tool–
Frustration can easily overwhelm other feelings you want the player to feel.
