‘Tactical Transparency’ is a term I throw around to describe the concept that the player should always know what his options are. This is not to say that the player should always have the right answer – he certainly should have the option of making a bad choice, or be beaten by bad luck, but he should always be able to figure out the odds. Blackjack, for example, is reasonably tactically transparent, but you still have the ability to be screwed by bad judgment or luck.

This term is useful when talking about many things, including combat, AI and 3D graphics. For example, one place where game designers really screw up tactical transparency is in poor use of the heightfield. Most games have an angle of terrain, above which you simply cannot climb – let’s say 40 degrees. Fair enough. But then those games don’t stop worldbuilders from building slopes at 39 and 41 degrees, both of which look virtually identical to each other to the user, which creates a world which feels inconsistent to the user.

OK, that’s obvious. But what’s less obvious is that, if the camera is overhead in a more isometric view, it may be impossible to tell a 30 degree angle from a 60 degree angle. As such, designers need to painstakingly ensure that unclimbable cliffs are clearly visually different, such as being painted with a different texture.

Nothing breaks immersion like the player fighting with the game’s controls and world representation. A game of Civ can be incredibly immersive. A game where you’re running for your life and you have to throw yourself against invisible walls to find the right green slope to climb is incredibly NOT, no matter how hard your graphics programmer worked on normal mapping every blade of grass.

Tactical transparency is, of course, the most utilized in strategy games, where players feel they have the right to know every bit of information about everything. But it is useful in other games too, and should be a growing concern for developers trying to make more realistic world representations. One of the cornerstone philosophies of tactical transparency is that giving the players visibility of their stats is usually better, so that those players can make informed decisions. Trial and error is a process that is, in general, antithetical to tactical transparency.

A good example of tactical transparency at work is the Light Meter that is found in most sneaking games (Thief, Splinter Cell, Vampire: Bloodlines), which represents the shadows a player is hiding in with one number. Sure, you could force the player to use his own judgment as to whether he’s in the shadows enough, but a player’s judgment of this can be affected by the angle of the camera, the glare on his monitor, even quirks and glitches in the stealth algorithm. If the player is worrying about any of these things, he’s not immersed. If he’s watching one number on his light meter, he knows it’s as low as it’s gonna go and he’s holding his breath as the guard walks by – he’s very immersed. And if he gets caught, he knows the problem is in his tactics, not in his camera placement.

Where this all gets interesting is in building combat and AI. Many in the previous thread talked about a desire for AI that wasn’t totally predictable. OK, fair enough. But the flip side is that players will reject any AI that can’t be observed, and then beaten based on those observations. AI that feels random and capricious just doesn’t feel fair.

For example, I’ve been playing Vampire: Bloodlines over the last week. The game is enjoyable except for the boss monsters. There are many problems with these boss monsters, the least of which being that the game mechanics are set up in a way that you can only fight them effectively hand-to-hand (an unfortunate discovery, since I specced my Malkavian to be a gun-toting stealther). But the real problem is that there appears to be no discernable pattern to their AI. There are no openings to watch for. You can’t hit the block button in time to respond to an incoming attack. The tactics of the situation appear to be 1) Bring a high melee score to the fight, 2) Pray and 3) Reload frequently.

When you finally win, you don’t feel smart, and you don’t feel skilled. You feel… lucky. Which, surprisingly, isn’t all that satisfying a feeling.

Taking the concept of tactical transparency can lead to better, more interesting combat encounters, which fundamentally leave the player feeling challenged as he loses and supremely satisfied when he succeeds. If, at the end of the encounter your player doesn’t know WHY he succeeded or failed, the game has fallen down somewhere along the way.

Original comment thread is here.