Mechanics Onboarding Redesign

Understanding Metroid: Dread players’ gameplay experiences to find design opportunities to support their unmet needs.

Tools: Miro, Notion, Figma

Timeline: 3 months

Role: UX Designer

  • Players are onboarded to the Omega Canon by using it to unlock a door to then defeat the E.M.M.I. robots. Though players understand they need to first shatter the door’s shield to expose and destroy its core, many don’t apply the same strategy to the E.M.M.I.’s shield.

  • 2 player personas I will use to cereate a feature prioritization matrix to help inform which potential updates are most meaningful to which player segments.

  • Metroid: Dread was my introduction to the Metroid series. Exploring and running through dangerous (and scary!) environments to unlock new abilities and locations was such a rush!

    As I noticed both things I enjoyed and moments of friction in my own experience, I started thinking, what do other players think of the game?

UX research process

My process for assessing and analyzing players’ feedback to identify opportunities to reduce friction in their experience.

Jump links to page sections:

I read Metroid: Dread reviews on GameStop and recorded them in a Notion database. For each review, I highlighted and filtered them by different aspects of the game such as Narrative, Gameplay and Aesthetic.

Though the game was well received overall, there were trends of frustrating experiencing many players were having.

Read online reviews

  • The E.M.M.I. enemies felt too punishing and unfair.

  • The levels and gameplay felt too linear and repetitive.

  • It was was too easy to get lost and players depended on online tutorials to understand what their objectives were.

Trends of players’ frustrations:

After reading how some players found E.M.M.I. enemy encounters too punishing, I observed YouTube streamers interactions with the E.M.M.I. to better understand what was happening in game.

One pattern in the players’ behavior was they weren’t using the Omega Canon’s new Omega Stream mechanic to help them kill the E.M.M.I. Despite understanding their onboarding process, most weren’t reading the on screen instructions to apply this strategy to their defeating enemy.

Observed streamer play throughs

  • Most players’ first instinct was to use only the Omega Blaster to kill their enemy like in the first level.

  • Players were too panicked by either the E.M.M.I. encounters or distracted by in real life (IRL) factors to read the mechanic instructions.

Observed player behavior:

Applied the PLAY Heuristics

I applied what I’ve learned about players’ thoughts and behaviors so far to the PLAY Heuristics to help gage what players should and shouldn’t be experiencing.

The PLAY Heuristic categories with the most unmet criteria were “Enduring Play”, “Challenge, Strategy and Pace” and “Error Prevention”. These results helped shed light on what aspects of the game’s features to focus on supporting.

  • Enduring Play

    • Players find the game’s repetitiveness boring and are penalized repetitively for the same failure.

  • Challenge, Strategy and Pace

    • Players don’t have enough context to understand a new ability or objective.

  • Error Prevention

    • Players aren’t given enough context sensitive help and feel stuck not knowing where to go or what to do.

PLAY Heuristic categories to focus on:

Affinity mapped findings

I combined and organized all of these findings in an affinity mapping session to identify patterns in players’ feedback.

  • EMMIs were repetitive and too punishing.

  • Gameplay felt linear and could've been more explorative.

  • Not enough contextual clues for players to understand their goals and how to accomplish them.

  • Controls felt satisfying and exciting making levels feel rewarding to explore with the right amount of challenge.

Key trends in playerfeedback:

Developed player personas

These trends informed 2 player personas that will be referenced through out the design and testing phases of this project.

Next Steps in Process

Apply the Seven Usability Pillars for Game UX to the Omega Canon onboarding process since players consistently struggled with it.

Assess mechanic onboarding process

Based on player feedback, usability guidelines and industry examples, design versions of low fidelity wireframes to survey with players to gage their preference.

Wireframe solutions for A/B testing

Prototype solution for play testing

Prototype the most well received solution in UE5 to play test and compare player engagement with the Omega Canon to previous observations.