What Features Influence Impact Feel? A Study of Impact Feedback in Action Games

Making the hit effect satisfy players is a long-standing problem faced by action game designers. However, no research systematically analyzed which game design elements affect such game feel. There is not even a term to describe it. So, we propose to use impact feel to describe the player's feeling when receiving juicy impact feedback. After collecting player's comments on action games from Steam's top seller list, we trained a natural language processing (NLP) model to rank action games with their performance on impact feel. We presented a 19-feature framework of impact feedback design and examined it in the top eight and last eight games. We listed an inventory of the usage of features and found that hit stop, sound coherence, and camera control may strongly influence players' impact feel. A lack of dedicated design on one of these three features may ruin players' impact feel. Our findings may become an evaluation metric for future studies.