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Letting the player do what they want won’t matter if the game only has one or two ways of beating it.
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Second, the game’s objectives (if any) must make allowances for and possibly reward the player for using Emergent gameplay strategies. Satellite Reign may be open-ended, but features linear tools and objectives which doesn’t make it all that emergent If you give the player 100 different options for solving a solution, but they have no connectivity between each other, then you’ve created 100 locked paths and not Emergent gameplay. However, just giving the player a lot of options doesn’t make your gameplay emergent there are two conditions that have to be met.įirst, the mechanics and tools must be malleable to the point where someone can combine them in expected and unexpected ways. Structured Sandboxes:įor a game to have Emergent gameplay, the design has to be open-ended to give the player enough options to be creative with. The result is that the player can solve challenges or create things with a completely unique solution and the game mechanics have a wide enough berth for this to work.īut here’s the problem: Emergent gameplay is built around open-ended games, but not every open-ended game is an example of Emergent gameplay. The point is that the mechanics are flexible enough that they can be combined by the player to produce unintended actions that the developer may or may not not have specifically designed the game around. Despite that definition, Emergent gameplay is hard to properly define, because of how tied it is to open-world or open-ended gameplay. Having given up playing the game, I did not find it to be emergent at all and I wanted to explore this concept further, because this is one of those dream game design concepts that designers can (and have) chase.Įmergent Gameplay will be defined for this post as the following:Įmergent Gameplay: A title where the mechanics afford the player to create new strategies and utility beyond their original intent or utilizationĮmergent gameplay as mentioned at the start is one of those dream concepts that developers love to explore just like a game with endless replayability. One of the things that bothered me about the design and was a bullet point the developers were pushing, was saying that the mechanics would lead to “Emergent gameplay,” that would let the players shape the situations around them. Recently, I tried and ultimately found myself not enjoying the open-ended game Satellite Reign.