Stunt Objectives in MP Games

[sXeth]

"Stunt" being the polite version. Sabotaging would be the less polite version.

Essentially, in many MP titles, you'll get these cutesy objectives ranging from defeting a certain number of opponents, or a kill streak, to killing 5 people in 10 seconds while standing on foot and holding the gun in your teeth.

Obviously, some of these are organic enough, while others are not so much, often to the point where the person doing the thing is actively detrimental to the other players on their team (either in co-op or versus).

With the "Gamees as Service" stuff, this often manifests in "Daily Quests" of some variety, usually tied into earning whatever the microtransaction obfuscation currency is. The addition of a time limit only furthering the tendency for the chase to end up resulting in subpar contribution.

For an example of the organic variety, Monster Hunter World's weekly bounties are simply hunt completions of various targets. It might be a monstr you have no real reason to otherwise touch, but there's no weird gimmick stuff to do, just straight up completion. And the reward is just a trade-in coupon to skip RNG grind for some of the rarer drops.

For some less organic ones, well. The recently defunct Paragon (a MOBA) would commonly include kills as one of its. For those who haven't played a MOBA, chasing kills is not exactly the best plan in the world (and the support character in the team arguably shouldn't get kills at all ideally). They did eventually shift it into a kills or Assists, as that second goes.

Fortnite (Save the World) has a litany of the things sending people off to find oddball things around the map or play as classes they may or may not have actual characters at level for, or using random matchmaking (which if you play with a regular group, is terrible). Though it does have a 1/day option to switch the quest (and you can backpile up to 3, they're only "Daily" in how you receive them).

Warframe is in love with the concept. A whole tier of upgrades locked behind the idea (Riven mods) though without the timegate. Also your Mastery :evel (required to use higher tiers of gear and occasionally get into missions) is based around levelling up weapons and waframes (classes, for those unfamiliar.), so boosting that essentially means you have to constantly be running some subpar gear. And every mission has an xp b onus attached to some sort of challenge.

Destiny 2 was also littered with the things. Although like most(all?) the xp in Destiny's endgame, they were so inconsequential I don't even remember if they ticked up the bright (cosmetic microbait) engram or the faction ones. But they literally had daily missions on every single activity of the same vein.

In a singleplayer environment, these thigns range from boring collecthons and completionist fodder, to unqieu gameplay challenges. But in an MP environment, it just seems like horrible design to compensate for some other lack that ultimately will create a byproduct of toxicity as players are constantly afflicted by team mates being off task and doing nonsense.

 

[Aerosteam]

I completely agree, I never liked how Halo had these sorts of achievements. It makes players start doing things they wouldn't otherwise, leading to an imbalance in their priorities and losing focus on the game's actual objectives. Not good to have in team games.

 

[Elijin]

I will be the voice of dissent!

These can be terrible in execution, sure. But they arent just wholly terrible. They provide engagement, a reason to try play the game differently than your usual take / the meta. Inspiration for new ideas or gameplay styles.

Sometimes they're a chore, other times they open doors to fun you hadnt considered trying before.

 

[Elementary - Dear Watson]

I agree. It means you can't engross yourself in the meta game as easily, as the way you expect your opponents to play, and your team-mates, constantly changes adding an unwelcome randomness to the proceedings. I would much prefer to really learn a game and it's players before an attempt to shake things up, not have incentives to shake it up throughout.

Maybe it's a way for devs to hide behind the fact that their game isn't hugely balanced or well designed?

 

[sXeth]

I agree. It means you can't engross yourself in the meta game as easily, as the way you expect your opponents to play, and your team-mates, constantly changes adding an unwelcome randomness to the proceedings. I would much prefer to really learn a game and it's players before an attempt to shake things up, not have incentives to shake it up throughout.

Maybe it's a way for devs to hide behind the fact that their game isn't hugely balanced or well designed?

Oddly enough, Monster Hunter World is the first one I'd have to call out on that logic. Almost invariably, the first bounty of the three in a week is fighting monsters that are absolutely irrelevant to the endgame/ongoing players. And those low-end monsters are basically a non-challenge (loading the map takes longer then killing them for endgame geared folks). But you have to complete all 3 of the weekly things to get the gold print for the gem trade-in.

