“You Don’t Want to Miss This!”

Words: 2173 Approximate Reading Time: 15-20 minutes

I want to talk about a particularly bad piece of design I ran into recently.

I decided to grab the recently released Black Myth: Wukong. I’m a sucker for soulslikes, and I actually want to talk about the game in that context in more detail, but I want to visit something that this game just egregiously messed up on.

Those familiar with the genre know that these kinds of games tend to give their players very little direction. You may need to wander around to find paths, or locate quests. If you’ve started a quest with an NPC and that NPC moves, you might need to search around for them. If the game is well-designed, they will give you some clue about where to search – it’s almost certainly a bad thing if you have to roam the entire game map just to find a particular character.

Regardless, this structure results in a very clear possibility: the player is going to miss stuff. You might begin a quest, but not realize that there’s a quest at all that you can progress, since the game doesn’t keep track of it. You might know there’s a quest, but not know where to go next, because the game doesn’t offer you a map or gave you a cryptic clue about the next step. You might not even realize that there’s a quest at all because you missed some tiny detail.

Let us sidestep the discussion about the relative merits of this design as a whole compared to a system which helps players keep track of these things. There are reasons both for and against this type of design, and we’re not going to tackle whether the system itself is good or bad.

But even within that framework, there can be terrible design. For this system to work, the game still has to be set up with certain constraints. In short, there needs to be rules for what can and can’t be missable, and when stuff can be missable, under what conditions that can happen.

The reason that these kinds of rules would need to exist is to make sure that players don’t need to feel too frustrated and resort to a guide. If you’re searching for something and find it under your own power, then you can feel a sense of accomplishment. If you decide you want to skip that search and just look it up, then you can still get the joy of experiencing the content at the end of it. But if you search for something, can’t find it, and then look it up, you’re likely to experience a double-disappointment: first you’re annoyed that you couldn’t solve the problem yourself, and then when the solution is discovered you’re annoyed because the solution likely doesn’t make sense.

So I want to visit a specific example within Black Myth to illustrate the problem and derive some rules that can be helpful for thinking about opaque design and missable content.

“It’s Just Gone?!”

Near the beginning of the game, you reach a small area which is lightly open-ended. There are a bunch of pathways you can traverse. One of those pathways is guarded by a gigantic monster that hits hard are takes very little damage. The path he’s guarding is actually one you need to go down – everywhere else eventually leads to a dead-end. But you’re not locked into an arena with this boss. You can just sneak past it.

This on its own is actually a potentially neat piece of design, akin to Elden Ring’s Tree Sentinel boss. You don’t need to fight everything when you meet it. If something seems too tough, it is. Just go elsewhere and come back later. If that were the intention behind this boss, it would be a pretty good boss. Arguably you’d want to do a bit more to try to push players to realize this problem and solution, but it would be a neat breath of fresh air.

So I took this lesson and moved on. I went through more of the game’s first zone. In that zone you begin a sidequest where you have to ring three large bells. Upon ringing the third bell, you’re teleported to a new mini area where there’s another boss that resembles the one that was bypassed earlier. It’s not the same boss, just similar.

But this other guy is still tough, so I tried once and then decided to come back later.

Later came, I went back to try to tackle that second guy. I won, so I went to try to tackle the first guy.

He was gone.

My first thought here was “okay, maybe he moves somewhere else?” But then I didn’t really want to try to search for him. So I took to the internet…and no, he’s just gone forever. Apparently he despawns when you ring that third bell. You’re not given any warning that this will happen.

That on its own is pretty bad, but it’s just one boss. Apparently it drops a power that people find pretty useful, but who knows if I would even make use of it in my playthrough. It’s annoying, but I can live with it.

But then…

In the next area of the game you come upon a small arena which contains a boss. In that arena is a wall that is different, but does not strictly speaking stand out in some special way. That wall can be broken. And there are two ways to break it.

First, you can have the boss in that arena break it.

Second, you can use a special power to break it. Specifically, the power you get from that boss in the first zone that despawns.

Okay, but what’s behind that wall? Apparently a key item that is used to access areas where four major (albeit optional) bosses are located. So if you want to try for 100%, or just want to experience the various things the game has to offer, you have to either start over, or wait until you get to New Game +.

When Should It Be Missable?

So let’s take a step back. Why does that feel so wrong? After all, there’s missable content in all sorts of games. Sometimes you’re going to miss things just because you didn’t notice them. Sometimes you’re going to miss things because you can’t do everything in a single playthrough. Sometimes you’re going to miss things because there’s some obscure trigger that you missed.

