Last week, we obtained the morph ball bombs and conquered the Bomb Torizo guarding it. Except, in all the chaos of fighting the statue, we never got to try them out. With the boss fight out of the way, it's time to look at the new opportunities opened up by this new power.
The first thing you'll have to do with the bombs is use them to escape the pit you got them in.
It should seem pretty obvious to the player that they need to bomb these blocks, and it is entirely due to their placement. They block the only way out, and they occupy a tunnel only the morph ball can fit through, and sense bombs can be placed only in morph ball mode, there's an obvious connection to be made. It is important that players are able to figure out bombs can break these blocks since when they tried to shoot them earlier with the normal blaster, absolutely nothing happens. The moment when the player realizes that previously uninteractable blocks can now be destroyed by bombs here is very important. Right now there is no obvious way forward. Last time you got a new power, it opened up a bunch of obvious doors and tunnels, but this time there are none of those. If the game didn't take this moment to teach the player that bombs can destroy new types of terrain, they would be pretty lost.
The only reason the player wouldn't be completely lost is the fact that there is still one awfully shady wall that's probably been bugging them from the very start.
Luckily, the power of morph ball bombs lets us blow up this wall and finally progress to somewhere new. You can notice a progression in the way the developers have been hiding the path forwards so far. On your way to getting the morph ball and missiles, you travel down a shaft with a bunch of clearly gated rooms along the sides. This makes it easy to check out all of those rooms once you have your new abilities because they're all in a central location you have to pass by, and they all have clearly defined locks for the clearly defined keys you just obtained. Once you realize all of these rooms dead end, you're forced to backtrack a little bit and apply your new ability somewhere outside the immediate area. Now, you're given a tool that isn't as easy to apply as the others, its purpose is to destroy blocks, but the blocks aren't clearly marked. First you were taught the basics of opening new areas, then the concept of backtracking, and now the idea of finding secrets that aren't immediately identifiable.
The mindset of a Metroidvania can be hard to get into for someone who hasn't played a similar game before. And back on the SNES when Metroid was busy pioneering this genre, it was safe to assume most people wouldn't be familiar with the style of game at all. While Super Metroid is supposed to feel imposing and cryptic (as we talked about last week), if it truly was as tricky as it wants you to think it is, most players would quit. Game design involves a lot of smoke and mirrors, and the teaching moments we've experienced thus far are an example of that. The developers obviously want the player to feel like they're the mighty Samus Aran, conquering the difficult planet Zebes on all their own. This feeling will only come if the planet is both imposing yet possible to defeat. The progression here subtly teaches players the skills they'll need to conquer Zebes while making them feel like they're figuring it out themselves.
With the developers exposed, let's return to the game itself. There's a new kind of upgrade to be found just beyond the wall we just blasted. This right here is an energy tank, your way of increasing max health in Super Metroid. Each one will give you an additional 100 health to the 99 you start with. Your first energy tank will probably be your most pivotal one, as it will double your current health. Luckily that first energy tank is also placed on the critical path here so you can't miss it.
You're about to reach the point of the game where things are more open and you'll have the option to do more backtracking. Since half of Super Metroid is about uncovering secrets and finding collectibles, the developers want to encourage as many players as possible to actually try and find those secrets. As useful as missiles are, having five extra at any given time won't be much of a game changer. Energy tanks give the player a huge collectible to always hunt for. Even when you've collected almost all the tanks in the game, one more still means a good quantity of extra health, so there will never be a time where the player is bummed to find one of these. Energy tanks provide a real motivation to try to find new collectibles, and the placement of one here, on the critical path right before things start opening up encourages players to start looking for secrets in the hopes they might find something as useful as an energy tank.
Following this very nifty energy tank comes a room full of a new kind of space pirates that can only be destroyed by missiles. This reinforces the idea that different weapons will have different effects on different things, but these pirates aren't that important. What is important is the the crossroads you'll find at the bottom.
You're faced with two doors, one of them instantly more interesting than the other. You've got your classic blue door to the left, but to the right you've got a missile door. That already makes it seem a little more important in the player's subconscious, but more importantly, the door leads to a room that's not on the map. Now we've already discussed how the maps you're given don't show the entire area, but it is entirely possible the average player hadn't known this until now. When they notice that this door leads to something that isn't on their map, they are going to instantly want to see what's behind it. It creates this sense of mystery, which is good because the developers definitely want players going through this door.
Enter the door and you can instantly tell something is up. The intense music that was playing cuts out, and you're suddenly in a foggy, mechanical room with red warning lights. One thing that I mentioned Super Metroid had to be good at was making the player remember important rooms. What we're about to see is probably the most important room in the game, and the developers are pulling out all their tricks to make sure it's remembered. This long hallway is a giant contrast from what you've been in previously. You go from dark, organic caves to this bright metallic hallway. There's one way to make it stick out. The music also cuts instantly from epic battle music to something quiet and somber, there's another way to make it special. Then this hallway goes on for quite some time too, just to give it even longer to burn itself into your brain.
Then, after this big hallway comes the room of import.
There are four strange statues in this room, all piled on top of each other, with strange glowing eyes. That's all there is, there's nothing you can do in here right now. This room is obviously important, but the lack of any immediate use just makes the player wonder about it more. And we want the players wondering about this room because of how important it is. I'll let you in on a little secret the player doesn't know yet: this room is the entrance to Tourian, the game's final area.
