I've been noticing a pattern recently across various games that seems to spark frustration in players, both in me and others. Once I had become aware of this, I started thinking back whether I had encountered it in Lemmings level as well - and yes, I did. It just didn't occur to me back then that this design choice might be a general flaw, if not to say a cardinal sin of game design, instead of something specific to (custom) Lemmings packs.
Thus, most of my "ranting" in this thread will refer to other games than Lemmings
. And I'm not planning to hit on any specific custom level pack here. I'm just sure that we all can think of levels where we encountered this type of obstacle.
I'm talking about what I've heard being described as "
binary win conditions".
A case in which the difference between success and failure comes down to a single aspect that also happens to be hard to control.
Consequently, the
chance of hit or miss basically amounts to the toss of a coin. In other words: It's random.
As a result, frustration arises with both outcomes.
-
In case of failure, the player is frustrated because they feel there is little they can control to improve the outcome. All they can do is try again and hope for the best.
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In case of success, the player can't really attribute it to their own skill, because (unless they're extremely lucky and succeed on the first attempt) through the previous failures they know the outcome is basically random. Meaning, they externalise their success as "I've just been lucky this time". They will be glad it's over, yes, but it's not something they will enjoy looking back on as a proud achievement.
Here are some examples of games that made me aware of this general pattern:Every now and then, certain combo decks pop up that are extremely hard to interact with. In the best case, it amounts to playing against a clock - defeat your opponent before turn X or they pull of the combo and it's an auto-win. In other cases, it already comes down to the starting hand they draw - something over which you don't have any control.
Note that in Magic, you can take Mulligans, i.e. exchange your starting hand of cards for a new hand with one card less each time. (The current ruling is that you still draw 7 cards each time, but when you choose to keep a hand, you have to select the number of cards from your hand equal to the number of Mulligans you took, and tuck those away at the bottom of your deck.) The fewer different cards are required for a particular combo, the higher the chance it can already show up in your opponent's starting hand.
All in all, this isn't the worst example, because the option of taking a Mulligan, and the choices you can make in this regard, still add some degree of control to the situation which you don't have in some of the other cases I'm mentioning here. However, you can only make a Mulligan decision for yourself; you can't influence your opponent in theirs. Thus, if an opponent playing a combo deck makes a bad Mulligan decision, you technically rather win through a mistake of theirs than through your own skill.
This game all in all is very well designed with a perfectly motivating difficulty curve: Any time you think "alright, this is the point where it gets too difficult and I'm about to quit", that's precisely when you overcome the obstacle, and this reward hooks you for the next challenge which repeats the process. That's what made this game so addictive and gives it great replay value in my view, even despite some of the terrible "subverting-player-expectations" elements that the developers decided to include as wannabe plot twists.
However, there is a certain bug in the game that can occur randomly with any given boss you fight: A bug which will give them a skill - or rather, powers up one of the skills they naturally have - on such a level that it
instantly kills you, irrespective of the number of life points you have. I've seen this happen to the skill "Fireball" (self-evident for any roleplayer) and "Magic Strike" (in German translated as "Magisches Trommelfeuer", i.e. a repeated bombardment of direct magical hits that you can't evade). With Fireball, the issue is that its area of effect also increases with level, so jumping out of the way of destruction is impossible if it already does such excessive amounts of damage. With Magic Strike, the issue is that you can't evade it, period. That already sounds broken enough, but usually these individual hits of Magic Strike do much less damage. It's just that this bug takes either skill completely over the top.
Theoretically, this bug can occur with any boss - that's what makes it a binary win condition: It can either appear or it doesn't, and depending on this, you're either completely screwed or you are not.But I've heard it reported most commonly for Laiken and Razakel (a Lich lord and his demon friend), Geshniz (a commander of the Black Ring in the flying fortress in Broken Valley), and Ba'al (the demon in Broken Valley from whom you need to get the seal to open the entrance to the Hall of Echoes).
Once you enter said Hall of Echoes, though, which is the realm of the dead, you encounter a bunch of the bosses you previously fought again (because they're now dead and want to take revenge on you), all in rapid succession. This means here the bug can occur on any one of them: Your former Dragon Slayer brethren, Amdusias, Undead Sassan, Ba'al, Laiken and Razakel, and/orLord John and Lady Kara.
There are a few choices you have to deal with this bug:- Reload an earlier save game, since the bug occurs when you enter the boss's dungeon for the first time. This isn't always viable, though, because some bosses have quite large dungeons before them, so you'd have to replay a bunch of the game and hope for the best when you meet the boss the second time.
- Send your save game in to the developers and have them fix it manually.
