A Cataclysmic Dawn: Rocket League And The Witcher Held My Attention With Repetitive Mechanics

One of the most often criticised aspects of games is repetition: players often find fault with games that are too linear in their mechanics, even if they have tons of content surrounding it. This can range from players being slightly disillusioned with the somewhat similar mission structures of most of Dying Light‘s missions to altogether upset by Destiny‘s grind-heavy mechanics.

However, variety isn’t always all its cracked up to be. The Assassin’s Creed games have come under a lot of criticism for their mechanics, despite there being a diverse set of missions and challenges open to the player at any given moment in the game, and recent forays into the Call of Duty series have shown that shaking up the popular formula of the game has left many players feeling disenfranchised from what was previously their favourite series.

In fact, in some cases, repetitive mechanics contribute to the game rather than take away from it.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — though massive, detailed and intricate — was not particularly diverse in terms of its gameplay. Combat was formulaic, as most enemies required specific strategies which demanded strict repetition; Witcher contracts followed a fixed pattern of investigate-prepare-fight, whereas many of the side quests involved simply fetching an item from a location and returning it to your quest giver. By all means, the game could be called incredibly repetitive, but instead of receiving constant criticism on internet forums, the game has been critically acclaimed.

The most prominent reason for this is how good everything actually was in The Witcher 3. Almost all of the characters, from main characters who appeared throughout the entire game, to peasants whose role was limited to a source of information in a side mission felt as if they had a place and, importantly, their own story in Geralt’s world. Aside from this, the combat was just so smooth that it didn’t feel laborious to fight an enemy with a strategy you had used before; dodging the rush of a wraith before casting Yrden and attacking it in corporeal and slowed form never felt repetitive because it felt powerful and deliberate, instead of monotonous.

The second reason for this is how well it fit within Geralt’s character. Witcher contracts were at the core of Geralt’s profession as a witcher, which means that the repetitive structure of these missions felt less like a dull slog and more like Geralt’s modus operandi. Likewise, with side missions, Geralt is not an inexperienced adventurer and thus has a specific method of dealing with people and situations, nor is he untrained, which means his combat style is narratively justified. The repetition in the gameplay fits into Geralt’s character and serves rather to empower the player rather than disconnect them from the vibrant world they’re in.

Alternatively, a game’s simple and repetitive mechanics can be the reason for its popularity and addictiveness. Rocket League is a great example of this: if you’ve played the tutorial, you’ve seen what the game has to offer mechanically. In fact, in this sense, it’s incredibly limited, since the tutorial should take you no longer than 5-10 minutes.

However, Rocket League’s appeal comes rather from its competitiveness than its mechanical diversity. Rocket League is varied in the same way sports are diverse — the skill of the players and the way matches unfold has the largest bearing on how the game varies match-to-match. The game may be played similarly, but its the players themselves who introduce the variables rather than the game which presents them.

This differs from competitive shooters like Call of Duty, which have a collection of game-introduced variables — from loadout selection, to asymmetrical map spawns, to AI-controlled killstreaks. Rocket League by comparison is far simpler, with all players driving similarly-paced vehicles in a completely symmetrical field and spawning equidistant from the ball. Everything is player-guided, and this is what makes it so compelling.

The game’s low skill barrier but high skill ceiling also contribute to this success. The game is very easy to get into — a result of the aforementioned simple mechanics — but it is incredibly hard to master. Players all have the same potential in-game, but players’ personal skill can create a huge disparity between teams — a set of players still struggling to hit the ball in a straight line will have no chance against a team who have begun to dabble into high crossing and hitting aerial shots. Once again, this differs from other competitive games since everyone in-game is perfectly balanced by default, meaning the difference is purely skill rather than virtual advantage.

Of course, Rocket League is not the only game which places players on a completely equal platform, it’s just the one I’ve been sucked into recently and the one I could most easily relate to sport. It’s also the highest profile one at this point, in an eSports scene populated by games which inherently present virtual disparities through class or weapon differences.

That’s a topic for another time, however, as this is more meant to discuss how the mechanical scarcity — or comparitive mechanical repetition — of these games does not negatively affect their quality, and how, despite this, they manage to be compelling, addictive games. And they do: The Witcher 3 is one of my games of this year so far, and Rocket League is one of the games I keep going back to — simply because of their quality, not because they’re incredibly diverse, but because they’re built in such a way that their repetition and similarity serve to reinforce the quality of the game rather than undermine it.

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