It feels like skill trees are cropping up in all sorts of games more and more often these days. I’ve seen them used in Rocksteady’s Arkham games, Square Enix’s Avengers game, and Monolith Studios’ Shadow of Mordor games. The most recent Spider-Man game had skill trees. The Far Cry games have skill trees. Resident Evil 6 had some bizarre interpretation of skill trees. Even Doom: Eternal had those diet skill trees mixed in with all of its other whacky systems (crystals, shards, demon fart collectors, etc.).
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The point I’m trying to make here is that this system—upgrading a character’s skills along predefined linear and/or branching paths—is very popular. Skill trees, in theory, allow for granular control over a character, and that level of control in turn provides the player with the ability to play through the game in their “own” way.
But what I’d like to argue today is that most skill trees in action games don’t matter. On top of that, sometimes—and this might shock you to hear from me—players should not play-their-own-way. Sometimes they should play exactly the way the developer wants them to.
And in order to argue the above points I’d like to use the design of Prey’s skill trees (and I suppose the various systems that feed into and flow out of the game’s skill trees) as an example of a top-tier approach.
I remember when my grandmother used to give me a bag of Waynetech Upgrade Points every Chanukah and told me not to “spend them all in one place”
It’s not that the skill trees in Arkham Knight or Far Cry 17 (citation needed) don’t do anything—they definitely allow for some level of customization—but what they wind up doing isn’t really anything to write home about. Here’s some of the upgrade outcomes you can expect in a standard Batman simulator and other action games:
Boost in critical hit probabilities
Strengthened armor
Gain new combat skill
Increased targeting capability
But do these kind of outcomes actually give the player the opportunity to shape their character?
Eh…
Most of the time these outcomes do more to create an illusion of freedom rather than actually facilitating true player choice. In fact, it’s not really freedom these kind of systems are after, but something more akin to character “growth.” In Arkham Knight, Batman becomes more powerful and capable as the player makes their way through the game. But what does that growth yield?
Not a whole hell of a lot, I’m afraid to say.
Let’s focus on strengthened armor for a moment. What does this allow the player to do? Well, for starters, they can get punched in the face more. They can perhaps take more risk in the ways they approach stealth or combat. Ultimately, increased health or armor flattens the difficulty curve, allowing the player to make it through scenarios that require larger reserves of HP (or better skills TBQFH). Of course, a designer that wants to keep players engaged won’t let this difficulty curve stay flat for long. They’ll introduce new enemy types or harder puzzles or what have you and they’ll put the player back on their toes.
Actually, that’s a little too much armor…
Giving the player the opportunity to spend experience or skill points toward increasing their HP or armor is great (ie. empowering) in games that provide the player the opportunity to choose to be a brawler, as opposed to other gameplay “stances” (sneaker, hacker, etc.).
But what choice is the player able to make in Arkham Knight after they’ve upgraded their armor? There are still sections of the game that are stealth-forward and there are those that are combat-forward. These scenarios are delineated by the game’s design, not the player’s choice. So why let the player choose to upgrade their armor? Why not just grant them the upgrade automatically at either a predetermined point in the story or when some XP threshold is reached?
Let’s put aside the dual logical leaps that allow for 1) a human being to increase their skills and abilities to such ludicrous extent in a single evening and 2) Batman needing some newfangled skills to fight crooks (he’s the goddamned Batman, Jerry!). Why is this system here in the first place?
Progression is a huge factor in keeping the player engaged in an interactive experience. It’s also a cheap way to keep them engaged. Some abilities will require a new animation or special effect here or there, but what work is required for boosting stats? Turning a knob? Easy stuff. It’s also an easy way to add…content. Here is a great big skill tree for you to “explore” as you play through the game! Maybe if you don’t pay attention to the fact that a lot of these moves are useless, you’ll think you’re having fun.
Progression in Prey works differently. It works the way progression should work. By upgrading Morgan Yu’s abilities across six different categories, the player is accessing new opportunity, not just growth. Tired of being discovered by robots and then having to bang them into scrap with your wrench? Well, you could quiet the sound of your footsteps by spending along the stealth branch. You could also unlock the mimic branch and roll around Talos 1 as a teacup. Naturally, these new abilities lead to all sorts of different gameplay opportunities unrelated to the reason you unlocked them in the first place. Which leads me to my next point…
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Because Prey is a game about choice, skill trees giveth and they also taketh away. This is because, in a simulation built around choice, there needs to be consequences for a player’s actions. Three of the categories you can spend points in are alien in nature (Morgan is literally injecting alien DNA into his eyeballs). As the player spends in those categories, a little meter begins to tick up. After a certain threshold is reached, the Talos 1 security systems begin to recognize Morgan not as an intrepid neuroscientist, but rather just another evil alien. That means the player will be fired upon by the auto turrets littered about the station.
That’s not where the decision making ends for the player though! The player, now faced with this new status quo, can decide to boost their stealth abilities (in order to avoid the wrath of the security systems) or they can develop their hacking skills to realign the turrets to only focus on the real bad guys. Or they could tune the power of their long range weapons to zap the turrets from afar. There are many different ways to handle this situation—a situation that unfolded because the player made a choice about how to play!
This is the trick that devs try to pull on folks when they add a skill tree system into their game. They want to have their cake and eat it too. But you can’t just put a system that is by definition about choice and consequence into a game that has no meaningful choices or consequences. At the end of the day (re: night), Batman doesn’t need more HP. He’s freaking Batman! He doesn’t need to unlock more moves. He already knows all the moves! He can and should just be Batman!
I guess what I’m trying to say is that we shouldn’t be afraid to let our Batmans be Batmen. Leave the choice and consequences to the neuroscientists.