- Lower the game difficulty, which lowers your opponents life points and damage output (Can sometimes work, but if the bug is present, you might still just make it by the skin of your teeth).
- If you have the Developer's Cut version of the game, you can open the console and enable God Mode to get through this particular boss fight. In other words:
Combat a bug with a cheat. Legitimate in the eyes of many, I assume, but of course still unsatisfying, because
you only have the choice between "completely impossible" and "auto solve". Meaning, it's still a binary win condition.-
Find particularly savvy ways to play around the bug - most likely by using broken skills yourself. No, I'm not talking about cheating - instead, you're using skills in a way they probably weren't supposed to be used.
One could also say: You backroute the boss fight. 
During my current playthrough of the game, I encountered this bug twice:- Once with Geshniz in the flying fortress in Broken Valley (lethal Fireball)
- Once with Lord John and Lady Kara in the Hall of Echoes (particularly frustrating, because now you have two opponents at once with this instantly lethal skill)
I've also encountered it previously with Ba'al and Undead Sassan. Though I'm not sure this was during the same game. During those previous attempts, all I could do was lowering the difficulty.
This time, I kept the difficulty at its highest, as I had been playing the entire game, and did some heavy lifting to navigate around the bug:
- I used a charge attack to get close to the boss right at the start, forcing them into melee. Since both lethal skills I mentioned are range skills, your AI opponents are less likely to use them in melee combat (even though there's technically nothing stopping them from doing so, see the next point).
- I then immediately used Splitting Arrows - a skill supposed to shoot arrows at several different opponents at once, but since this game doesn't give you any drawbacks for using ranged skills in melee combat, if you use this skill while standing in front of a single opponent, all the arrows will hit the same target, doing a buttload of damage to them.
- You can summon up to two companions in this game - one is an undead "pet" creature, the other one can be an Undead, a Ghost, or a Demon. Occasionally, the boss happens to hit one of your minions instead of you with their instant-kill attack, and then the skill takes a while to cool down until they can use it again. It's hard to influence what they go for first, though, since your minions move own their own, you can't steer them yourself. Once the lethal skill is in cooldown, you gotta take the boss out as fast as you can. You can still deal with their minions afterwards.
- The game is not turn-based, it's in real time - but there is a pause mode for when things get too hectical. You can also choose skills and select targets in pause mode, and then the commands are executed at the next possible occasion once you release the pause mode again. Thus, I've been using pause mode throughout both of these bugged boss fights. A guaranteed way to draw all the fun out of the game.
Of course, all of this only works if Charge Attack, Splitting Arrows, and a bunch of other high-damage output skills happen to be the ones you've skilled during leveling. Stunning Arrows might also work, I haven't tried; turning invisible with "Embrace of Shadows" doesn't work, I've been told. In short: You need to have trained very specific skills, or this last option of playing around the bug isn't really open to you.
You have the option of unlearning all your skills and re-investing your skill points (by paying the trainer at your Dragon Tower to do it). However, once you're in the Hall of Echoes, where you meet a bunch of the former bosses again in direct succession, there is no going back to the Dragon Tower (at least not while you're in human form, only in the parts where you are a dragon, I believe).
This game revolves around podracing and was re-released for Steam recently (it's originally from the beginning of the millennium, when Episode I came out, and the CD version was very unstable). I think there was a patch to make the CD version run on Windows 10, too, but just buying it for less than 10 € again on Steam seemed like less of a hassle. It can still occasionally crash, either at the beginning or (worse) at the end of a race - which, in an execution-based game like a racing game, of course is also a binary win condition, because then you have to play and win the race again. But it's comparatively infrequent. And just like with the previous example, you can debate whether a binary win condition arising from a bug qualifies as a design flaw, because at least it was unintentional.
What was definitely not unintentional is the layout of the race track "Abyss", the second track on the last difficulty rank (the Invitational Tournament / "Elite Class" in German).
Throughout the game, there are shortcuts here and there on various race tracks. This is fine and in-flavour: Podracing is described as a very rough sport with a lot of unfair tactics going on. Sebulba is the established champion in the movie because he's constantly cheating, sabotaging his competitors' vehicles both before and during the race. So people taking shortcuts during the race seems generally fitting. And of course, when you do so as well, you can expect to get a considerable advantage from this.
As the game proceeds, the shortcuts on the race tracks become less and less optional to take, because your AI opponents get better and start using the shortcuts themselves, too. As Lemmings players, we would say the backroute becomes part of the intended solution. (Kind of like on the ONML level "No problemming!") But in contrast to NeoLemmix, just knowing where the shortcuts are isn't enough: You need to get the execution right as well, because it's a racing game, and some of these shortcuts are very difficult to access, even when you know exactly where they are. Plus, every race has three laps, so you want to succeed at this several times in a row.
