Why Good Gameplay Isn't Enough
Good gameplay is what keeps players around, but it's rarely why they try something in the first place.
A while back on Steel Hunters, Wargaming's extraction shooter, I opened a Tableau dashboard for one of the heroes I'd designed and couldn't make the numbers fit together. The players who picked the hero kept coming back to it, so retention looked good. But hardly anyone was picking it in the first place.
My first reaction wasn't very analytical. Mostly I was sad, and under the sadness was a feeling I think a lot of designers will recognize: that I hadn't been good enough, that I'd done a bad job, that maybe I just wasn't competent at this.
What I tried really hard not to do was jump to conclusions, about the hero or about myself. I was confident in the gameplay. We'd tested it a lot, and the internal metrics kept saying the same thing, which was that people enjoyed this hero when they played it. So when the dashboard turned into a review, I went in trying to keep every option on the table.
If it were your hero, where would you look? The gameplay's fine, and the people who try it stick with it, but almost nobody tries it. What's left to fix?
Keep your answer in mind. I'm going to come at it sideways, with a chess set.
Which board would you sit at?
Picture two chess sets on a table. One is the kind you probably grew up with, where the knight is a little carved horse with its mane swept back. The other is a set of plain wooden blocks with a notch or two cut into the top of each one, just so you can tell which piece is which. Both of them play chess perfectly, since the rules don't care what the pieces look like. Someone offers you a game. Which board do you sit down at?
You probably picked in about half a second, and I'd bet it wasn't the blocks.
That's kind of strange when you think about it, because nothing about the game is different. Set up the same position on both boards and play knight to f3 on each. The block standing in for the knight jumps exactly like the knight does, and every legal move on one board is legal on the other. Either way you'd be thinking ahead, reading the board and trying to guess what your opponent is setting up. That part, the rules, is what keeps you hooked for an hour, and the blocks have all of it.
What the blocks don't have is the other thing a game of chess is doing, the part almost nobody notices: the feeling that this piece is a cavalry charge and that one is a queen you have to protect. That's the fantasy. I'd assumed good gameplay would be enough on its own, and I think a lot of us do, because the rules are the part you can test and tune and put numbers on, while fantasy is fuzzy and easy to file under polish. The blocks show what that polish was actually doing. It was the reason you sat down at all.
If you're thinking "okay, but what about Go?" right now, that's fair. Go is nothing but blank stones, and millions of people love it. I don't think it breaks the idea, though. In an abstract game the fantasy lives in the contest instead of the pieces, two people trying to outthink each other with a couple thousand years of history behind them. That still gets people to the table. It's just not carved into anything.
My favorite piece
In Turkish the queen is called the vezir, the vizier, and she's always been my favorite. She starts the game boxed in behind her own pawns, so for the first few moves she mostly waits. Then the board opens up, she can go almost anywhere, and she turns into the most fun thing you can play with.
Part of why that feels so good is that the rules and the story agree about her. She's the most powerful figure on the board, and she's also the piece that moves the most and runs the game. You never have to remember that she's strong, because everything about her tells you.
It wasn't always like that. In the old Persian game the piece was the king's counselor, which the Turkish name still remembers, and it could only move one square diagonally. When chess reached Europe the counselor became a queen but kept that tiny move, so for centuries the most powerful figure in the story was one of the weakest pieces on the board. In the late 1400s, starting in Spain, the rules finally caught up and gave her the move she has today. Checkmates suddenly took a lot fewer moves, and people started calling the new version queen's chess, or, less politely, mad queen chess.
What's your favorite piece? Do you like it for how it moves, or for what it is? I couldn't pull those two apart for the vezir if I tried, and that's kind of the point.
Back to the dashboard
So, the hero. If your answer to the puzzle was something like "whatever makes people want to try it," that's where I ended up too.
The rules part of my hero was fine, and the tests had been telling me that all along. What it was missing was the carved knight. So I worked on the fantasy, how the hero came across and what it promised you'd get to be, and left the gameplay alone. No ability changed and no number moved, and more players started trying it.
Looking back, the dashboard was easy to misread because retention only tells you about the people who already showed up, so a hero can look healthy on that chart while most players never give it a shot. And the feeling that I'd failed was aimed at the wrong thing. The gameplay was holding up its end the whole time. I just hadn't given anyone a reason to find that out.
When fantasy can't help
I don't want to oversell this, because fantasy can't save a game that doesn't work. The blocks are still the full game of chess, so the carving isn't repairing anything; it's giving you a reason to care about something that already works. Flip my problem around and you get the opposite failure, where a hero with a great fantasy and a weak loop gets tried by everyone and then dropped. You need both, and your numbers will usually tell you which one is missing if you compare who's showing up with who's staying.
If you're working on something live right now, try it. Find the thing in your game that tests well and that nobody's trying. Before you touch a single number, ask what it promises the player, and whether you'd want to sit down at that board.
Gameplay is a blank block. Fantasy is what turns it into a knight.