CoD and Destiny's are both just ticks towards cosmetic lootboxes. Can't speak too much for CoD, but Destiny's should in theory be mostly irrelevant since you should hypothetically gain that same xp by just doing whatever. That has on at least one fairly public controversy been provably throttled, so maybe they are relevant, but who knows. (Destiny's weird hyper-fast, but timegated progression is its own mess of a discussion, really)

PAragon's variation (at its final stage before the shutdown) was a bit weird. But was probably an attempt to keep people playing through its ridiculously turbulent development process in early access. So kind of a bandaid to try and get people to bear with them through a mess of weird design upheavals.

Fortnite's dailies are largely tied into the free-to-play progression. If you do them you get one free llama a day, and 7 of them lets you get a specific legendary out of the weekly rotating store. Its solid enough design for what it is, just some of the objectives are kind of weird, like doing missions in the low-level tutorial zone, or as a specific hero type (where you may not have any heroes of the type at all,or poorly levelled ones).

Waframes are a bit of weird one. I guess they can't really design stuff because most of its procedural, but some of the bonus mission stuff can get silly (Stealth kills in a wave defense. Which is admittedly possible with invisible/blinding abilities, but kind of a goofy). It'd be a sizable stretch to call Warframe poorly designed, but taken as a whole, you can see it kind of grew sporadically in parts and everythings sort of stapled together

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I'm of two minds about it.
Usually they're so convoluted to pull off that you can only get the achievement/trophy by boosting, which kinda defeats the purpose of multiplayer. I've done those sessions where a whole team keeps walking out into the open to get slaughtered, respawn, repeat; second round the other team does the same. Essentially you're taking turns as human sacrifice. It's dumb and it looks dumb.
On the other thand I'm not really against it in principle. Most of those trophies/achievements are there to add replayability or add some sort of incentive to keep playing and aiming for a goal past winning or leveling up. So in theory they're fine, and only really annoying if you're obsessive about getting 100%.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

I completely agree, I never liked how Halo had these sorts of achievements. It makes players start doing things they wouldn't otherwise, leading to an imbalance in their priorities and losing focus on the game's actual objectives. Not good to have in team games.

I disagree...

If I'm allowed to insert a board game equivalent, hidden objective games. Gloomhaven is a Euro-lite dungeon delver game with RPG and legacy-style components.

Gloomhaven is for 1-4 players to all co-ordinate together. Unlike your standard dungeon delver affair, characters have secret personal quest cards that form the basis of their retirement and unlocking other secretive game elements such as new character classes to play with.

And to compound this problem, quite specifically in the rules it tells you players can't share gold or items. Because you're mercenaries for hire, and if you routinely kill things (and sapient creatures) for money, chances are you're kind of a jerk. But the reason why it tells you this is ultimately rather elegant ... it's because it makes you selfish...

You don't gain treasure or gold dropped in game unless pick it up yourself.

So essentially because of all elements in this managerie of self-interested people is also juxtaposed by the need to work together in order to succeed. And combine that with the inability to tell players exactly what you're planning to do each round. You can say things like; "I plan to move over here roughly and attack these two targets..."

You can't say; "I'll be moving right here, and using this specific card, and moving at initiatve order value of 12."

There is also, at the start of every new scenario, one of two random (and secret) 'Battle Goal' cards that you aim to complete for additional perks. These include every round making sure there is an enemy at the start of it, to only taking short rests, or being the first to open a doorway (introducing more monsters), or to loot a treasure chest overlay tile.

Things that don't likely help your team, or make collective progress less efficient.

Now what happens when you mix all these elements? Something like this....


And God--it is fucking fun.

It's frustrating, but it's also magical and the fun style of frustrating where people let you down because of greed... but you will, on the basis of your own greed, use that to justify your personal excesses and failures to truly co-operate.

So everyone pushes the envelope of acceptability of completing the main objective. Players will be like; "Oh we have time, guys ... So surely you don't mind if I scooch on over here and steal these coins." But the magic of that conflict is quite simply this, when it comes down to the wire ... suddenly no one is fucking around anymore.

So games where you're breezing through, suddenly you're no longer breezing through because of player greed. So every scenario end is nailbiting where in your unco-operative natures have made things harder than they ought to be...

And that's fine ... because who wants easy?