How Devil May Cry 5 Encourages You to Play the Right Way
/One phrase you will often hear if you hang out in gaming circles for a while, is that “there’s no wrong way to play a game”, which sounds like an agreeable enough sentiment. Personally though, I don’t think it’s one that I can really agree with taken at face value.
The problem is that there really are wrong ways to play a game. If one is playing an FPS, then chances are the game is designed to be fun when the player is shooting the bad guys. Maybe the player can choose to play as a pacifist, or to exclusively melee their opponents, but this has to come with the acknowledgement that this is not the “intended” way to play the game. The player can do it if they find it fun, but this is not the experience the designers were trying to optimize, and so it behooves them to try and guide the player towards playing the game in the way that will be most optimized.
For reference, let’s look at a game like Bloodborne. Here is a game that’s entire existence is driven by the desire to make a “Souls” style game while encouraging the player to play more aggressively (a concept that I touched on previously, in this post ). Essentially, Hidetaka Miyazaki was disappointed that Dark Souls encouraged it’s players to play slowly and passively, and so in Bloodborne, they crafted a game that focused on encouraging it’s players to attack more often and take more risks, because to Miyazaki, that is when the game is at it’s best. To my mind, this was wildly successful.
But how does this relate to Devil May Cry 5?
Well, Devil May Cry is a series that is well known for being all about selling the fantasy of being a super stylish demon slayer. However it seems like for many, the memory they have of the series is less about pulling off incredible combos and hitting those “S'“ rankings, but more about the game’s difficulty. I’ve talked to a bunch of people who were hesitant to give Devil May Cry 5 a try because they “didn’t want to worry about their ranking”. This includes myself as well - my own memories of the series are primarily of being beat up a bunch, barely making it through alive, and to add insult to injury (literally), being greeted with a dismal “C” ranking for my efforts.
But my time with DMC5 had none of these frustrations. In talking to a friend I remarked about how the game “makes you feel like doing sick combos is the right way to play”. And so, I wanted to take the time to look at how exactly it is that the latest iteration of DMC manages to coax the player into the most optimized part of it’s gameplay loop.
A lot of what it comes down to is really just moderating where the player is spending their attention. At any given moment, the two most attention-grabbing things on screen are going to be either the enemies on screen, or the rating UI telling you how awesome your combo currently is.
We can see that the enemy’s health is indicated by the little ring around the lockon reticule, but it’s super subtle. It doesn’t even animate smoothly, it seems to just kind of disappears in chunks when the enemy’s health reaches certain thresholds. The player’s health bar doesn’t have smooth animating either, damage is represented in red chunks, but you won’t see your health bar gradually filling. Even things like the Devil Trigger meter will not animate filling, so much as gradually change colours, until a pip is fully illuminated.
The ranking letter on other hand, is displayed fairly large, animates as it fills and empties, has a pulsing animation at all times, pulses more violently when you attack enemies, and has fancy enter animations whenever the rating goes up. Other parts of the UI may animate when they have an important state update to communicate, but in general, the ranking UI is the only part of the UI that is animating at any given time.
So because of where the player’s attention is guided, the player intuitively focuses on their rating and their interactions with enemies above all else, and this becomes the primary source of feedback the game gives them.
Maybe the most important thing they changed however, is just the fact that they’ve made the game easier than earlier entries in the series. Which, may well be controversial to series elites, but for the purpose of making players focus on the combos, does it’s job.
As I mentioned earlier, a lot of my memory of the earlier games revolves around getting beat up a lot. So naturally, if one is half dead all the time, their focus is probably less on being a super stylish demon slayer, and moreso on being an alive demon slayer. I definitely have memories of sitting back and spamming Ebony & Ivory endlessly because an enemy couldn’t reach me from that far away. This is probably the least stylish thing ever, and my ranking showed it, but it’s safer than getting up close and using my sword. It’s definitely not how I always played the game, but when you’re worried about your survival, you instinctively default to whatever the lowest risk way to approach a situation is.
Of course, in DMC the most important step to getting a good rating is usually not to get hit anyways, but it’s about the player’s mental bandwidth. If in the back of their mind a player is thinking “oh god I’m going to die”, then they probably aren’t planning out their next elaborate move. Reducing that fear of death frees the player up to focus on being stylish.
Of course that doesn’t mean death is impossible in DMC5, and in fact I feel like the boss fights of the game really prove my points here. As soon as a boss enters the picture, you get a big boss health bar on screen, and my experience at least, was that my focus instantly shifted from “be a badass” to “make that health bar run out before mine”. Suddenly enemy attacks are less of an inconvenience to my ranking, and more of a danger to my ability to finish the fight.
Perhaps it’s also to do with the fact that most bosses don’t stagger or get combo’d the same as normal enemies, but my experience was them was that, I felt more like I was suddenly playing a Souls game, than DMC5. In order to make it through the bosses, I felt obliged to do a lot of hit and run, a lot of dodge rolling, and for all intents and purposes, ignore my combo rating entirely.
In other words, the shift that happens when fighting bosses completely disengages the player from the “super stylish demon slayer” fantasy, and so perhaps it’s no surprise that the bosses were by far my least favourite part of this game. Devil May Cry 5 is at it’s best when racking up sick combos - everything the game does builds this up as the thing one is meant to focus on. As a result, when it feels like you can’t focus on that part of the game that’s super optimized, it doesn’t feel so good.