Missable stuff is not, on its own, bad. For example, a game could be built around playing through multiple times, where you explore different possibilities and pull on different threads. In this case, missable stuff is actually good – it provides a strong incentive to start over. So something being missable is not inherently good or bad.

However, there should be some rules to help identify when something goes wrong.

There are a lot of potential variables for a piece of content, but let’s focus on two: Clarity and Importance.

“Clarity” means two things. Firstly, how easy or hard is it to find the thing in question? If you’re exploring, are you all but guaranteed to find it? Does it require some special trigger that might be difficult to overlook or require backtracking? How much something stands out or is hidden within the game is relevant. If something is easy to find, then it feels like missing it is okay – we messed up in that case. If it’s hidden, then it feels cruel – we can be thorough and still miss it, and it feels like the game is punishing us for not doing exactly the right thing.

Secondly, Clarity refers to signposting about whether you are going to or about to miss something. How well does the game teach you to look around and find secrets? Does the game teach you how to notice potential secrets? If something is permanently missable, does the game warn you about that? Does it warn you if you’re about to do something that can’t be undone? If we get a fair warning or feel properly taught, then missing something is okay. If we don’t get that warning, then it feels arbitrary.

The other element is Importance. This relates to how much impact the specific thing in question has on the rest of the game. Is it a really powerful or cool piece of equipment? Is it some extra resources? Is it an entire zone of the game? The more value you could get from that missable thing, the more important it is going to feel. Importance is not related to whether something is necessary to beat the game, but how it is going to feel to the player. In a game like Black Myth where fighting bosses is one of the core points of fun, fighting as many bosses as possible is almost a goal in and of itself. If you’re not allowed to fight some bosses, that feels like an outright punishment.

Insofar as something is going to be missable that is not tied to the story itself, we need to figure out a balance of these two factors. If you are going to make things in your game missable, you need to either make sure that they are clearly telegraphed, or that they are not too important.

So for example, an incredibly valuable or powerful item is locked behind a gate. If you progress too far, that item cannot be retrieved. If you at least make it clear that there’s something to explore and that there may be something that’s been missed, the player feels like they have a genuine choice in the matter and can use the information to their own ends. If they don’t want to keep exploring, they can move on. If they want that item, they can go back. But it puts the choice in their hands.

Conversely, maybe we want to be incredibly coy with our items, and reward players for doing all sorts of weird things to find secrets. We can do that, but in doing so we need to make sure that those items are something that players are not going to feel bad about missing. Because if the player is worried about what could be behind every wall, then they’re going to come away with the lesson that they need to waste their time running through every option to make sure that they don’t miss out on something cool.

And with this example in Black Myth, we can see the problem. The item in question is both important and unclear. It is the kind of thing that you are more likely to discover by accident or by reading about it online, rather than organically realizing that there’s a secret.

In a sense, it’s the kind of design decision that almost feels engineered to sell strategy guides. There are not – to my knowledge – any official guides for the game detailing these secrets for you to go out and buy. But it still gives off that feeling like you’re not really supposed to find this secret. You’re supposed to have someone else tell you the secret.

Concluding Remarks

I find myself ruminating on missable content so much for a couple of reasons. One is that I used to be one of those completionists, and that tendency doesn’t just die out on its own. There is still this sense of wanting to see a lot of the game and the experience it has to offer. There are limits, and I’ve gotten better about setting those limits. But that feeling of wanting to discover as much as possible means that missable content – at least of this particular variety – feels like a betrayal.

The other is that I am someone who does a lot of exploring in games. I poke around corners and turn over rocks and do all sorts of things to uncover the game’s secrets. So when I put in all of this effort and then find I miss something, I feel like I’ve done my part, and yet the game has not responded in kind. I feel almost as though the game is gaslighting me – it has asked me to explore, and I did, and then the game turns around and says that actually I didn’t explore.

And I don’t want to ignore the fact that I particularly appreciate the organic experience with the game – the feeling of discovering things on my own. When I notice something in a game – a crack in the wall, a bit of light shining through, and pathway obscured by foliage – I feel like the game and I have truly communicated. I do not see the game as an opponent trying to trick me, but as a compatriot trying to help me have fun. But when I miss things in this way, I sense malice. I do not feel like the game wants me to play it. It wants me to struggle while it laughs. And why would I want to go through that?