Players do not get bored, they finish learning

I marketed Metal Thunder as endless chaos and I was not lying, it is a roguelite, it really does not end. A while ago I downloaded every negative review and read them one by one. 45 of the 132 negatives say the game felt empty. Most of them were written after 10-15 minutes of play. So I gave the player something practically infinite and they got bored inside that infinity.

Anyone seeing this for the first time assumes there was not enough content, and the sentence that comes back from playtests is usually the same, “I got bored after a while”. But boredom is only a symptom, and the player has no other word to describe it. Understanding what the player cannot put into words is your job.

The player stays in the game as long as they are learning something new, and the moment they finish learning they get bored, no matter how much content is left in the game. Or, going through psychology, fun is flow and flow is learning. Anyone who watches Jonas Tyroller knows these ideas.

Boredom comes from two separate places, but the player uses the same word for both. They get bored if you have nothing left to teach, and they get bored if you try to teach too much at once, because where they cannot learn they stop trying. To tell them apart, look at when they quit. The ones who play for hours and then quit have mostly finished learning, and the ones who quit in the first ten minutes never got started. The causes are exact opposites, and the fix you apply to one sinks the other.

Do not mix struggling into this either. Struggling is not boredom, a player who is struggling is standing exactly where the learning is. What breaks a game is not difficulty, it is difficulty that neither satisfies nor teaches anything.

If you cannot make that distinction you do not know what to fix. You add a new map, a new enemy, a new weapon, but all of it is another costume on what they already know. The quantity went up, the thing to be learned did not, and the player keeps getting bored at exactly the same minute, however hard you work on top of it.

You might ask, “then why do content updates work”. The ones that work, work because they bring a new system, they open something for the player to learn. Nobody even talks about the update that puts in ten more of the same thing.

In a roguelite this is even harder to see, because every run looks different. But looking different and teaching something new are not the same thing. If no new question forms in the player’s head, the next run is not content, it is repetition.

I lived through exactly this with Metal Thunder. When it first came out there were 2 maps and 5 weapons, and later I took it to 7 maps and 11 weapons. The rate of that comment did not change.

What Metal Thunder promises the player is clear, power fantasy. If the player enjoys the explosions, they can try different combinations of 11 weapons and 40+ modifiers that leave difficulty entirely to the player, and go up to 100+ hours even while playing the same map over and over, and there are people with 300+ hours.

But because the game is so easy to understand, the people who enjoy learning and pacing rather than power fantasy find it empty. That is because after the first run I open everything in the game to the player and expect them to use it however they want, with no guidance at all.

Under normal conditions, if I had done content-gating like any other roguelite the game would probably be sitting at 90%+ reviews right now, but the number of people with 100+ hours would not be anywhere near this. Some people also complain about the lack of modes, but with the modifiers you can play the game as though it had 3-4 different modes, which is the content-gating question itself.

I wrote before that the audience is not running from cognitive load, it is running from badly presented cognitive load. This is the other face of that. The point is not to reduce the load, it is to hand the load over in an order that can be learned. Sometimes taking your own advice is hard.

What keeps learning standing is fast and frequent feedback, because nobody learns anything from an attempt whose result arrives late. A player who dies without understanding why they died is not learning, they are just getting angry, and that anger goes into the review as “the balance is broken”.

There is also this: every game runs out of things to teach one day, and that is normal. What you do at that point is not to bloat the game, it is to let the player leave at the point where they are full.

Open your game and mark, minute by minute, when the player learns or sees something new. The first five minutes, the fifteenth minute, the first hour, the third hour. The stretch that stays empty is probably where players hit Alt+F4 the most, and what you need to put there is not content, it is something new to teach. The opposite gives you the same result. If you piled three or four new things into a single minute, that is an exit point too, and there you need to spread them out rather than add more.

When you test, do not ask “were you bored”, because the moment you ask that question you have given the answer yourself. What the player tells you has been misleading you from the start anyway, so stop asking and watch them while they play.

There is only one thing to watch, what the player does when they cannot manage something. If they try something different they have learned, because learning already means changing behaviour. If they try the same thing over and over they are learning nothing there, and then either they did not understand what happened or they did understand and have nothing else to try.

Adding content makes the game longer, teaching something new gets it played.