The Gameplay Loop - Zero Company
Been thinking a lot about gameplay loops while playing Zero Company, because it produces the kind of fatigue that I've been feeling in almost every game I've played that follows the loop perfected by Hades.
The Loop
"What's the gameplay loop" is a fairly old question 1 used to describe how a game plays in that middle-ground between moment-to-moment action and long-term progression. What's the structure gluing together action scenes, and what are the common activities making up the glue.
In GTA3 the gameplay loop might be Mission -> Restock Ammo/Armour -> Save -> Mission, with diversions for the chaos that game allows.
In Mass Effect you'd have Mission -> Talk to Crew -> Scoot around Galaxy Map -> Mission, with diversions to explore mission-less planets or return to previously visited locations.
XCom Enemy Unknown has Mission -> Base Management -> Globe Management -> Progress time on the Globe -> Mission, with diversions for random events, tech, the like.
For older roguelites like Binding of Isaac it's much simpler - Start Game -> Win or Die -> Start another game. The whole game is contained within the loop.
Hades
When Supermassive made Hades they kind of fucked it in two ways.
The loop looks like this: Start a run -> Win/Lose -> Talk to people -> make permanent upgrades/unlocks -> Start a run.
The first thing they fucked, they took the roguelite approach of bundling the entire game into the loop, but with the multiple phases of a larger more narrative experience.
The second is that they made it so that the transitions between phases always feel very small, so it's very easy to "just one more thing" your way into a whole new cycle. "I finished a run and got resources" -> "I want to spend my resources" -> I don't want to miss out on any conversations so I'll do that first" -> "I've got all these new upgrades and the door to a new run is right there." There's no menuing, you just walk from one to the other and oops, you're holding a spear and choosing your first boon again - because the run doesn't really start until you know what the first boon is.
The 3rd secret thing they did is that they made Hades fucking sublime in a way that felt incredibly replicable. Personally, I found the slick perfection of the gameplay loop to feel greasy and manipulative, but it was undeniably effective and... if I keep playing that's presumably because I'm enjoying it? Compulsion is the same as enjoyment, surely.
In my opinion, all this streamlining of the gameplay loop into the total cycle available to the player has kind of deadened my sense of playing at my own pace.
Consequences
I'm playing ZCom at the moment and it does the same thing. Mission -> Base Management/Talk to Crew -> Map Operations -> Mission. In game, they literally call it a Cycle, 2 and the wiki literally lays it all out like its the most normal thing in the world but it's kind of weird that that's the whole game. It also compares it to Midnight Suns but that had the crucial difference that in a lot of the early game you could run about exploring the grounds - this makes a huge difference in the gamefeel while you're getting a handle on it.
I'm sure 20 hours in I won't mind blasting through cycles one-after-another in a single session, but when I'm still learning the game I need time to decompress and ZCom, like Hades, will not let me have that. And it feels more and more common as time goes on to see this condensation in bigger games. In just the last year or so (scanning my Steam library), I've felt an identical fatigue playing ZCom, ReStory, Bloodlines 2, Hardspace Shipbreaker, Mewgenics, Veilguard, Demonschool, and Eternal Strands.
While I love some of those games, it feels like there's a design pattern gone rogue here causing me to cut my sessions short rather than risk a half-cycle. When compared to the games I consider to be my favourites of the same period3, it's clearly a pattern that can't reach the highest highs for me.
Closing Thoughts
I wonder if the Gameplay Loop has become another victim of Goodhart's Law - when a metric becomes a target it stops being a good metric.
When we were using the concept descriptively to say what works or doesn't work in a particular game it was useful to package it up as a series of repeated actions, but now that it's become a core design principle we've lost too much off the side. If a feature doesn't contribute to The Loop, drop it. We've got a deadline to hit let's get it shipped.
The earliest reference I could find with some mild googling was this 2009 Assassin's Creed 2 review - that it's taken as accepted language implies that it had been in use for some time, but the google results are poisoned by badly dated pages with more modern comments/threads. Would love to learn more about where the phrase came from tbh, but it's not my focus here.↩
Guessing that's some Star Wars lingo for the space perverts - I haven't wholeheartedly enjoyed a Star Wars thing in over a decade so I can't bring the required energy to know such things.↩
For completeness - Baldurs Gate 3, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Where Winds Meet, Cairn, Dragons Dogma 2, Tainted Grail. Old games in here? I just replay the good ones a lot.↩