Gatingdraft

Definition

Controlling the order in which a player can reach parts of a space. A hard gate is a rule: a locked door, a required item, a scripted trigger. A soft gate is a suggestion enforced by difficulty, distance, or discomfort, and the player can ignore it if they are good enough or stubborn enough.

How to spot it

Try to break the intended sequence. Where you are stopped by a message or an invisible wall, the gate is hard. Where you are stopped by dying, the gate is soft. Then ask what the soft gate would have cost as a hard one, since the substitution is usually the whole design argument.

Why it works

Gates let a designer guarantee that lessons arrive in order, which is what makes teaching possible at all. The choice between hard and soft is a statement about trust. Hard gates buy reliability and pay for it in agency, and they read as arbitrary the moment the fiction cannot justify them. Soft gates preserve the feeling that the world exists independently of the player's progress, and they reward mastery with sequence breaking, but they accept that some players will wander into a wall of difficulty and read it as a bug rather than a suggestion. Opening a gate from the far side is the move that converts one into the other.

Levels using this (3)

Derived from level entries, not maintained here.

• Undead BurgDark Souls · 2011

  Soft gates dominate: the path to the Graveyard and the Taurus Demon bridge are both open early and simply lethal, leaving the sequencing decision with the player.

• FoundryDoom · 2016

  Hard gates all the way down: a gas leak stops the player until they carry a severed hand to a biometric scanner, and the yellow and blue keys are looted from corpses rather than found on pedestals. The keycard grammar of 1993 survives, reskinned as industrial accident.

• The Clockwork MansionDishonored 2 · 2016

  The lever states are soft gates: they shape which rooms exist right now, but the between-walls layer lets a player who understands the system ignore the intended sequence.

Related

• Shortcut loop
• Multi-route parity
• Chokepoint balance