There is a level which I consider on the borderline of what's acceptable, on the third difficulty rank ("Galaxy Class"), called "Sebulba's Legacy" (named after the Sebulba described above): Right before the finish line, there is a steep curve without a wall on the right side, so if you're too fast, you fly off and fall down to a lower layer, from where it takes you quite a while to get back up again. You can still win if you fall down, though, as long as you've been fast enough during the rest of the race to establish a sufficient lead.
With the track "Abyss", this is not the case: Right at the beginning, there is an extremely tight curve in a tunnel with two layers. If you fall to the bottom layer during that curve - or any time later in that tunnel, because the top layer also has a gap and another curve where you can fall down - you're taken on a detour that costs you at last 30-45 seconds. This means that, if you fall down, even if you deliver your best performance ever during the rest of the race, you're still going to fail. Where all the other tracks measure your average level of racing ability across the entire track across all three laps, this one is a complete "do or die". The curve and the top layer of the tunnel form the binary win condition, and all of your other racing skills you've picked up so far don't matter.
Add to that, basically everyone of your opponents, because they're flying on autopilot, manages to stay on the top layer easily. Thus by means of exclusion, you also have to stay on top, or you're pretty much guaranteed to lose.
More than that, you have to be able to pull it off during all three laps of the race. I saw one guy who fell down during the last round and managed to catch up again with the first guy through some later shortcut and a good deal of luck. But I wouldn't bet on it. Anyways, you have to stay on top throughout the entire tunnel for at least two rounds of the race. And there's a bunch of stuff coming after that tunnel, of course, where you can still screw up additionally, like on any other race. I recently had the track favourite pass me by at the last jump before the finish line, when I had finally already managed to stay at the top layer of the tunnel for all three laps of the race. In that sense, it's almost more of a "binary lose condition" (fall to the bottom and you're done immediately), but there's no guarantee you'll win when you manage to suceed. Thus, any time you succeed on a given round, you're already anxiously looking forward to the next round.
I always manage to beat this track in the end - but I've never enjoyed playing it. And I don't know a single player of the game who does. Fortunately, it's the only track in the entire game with such a binary win condition. But that also means it creates a huge spike in difficulty, compared to what the player gets used to throughout the rest of the game (including the races that come after the track "Abyss").
Similar to the Divinity 2 example, there appears to be a Debug mode in which you can set yourself into autopilot, just like the AI drivers, to get through the curve. However, in this case this would feel more like cheating, because you're not using "God mode" to combat a bug, but to combat a conscious game design decision of the developers.
With examples 2 and 3, because both are video games,
knowing that these binary win conditions appear at certain fix points of the game is also hugely detrimental to their replay value: Because you always know you have this huge roadblock ahead of you that basically comes down to chance.
This divides every repeated playing experience into a "before" and "after". Kind of like what traumatised people report about their lives...
During the "before" stage, you can't really enjoy the game, because you know the binary win condition is still coming, the dreaded thing is still ahead of you.
During the roadblock, you don't enjoy it, for the reasons stated above - you're just all tense the entire time and simply want to get it over with (again).
And afterwards, while you may be relieved about it being over, a good chunk of the game is now already over, as well. Usually the best part (because most developers tend to put more effort into the early parts of a game, while at the end, they're under time pressure to finish up the product and start losing their creativity). But the best part of the game you couldn't enjoy as much as you would have liked to, because at that time you still had the known roadblock ahead of you.
In original Lemmings, the classical example of a binary win condition is the aptly named Mayhem level "All or nothing": You have to assign the basher correctly, while facing in the required direction, and do so three times in a row, like on the race track "Abyss" in Star Wars Racer. The lemming turns left and right in such rapid succession that this basically amounts to chance in original Lemmings, without all the framestepping and rewinding. You can't even assign skills while the game is paused, like you can in Divinity 2. (At least you can select skills on the panel in the Mac version; in the DOS version, not even that is possible, though in this case, with only Bashers available anyway, this doesn't matter too much.)
In contrast to the "Abyss" race track, though, at least getting this Basher thing right is the
only thing that the level requires from you - instead of adding in a bunch of other stuff before throwing you back into the dreaded obstacle again and yet again.
In NeoLemmix, we rarely have such binary win conditions in terms of execution difficulty. We do however have them in terms of puzzle difficulty.
In particular, this comes up when a certain obscure skill trick is required, and, similarly to "All or nothing", this trick is the main or even the only thing the level requires:- If the player happens to know the trick is possible, the level is an auto solve.
- If the player doesn't know the trick is possible, and the level isn't set up in such a way that the player is bound to find out eventually, the level becomes a complete roadblock. Because the knowledge required for the intended solution isn't even part of the player's considerations.
