Impossible Opponents

I have been playing the computer game Diablo III for quite a while now. I find it an excellent video game on several levels, but there is one quality in particular I want to discuss: impossible opponents.

To give a quick explanation of the gameplay and mechanics involved, you are a classic armed-to-the-teeth hero, going through randomly generated levels, slaying randomly generated demons, all to restore peace to the world. You have your classic health meter, and when your life hits zero, you die. If you die, you can resurrect from the last checkpoint on the level you reached. When you beat the game, you unlock the next difficulty, where you can continue to gain experience and acquire even stronger equipment, all while fighting stronger versions of the enemies.

Periodically, you will encounter elite enemies. They are like normal enemies, but they will glow blue or gold, and will have special abilities on top of their normal attacks. In every subsequent difficulty level, the enemies gain additional abilities. So where on the Normal level, an enemy might have a shielding ability or a mortar-launching ability, in the next difficulty level (Nightmare), they will have two abilities, so they could have both. And on the fourth and final difficulty level (Inferno) they have 4 randomly generated abilities, on top of already being tough as nails for naturally being the hardest difficulty level.

Here is where it gets interesting, because some of these enemies are completely impossible to defeat. What's that? Impossible to defeat? Like they can't take damage? No, imaginary person, they can take damage, but you can't deal out enough of it before they kill you. And if you resurrect, then they will regain all of their health. When enemies can make themselves temporarily invincible, open up craters of lava under your feet, freeze you in place, and set up laser turrets all around you, you will be spending most of your time trying to survive, with barely an opportunity to actually launch an attack against them.

This aspect of the game can be aggravating beyond belief, but I actually support it. It does something that games basically never do. In nearly every game, you must be able to beat your opponents. They are there for you to wreck up. Often, you can't even progress without killing every living thing. Occasionally, a game may throw an invincible enemy at you, but they are truly invincible. Your weapons literally do zero damage to them. Your escape is scripted and demanded.

But here, you are tempted with the opportunity to kill these impossible opponents. They are mortal. They can take damage. Everything about them, especially including all your previous experience with video games, tells you that you should stand your ground and crush them, but when you are the corpse ten times out of ten, you start to accept that maybe your belief that they even can be felled is flawed. This is when you realize that although the opponents are impossible, the mission is not. If you can run fast enough and far enough away, such that they simply can't keep up with you, you can progress with the level, losing the battle, but possibly winning the war.

Diablo III does an amazing job in the beginning making you feel like the hero of legend, and in the end making you feel extremely mortal. And that mortality is what is rare and what is exciting.

If you are making a video game, then the lesson is right there. And if you are writing a story, the lesson is not far off.

A hero dropping thugs can be satisfying until it gets boring. A hero fighting an opponent who cannot even be harmed is shocking (especially if the hero just finished wiping out a fleet of thugs), but ultimately just railroads the story. A hero fighting an opponent that can be defeated, but is just too much better in some way or another is gripping. You feel the hero struggle. You see progress and get hopeful, but the progress is just not enough to succeed. Seeing that real chance for victory and having it dashed makes you feel the loss the way that the hero does. Having the fear of impending death (or whatever loss is at stake), and having the hero realize that the only way to survive is to run, and the only way to win is to not engage in the fight is a rare emotion for a hero, but a very human one, which we might all be able to relate to. And when you can make that kind of connection with your audience, you have reached an impressive level of storytelling.