For game designers, encouraging aggression is often a good thing. Too many players of StarCraft or even regular combat games end up "turtling", dropping initiative wherever possible to make their games slow and boring while playing as safe as possible.
But in other games, often of multiplayer variety, hyper-aggression can sometimes ruin pacing in the other direction. Imagine spawning into a game with dozens of mechanics to learn, but finding that the prevailing strategy of enemy players is to arrive directly into your base and overwhelm you with a large set of abilities, using either their just-large-enough HP pool, or some mitigation ability, while you were still curiously investigating mechanics and working on defenses.
Some players find this approach fun, and this may even be the appropriate situation for games of a competitive variety, where the ability to react to unexpectedly aggressive plays is an exciting element for both players and spectators.
Plus, this is a very necessary setup for speedrunners, who often optimize to find the best way of trivializing singleplayer encounters.
But other games have something of a more casual focus, which can give a sour feeling when trying to bring people into the experience without having to reflexively react to players that are abandoning caution. Even when a game isn't casual, aggression metas can trivialize the "ebb and flow, attack and defense" mechanics that the game traditionally tries to teach. This can also lead to speedruns becoming less interesting because one mechanic allows a player to skip much of what makes a game enjoyable (which can sometimes be solved by "No XGlitch%" run categories)
So, the prompt branches into a few questions:
- What are fun occasions you've seen where players got absolutely destroyed for relying on various "rush metas" in certain kinds of games, because witty players knew just how to react?
- What are some interesting game mechanics you've seen that don't ruin the fun of the game, but force players to consider other mechanics they'd otherwise just forget about in order to have a "zero HP, max-damage" build?
- What are some games you know of that are currently ruined by "Aggression metas", and what ideas do you have for either players or designers to correct for them?
Aggression should be part of a game, but shouldn't be the only way to play it. Obviously, when a game is optimized, it may be the best way to play (Monster Hunter and HAME speedruns come to mind), but a lot of great games try to design so that different archetypes can coexist and play off one another.
Street Fighter 6 encourages aggression. The Drive Meter system makes it so that turtling and blocking forever will end with you in blowout, taking chip damage and having worse frame disadvantage, as well as removing your ability to use Drive moves and opening you up for stuns. However, also hidden within the Drive System are some of the tools to deter mindless aggression. Drive Impacts are big moves with armor that lead into a full combo, so if you can read a braindead attack sequence, you can Drive Impact to absorb a hit, smack them, and then combo them for 35% of their life total. There are also parries, which can refill your drive meter.
Magic: The Gathering has tried to balance the various archetypes (Aggro, Midrange, Control, and Combo) so that every format should have at least 1 competitively viable deck in each meta archetype. Typically, Aggro will be too fast for a Control deck to stabilize and kill them before they can get their engine set up. But Midrange will trade just efficiently enough (with good 2-for-1 removal or creatures) to stop the aggression, and then start plopping out creatures that Aggro will have difficulty overcoming. And Combo often has nothing to fear from Aggro, since Aggro oftentimes can't interact with the game-winning combo pieces. And because of this system, Aggro decks have to have sideboard plans ready for whatever meta they expect at an event or tournament. Removal or protection to get over or under Midrange, and faster speed or other types of interaction to take down or disrupt Combo. Magic's systems (Mana/lands, instant speed removal, and even the variance that comes from being a card game) don't punish aggro directly, but they make sure that there are usually answers out there.