Most games tend to be based on completing a single objective, such as collecting victory points, moving to a specific location, or killing your opponent. There may be different strategies to achieve that objective, but it is rare to see games that offer players multiple distinct paths to victory. These games certainly exist, such as Armello, Civilization, and even Magic: The Gathering, but one phenomenon I’ve noticed in many of these games is something I’ll refer to as the Lock-In Effect:
The Lock-In Effect: When a game features multiple distinct victory conditions, pursuing one of them makes it more difficult (if not impossible) to pursue the others.
The Lock-In Effect is very common in games with multiple objectives. Achieving a win condition typically requires devoting a lot of time or resources, so logically it should be difficult to have enough left over to successfully pivot to another goal. But what if you want players to adapt their strategy and change objectives throughout the game? How can you avoid the Lock-In Effect?
Killer Queen Black is one of the few games I’ve played with multiple win conditions that doesn’t suffer from the Lock-In Effect. Based on the extremely popular 10-player arcade game, Killer Queen Black is a team-based competitive action platformer for up to 8 players. Each four-person team is made up of one Queen and three Workers. The Queen is a powerful, aggressive role based on protecting your team while attacking your opponents. The Worker, on the other hand, is a flexible role that can serve a variety of functions. There are three distinct ways to win the game:
Economic Victory: Completely fill your hive with berries. Only Workers can gather berries and return them to the hive.
Military Victory: Slay the opposing team’s Queen three times. Queens can be slain by the opposing Queen, or by Workers that have transformed into Soldiers.
Snail Victory: Ride the slow, neutral snail all the way to your side of the screen. Only workers can ride the Snail, and only one team can ride it at a time.
The game feels very fast and fluid, and teams often ebb and flow between the three objectives throughout a match. But why is that? Why doesn’t Killer Queen Black suffer from the Lock-In Effect? I think it comes down to three main factors:
The Objectives Aren’t Fully Incompatible
I can’t tell you how many times someone sneaked in an Economic Victory because everyone was fighting over the Snail.
While it is technically more efficient to devote the whole team to one objective, this strategy will often leave your team vulnerable to a devastating counterattack. Instead, by splitting your team between multiple objectives, you force the opposing team to divide their focus. This can allow your team to sneak in a victory while your opponents are distracted. This means that time and resources spent pursuing one objective aren’t fully wasted if you decide to pivot to another objective later in the game.
The Team Roles Are Malleable
Workers serve an extremely flexible role on the team. They can gather berries or ride the Snail, and they can freely swap between these tasks. Alternatively, they can transform into Soldiers to support their Queen. But even after transforming, both the Queen and the Soldiers are very flexible with where they want to focus their efforts. Do you want to defend the Snail, or attack the Workers harvesting berries? Do you go after enemy Soldiers, or focus on their Queen? There are lots of different ways to deploy your offensive abilities, especially when you consider that…
Your Strategy is Dependent on the Other Team
What strategy should you go for?
Because the opposing team can also pursue multiple objectives, your team needs to be constantly monitoring them and adjusting accordingly. If the enemy team is riding the Snail, your team needs to stop them and move it away from their goal. And once you’ve started moving it away, why not try to move it all the way to your side for a Snail Victory? If the opposing team keeps killing your Queen, you might want to create more Soldiers to help defend. And if you manage to kill the enemy Queen once or twice while defending, maybe you want to push the attack for a Military Victory? If the opposing team keeps collecting berries, you might want to harvest them so that the opponent can’t collect them. And while you’re at it, maybe you should just collect a few more for an Economic Victory. The key here is that none of the three victory conditions feel objectively more difficult than the others. Instead, their viability depends on the skill of the teams and the meta that forms between them.
The Lock-In Effect isn’t always a bad thing. As designers, you might want players to pick an objective early on and stick to it for the rest of the game. But if you want to create a game that is fluid like Killer Queen Black, it’s important to empower your players to quickly and easily shift between strategies. Otherwise, you might find that all the potential objectives your players could pursue quickly collapse down into whichever they happened to choose first.