Examples from original Lemmings would famously "I have a cunning plan" and "No added colours or Lemmings".- You need to be aware that three Builder staircases act like a wall, even though lemmings can walk through single or double Builder staircases easily.
- You need to be aware that Blockers stop being Blockers when they lose the ground under their feet, even though terrain can easily float in the air in Lemmings, instead of "collapsing" when you remove its fundament.
, because it has a clever solution overall that even makes it the best level in original Lemmings in the eyes of many.
"I have a cunning plan" is the worse offender here, because it's really just about knowing or not knowing the trick. There is an alternative solution, the one that I've been using at a kid. But it basically just requires you to have knowledge of the "No added colours or Lemmings" trick at this earlier level, plus it's much harder to execute:
You need to block right under the hatch with a lemming facing to the right, then with the last lemming turning around during bashing, you mine to free the Blocker (who continues walking to the right since that's the way he came out of the hatch), then build into terrain to stop the Miner and make him turn around as well. This is not only hard because of the tightly-packed crowd at release rate 99, in which you have to spot the last lemming facing to the left to make him the Miner; you also have to stop him quickly, because the terrain the Blocker is standing on is only one of these thin pipes from the Marble tileset, with water / abyss right beneath. Contrast this to "No added colours or Lemmings", where the terrain beneath the Blocker is much thicker, you have fewer lemmings, plus you don't need to stop the Miner anyway, he can just continue all the way through.
In custom packs, I've encountered binary win conditions e.g. on two levels that both used the Blocker-Basher turnaround / cancel trick. Even though I was later told by the level designer that neither of the two levels where I saw somebody else use this trick actually required it, to this day I still can't think of any other solution for it than using this trick.
With a bunch of skills - and a bunch of tricks regarding their combinations - being available by now,
binary win conditions also explain the split that we've been observing in the player base for a while now: Meaning between very skilled and very casual players. And this has been reflected by a split in pack difficulty, between a lot of very hard packs (designed by players who know all the tricks) and very easy packs (designed by newcomers), with few packs in the middle or intermediate difficulty category:
Once you know about the tricks, they become self-evident. You start looking for all kinds of affordances in the level landscape where you can employ them.
However, as long as you don't know them, levels requiring such tricks from you as part of their intended solution (and doing a good job at enforcing them, i.e. being backroute-proof) will be complete roadblocks until you read up on the fact that trick X is even possibly in the first place.
As someone who likes inventing solutions revolving around obscure skill tricks and combinations, this is something I should probably take to heart more frequently - considering how much such binary win conditions frustrate me whenever I encounter them in other games.
I think the main reason I resort to levels based on skill tricks so much is because I suck at hiding things in plain sight. I can of course create "resource-conservation" levels, but such levels are generally open-ended and will usually leave the player with a lot of remaining skills, instead of all skills being accounted for. This is basically not much different from the issues I've been criticising about X-of-everything levels, yet this is what even my own resource-conservation levels often end up looking like.
Meanwhile, some of the most amazing puzzles I've seen are technically just "additive" challenges, meaning all the skills are used in fairly standard ways, not in obscure skill combinations. And yet, when you approach these levels in a standard manner, you always find yourself one skill short, and you can't figure out why, until you do. This is explicitly
not a binary win condition
- the level just somehow makes you overlook the obvious, but there are many ways you can ultimately arrive at the correct conclusion.
I've tried to bridge the gap between the "trick-aware" and "non-trick-aware" players via the Noisemaker rank in my pack Lemmings World Tour. However, some of the hints instructing the trick where clearly too vague in the beginning. Thus, I probably created a roadblock of a binary win condition as early as level 08 in the pack, "Glide and joy", which I could only remove by spelling out the trick in the pre-level text explicitly.
So it seems like this is something we all occasionally do. Maybe we should try doing it less in our future levels?
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). And for a while, I couldn't quite figure out why. Sure, it had great puzzles, but a lot of other packs do as well. Yes, the levels where smaller, which is not as annoying as having to navigate huge landscapes on the majority of levels of a given pack. And yes, the levels looked pretty colour-wise, without depicting anything specific (as in Arty's SubLems or Gronkling's new "Rodents", for comparison). So what was it that made this pack feel so cohesive to me?
But now that I've become aware of it, I'm all the more eager to try it out myself! 
. The song titles will become less and less known as I've dredged them from the darkest depths of the Hell dimension. It's pretty much all Death- or Black Metal at this point. The final level is named after an absolute classic of the genre.
It happened for the first time two years ago during the final stages of Lemmings World Tour, and now of course it had to happen again during the final stages of Lemmings Open Air.