Stuns are one of the most common forms of disable in lane-pushing games. Right now, genre-wide, around 50% of heroes have a stun, and this plays a substantial and understated role in shaping the gameplay and hero combat of these games.
In this article we'll discuss what stuns are, how they impact gameplay, and why my game Causeway adopted a "no stuns" policy.
Stuns and Stun-like
The scope of this article isn't just stuns, but those disables which give the "experience of being stunned". I'm going to call these stun-like disables, and we can identify them as those where all of the following are true:
- The affected unit has heavily limited choices.
- The affected unit is vulnerable to further attack.
- The duration of the effect is long enough to interrupt the player's flow.
Using this definition, we would count a sleep, but not a mini-stun (too short) and not a slow (not limiting enough).
With experimentation, we can assess other disables and see that these criteria are effective for identifying the "experience of being stunned".
This chart shows a loose hierarchy. The top two circles are usually limiting enough to count as stuns, but it will depend on the individual game.
The Three Peeves
The three conditions for a "stun experience" also happen to correspond to the problems that stuns create.
These three problems are something we should examine in detail:
Problem 1: Heavily limited choices
"A game is a series of interesting choices." — Sid Meier (of Civilization fame)
In every possible moment of gameplay, from drafting their heroes to deciding the exact moment to use a spell, we would like players to be faced with interesting choices.
As game designers this feels implicit, and we could propose many arguments in favour of it. Indeed, "choosing among interesting choices" is not far from a description of playing itself.
A player who is stunned or chain-stunned cannot choose; they can only suffer from their previous choices. And what worse time to deny a player choices than during the most decisive moments of gameplay: in the middle of team-fights.
Problem 2: Being vulnerable to further attack
Many players enjoy being tested on their aiming and timing: their ability to predict an opponent's movements. Unfortunately, having stuns in the game creates many situations where landing spells is trivialized, because the victim cannot react.
This denies everyone in the game of opportunities to aim, dodge, juke, and make clutch plays.Problem 3: Interrupting a player's flow
Brief moments of pause or transition are inevitable during gameplay, but sustained inability to act (particularly during the crucial moments of a team-fight) is likely to spark frustration, which in turn can break immersion. We'd prefer to minimise this wherever possible.
More on Flow
To back this up, we can look at the psychology of flow. Flow is a state of mind where a person is fully engaged with the activity they are doing — they are free of distractions and completely immersed in the moment.
This happens naturally when people are rock-climbing, painting, competing in sports, and many other activities.
Flow is particularly applicable to games. Having players who are deeply immersed in gameplay (or achieving a flow experience) is testament to great game design!
However, flow only happens under certain conditions, and not all activities or games qualify. For example, most people will never achieve flow while filing their taxes. A primer about the conditions of flow can be read here, though I've picked out the three relevant which to this topic:
- The individual should be actively exercising control over their situation.
- The activity must be challenging and require or test skills at an appropriate level.
- The individual's attention is absorbed completely by the activity.
It is easy to see how the absence of these things would cause problems in a game: look no further than a game with poor controls, a mismatched difficulty setting, or a clunky/distracting interface.
Earlier, we established a definition for identifying stun-like disables. Looking closely, we can see that this definition is the inverse of the conditions for flow. Stuns stop players exercising control, trivialize challenges, and interrupt immersion. They oppose flow definitively.
If we're aiming to have a fluid and immersive gaming experience, stuns probably don't have a place in it.
Note: Stuns don't always have to oppose flow, and the RTS Warcraft III® is a perfect counterexample. Players control entire armies, and when parts of an army are stunned, there are plenty of other soldiers and tasks to manage. The player is still in control, and can still take actions around their stunned units.
The issue in lane-pushing games is that players control exactly one character, and a stun causes complete loss of control.
If our stuns only affect non-player controlled units, there should be no problems.
The Maximal Disable
My focus on stuns and their removal from Causeway is because they are particularly bad for flow experiences, and flow is something I value highly. But for a balanced discussion, we must also consider the positive influences of stuns:
- They reward good game sense. If a player slips up and is out of position, stuns let you keep them out of position while unloading more spells and damage without reprisal. To survive, players have to sharpen their senses and think a few steps ahead to avoid stunlocks before they happen.
This game sense is a skill that many players enjoy demonstrating and being tested on. - They increase dependence on teamwork. Disables create points of weakness where a hero is less able to act independently, creating a window where the importance of allies is increased. Since stuns take away the maximum possible actions (all of them), they similarly maximise a player's dependence on their allies during those moments.
In a small way, stuns also encourage coordination, since staggering stuns is more valuable than staggering most other disables. - They increase the importance of immunities. Being stunned at a crucial moment is a big risk, so players must invest in understanding and leveraging any mechanics which can mitigate that risk.
- They create more reliable and diverse structure in fights.
Stuns temporarily reduce the number of possible actions an opponent might take to zero: which makes it easier to execute a team fight, or fight in a structured way. Without stuns (or at least hard disables), it may not be possible to create real openings that make a fight advantageous.
Similarly, if it's not possible to stop individual heroes from using their spells, then "generally" all heroes can use all the spells they want during a fight, and fights suffer in diversity.
The above properties apply to disables in general, but are seen at their most extreme with stuns. In removing stuns, the potency of these factors in overall gameplay would be diluted.
Is improving flow worth the uncertain outcomes this would have?
A Different Approach
Rather than simply removing stuns, the real challenge lies in replacing them: finding alternative mechanics which preserve their best properties while removing those which inhibit or interrupt flow.
For Causeway, the closest equivalent to a stun is a knockback. Many lane-pushing games have knockback, but Causeway's implementation is special: bonus damage is dealt for each obstacle hit by the unit during their trajectory.
Depending on the angle and obstacles that a victim hits, that could be 4% of a unit's maximum life, or 40%.
This "variable bonus damage" mechanic creates interactions where:
- Bad positioning is still punished
- The displacement is quick enough not to interrupt flow or leave a window for further attack
- The victim immediately reclaims control and can resume making choices
Great for flow, great for gameplay!
Some of the other positive influences of stuns are trickier to replace directly, but can still be manifested using other mechanics or game systems.
Afterword
Causeway's implementation of knockback has been a player favourite for a long time. I can say that because I first came up with it while modding a game called Rise of Winterchill (2007–2014), where I learned many of the lessons that are being applied in Causeway: including this one about stuns!
As I was researching this article, I was interested to discover that the saturation of knockbacks in Rise of Winterchill at the end of its development was about the same as the saturation of stuns in other lane-pushing games (~50%).
Importantly: this does not imply that Rise of Winterchill's characters were simply heroes from other games with stuns switched out!
Instead, Rise of Winterchill had a fundamentally different and unique ecosystem in which heroes are designed and interact. The mechanics and geometry of the game were different.
For example, I can share that while there was lots more displacement in the game, Rise of Winterchill almost always had push effects rather than pull. Any 'hook' ability would have been crazy overpowered!
I am excited to be curating similar ideas in our new game, and look forward to writing about those some day too.
The Crafting Causeway series aims to introduce the features of Kybolt's upcoming game Causeway, while sharing insights about lane-pushing game design and encouraging discussion about how to improve the genre as a whole.
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