When designing a game as open-ended and mysterious as Super Metroid, there are two problems you run into pretty early on. One, if you're planning on not using any dialogue or obvious exposition, how are you going to give the player a goal to work towards? And two, if area progression is a big maze of backwards and forwards and not just a straight path, where do you put the end-game? The statue room is the developers' answer to both of these. Metroidvanias are about getting stronger, but getting stronger cannot function as a standalone player goal, it has to be a means to an end. What is the point of gaining new abilities if there's no need for you to have them? Each of these statues represent a boss, and they are the end-goal of your power-gaining crusade. Although the player can't figure it out immediately, the statues work to let you know that your goal is defeating the four baddies that lurk in Zebes.
The second question is a bit more of a complicated one to answer. In most games where the levels are laid out linearly, you just place the last level at the end of this string of levels. You could take that approach and apply it to a Metroidvania structure. Just take your final area, and connect it right to the end of whatever area the player is supposed to gain their last upgrade in. While that is something that can work, it's not something that works for Super Metroid. Having to defeat all four bosses would be meaningless if Tourian was past the last boss anyways. While it would be functionally the same, the player gets a lot more of a sense of progress and motivation from having the access be here, with the four statues showing you how far you've come.
With this strange room certainly in the back of the player's mind, it's time to head on down the other path, and pretty soon we get to an elevator that takes us to a new section of Brinstar. And now the game is going to be starting for real.
You might notice that this shaft design seems very familiar, and that would be because it is. Remember how earlier I was talking about smoke and mirrors and how the developers need to trick the players into thinking they're exploring and figuring things out for themselves? Well this is a good example of that. When you first find this shaft, it feels like a huge new world of possibilities, when in reality it's only a small difference in complexity from your last shaft. For one, there are only five doors over the previous three. The main difference here being that they're all instantly unlockable. There is no upgrade you need in order to access all of these different rooms. That initially makes it seem like this one is much more open, but thanks to what was put behind all these doors, you'll find it is actually still a really controlled environment, just one that's supposed to feel large.
First off, all of the rooms on the left side are immediate dead ends, all of which containing some kind of resource room. The top left leads to a map room with this area's map, meaning if you choose to open that door first (which is likely since it is one of the first doors the player will see), you'll be given a sneak peak at what the rest of the rooms hold. The room below the map one houses a save station, something that will probably be useful, and then the room at the very bottom left leads to a new kind of room.
This right here is a missile refill station, and is a lifesaver to all the players trying to explore this shaft. Since each red door takes five missiles, there is no way for you to be able to open all the doors in this shaft without having to refill your missiles, and this room lets you do that. The downside however, is if players waste all their missiles on other doors before this one, they'll have to go back and farm some more, the issue this room is designed to avoid. Thanks to its placement however, there is a good chance players will find it before they run out of missiles. Odds are, players will start opening doors either at the top or at the bottom of a shaft. Players who open at the top just see a door and want to open it, while others may want to explore the whole area before opening any doors, and thus end up at the bottom when they're ready to start exploring the branching paths. Later in the game when the player has a vast supply of missiles, not having enough to open doors will rarely ever be an issue, but in this early phase it's a necessity to include some kind of restock. Otherwise players would be forced to grind for ammo pickups, and that's not engaging and we don't ever want to make players do that, especially this early into things.
Once we're done with this room and restocked on missiles, it's time to keep checking out the other rooms. First however, there's something interesting that'll probably catch your eye at the bottom of this shaft. There is a small room below the ground where a lone monster crawls around. This is a huge giveaway to some kind of secret, because there is literally no point for the camera to scroll down that far and for the small room to even exist in the first place if there's nothing there. Now you may have the urge to bomb this ground, since you were taught earlier that bombs can break certain blocks, even if they don't look breakable. Doing so, however, will not break the ground, but instead make them turn into the weird gray icon blocks picture above. Odds are, this maybe the player's first experience with these kinds of blocks, and like everything else so far, it's designed to be a teaching moment. It becomes clear that your current arsenal is not enough to break these tiles, and the icon most likely represents some kind of future power you don't yet have. This moment introduces you to the icon tiles, and you'll see more of them in the future for different powers, but it also introduces you to the second function of bombs. They let you reveal the hidden function of blocks. This sets the bombs up to be your go-to tool for investigation, exactly what they should be.
There is an issue the developers of Super Metroid must certainly have faced when they were crafting this game. When you have so many different abilities that all interact with the world differently, how can you make sure the player knows what to use where? This isn't much of a problem for the mandatory path of progression, it's pretty easy to signpost most abilities. The problem is when trying to hide a secret. If you were to be able to look at a wall and see some kind of marker that meant it could be shot, it wouldn't really be a secret. Marking everything immediately would give to many things away, but if they weren't marked at all, players would have to try each tool in their arsenal on a wall in order to find out which one would bust it open. The morph ball bombs act as a compromise. You an see something that looks suspicious, and then using bombs on it will reveal what it takes to open it. This way, unless you are bombing every single tile you come across, you still have to pay attention to the world to find something that sticks out. Then once you've identified it, there is no boring trial and error since you can then bomb it to find out what it will take to destroy it.
With the useless half of this shaft explored now, we'll have to see next week what the last two doors may contain. To tide you over until then, here are some key takeaways from what we went through this week.
Key Takeaways:
- Players always want to feel like they're achieving something, and they certainly don't want their hand to be held the whole time. Any instance where a game can have the player uncover things themselves will be preferable to being told
- Good tutorials are ones that players will never notice. The game can continue teaching the player far after the starting area. Super Metroid is aware that it is a tricky game, so it takes the training wheels off very carefully, slowly increasing the complexity of the map so the player is never dumped in the deep end with no idea how to handle it.
- There's a very tricky balance between secrets being too obvious and too obtuse. Diligent players should be able to notice something off, but the solution should not be signposted in a way where nobody could possibly miss it.
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