Extra Credits says Game Design courses are bad for learning to be a game developer, thoughts?

Much as I hate to admit it, they’re probably right. Not even like a half-and-half thing here as is typical with EC where they have the right idea but botched research and suggestions. Continue reading →

Thoughts on Game Maker’s Toolkit?

Okay, my general thought is that I overhyped GMT a bit for myself on finding it, and it tends tend to be a bit hit or miss. Despite this, the guy puts the work in frequently and performs above expectations, so I really can’t say he’s average. Overall he’s definitely more good than bad. He’s a solid step in the right direction. Continue reading →

What is your thoughts on this guys video series on his critique of Dark Souls?

I started to do a level-by-level critique of dark souls myself. It went unreleased due to audio level issues. I had different criticisms than this guy, like the way that the door out of the asylum demon’s room isn’t more obvious, leading many many players to try to fight the asylum demon instead of realizing they can run away (like sean malstrom). Also the kick/jumping attack instructions could have been more clear, and there could have been a shielding enemy that allowed the kick instruction to come across better. And the room explaining how to put on armor and equipment is easily missed too. I also think they crowded too many messages around the boss fog. I didn’t miss these things, but a lot of other players did from the LPs I’ve seen. I like the dark souls asylum tutorial way better than the dark souls 2 tutorial which has branching paths without any real flow, Though I like the way the dark souls 2 tutorial can be skipped. Continue reading →

What is your opinion on Extra Credits’ video on speedrunning? I know you’ve mentioned it before that it was god awful, but could you go into more detail about it?

Goddamnit, I hate having to do this, but fine, I will.

First mistake is EVER mentioning the term “glitchrun”. There’s NEVER rules for whether you’re allowed to glitch past large sections, there’s only ever rules forbidding you from doing so. Skipping things does not require permission, it is allowed by default. Using the term “glitchrun” implies that glitches are the aberration, not the standard. Continue reading →

What is your thoughts on this guys video series on his critique of Dark Souls?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VJCDYtR9B8

I started to do a level-by-level critique of dark souls myself. It went unreleased due to audio level issues. I had different criticisms than this guy, like the way that the door out of the asylum demon’s room isn’t more obvious, leading many many players to try to fight the asylum demon instead of realizing they can run away (like sean malstrom). Also the kick/jumping attack instructions could have been more clear, and there could have been a shielding enemy that allowed the kick instruction to come across better. And the room explaining how to put on armor and equipment is easily missed too. I also think they crowded too many messages around the boss fog. I didn’t miss these things, but a lot of other players did from the LPs I’ve seen. I like the dark souls asylum tutorial way better than the dark souls 2 tutorial which has branching paths without any real flow, Though I like the way the dark souls 2 tutorial can be skipped.

I think the big fault with firelink is that the way you’re supposed to go is at your back, and the two ways you shouldn’t go are both roughly the way you’re pointed towards when you land. He’s wrong in that he claims you need the master key to go to blighttown, you don’t. I’m glad we were afforded options here, but the presentation of firelink in terms of guiding the player leaves a lot to be desired.

He’s pretty close to correct about the hellkite wyvern. I think that something like the scorchmarks are a bullshit argument too, considering it’s a visual tell that isn’t established earlier. The dragons in Demon’s Souls were much more fair about their bombing runs. I was expecting the hellkite wyvern because I had played demon’s souls previously. A lot of people die right there, few people figure it out beforehand, it’s like a kaizo block.

His remark on physically consistent level design being good level design is a little shortsighted. It’s good in the context of dark souls, not universally.

Butt stabbing the boar isn’t inconsistent. He shows a ton of clips where he’s too far away. It’s the same range as any other enemy’s backstab.

Complaining that the combat system becomes awful when you have to fight >1 enemy is complete scrub talk. Attacks don’t layer in unpredictable ways, you can see the startup of both enemies. In my opinion, 2 on 1 is when the combat system of dark souls actually becomes interesting, and 1v1 is simply cheesetown for most enemy types. Dude needs to learn to whiff punish, not dodge or block.

Yeah of course the combat remains interesting despite few mechanics, that’s because of good enemy/level design that push the system in different ways and need to be uniquely learned.

I think he could have done this video better by pointing out simply all the common mistakes beginner dark souls players make, then tonally consistent changes that could be made to the game to prevent said mistakes.

Very detail oriented critique. Very gameplay focused. Great description of the game.

What do you think of some of the multiple enemy based encounters in Dark Souls 2?

I remarked in this post that I thought that was one of the best upgrades to dark souls 2 over the original, as I think multi-enemy encounters are where the system of dark souls truly shines.
https://critpoints.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/74/

In single enemy encounters you can easily dodge and attack at rather set times, but multiple enemies make it so you need to judge asynchronous cycles and AI patterns to find opportunities to fight back, which is really fun. With individual enemies, you can parry them or circle strafe backstab them rather easily, multiple enemies cover for each other, making these strategies still useful, but much harder to find opportunities for. There is a similar principle to this in doom and quake (and hell, most other action games).

It’s disappointing to me that this was panned by so many people.

Reading the Dark Souls Critique of Paul Anderson you just mentioned. What do you think about the other parts of his critique. He has five videos total. What are your thoughts on the other four?

I saw. I’ll get around to it. They’re long. I approve of this guy’s style, even if I don’t agree with all his points.

Part 2

I myself have said that the basement key being used to go to the lower burg is probably the weakest point of connection in the whole of dark souls 1. Uneventful door, uneventful key, almost no connection between the two.

The game doesn’t teach you to block the dogs then counterattack. This is probably the absolute crux of my issue with people remarking that any time you’re thrown up against something for the first time the game is teaching you something. It’ll probably be the example I point to in the future for the mistake of this sort of thinking. The thing he demonstrated in the last video was that he didn’t know how to whiff punish. The best way to beat an enemy isn’t to dodge or block it, it’s to press no buttons at all. Dogs get locked in position when they lunge, you can move away from them to bait their attacks, or circle/run around them. Also 1.5 seconds is far beyond average human reaction time, the sane response is to roll.

I think the capra demon is a hard fight, maybe it’s a bit of a gotcha, but absolutely less than the hellkite wyvern, and it’s a spectacular use of level design and enemy combinations, with the weak point probably being the safe zone at the arch above the bridge. There needed to be a high ground of some type, but it being so abusable for plunge attacks and safe from dogs/capra is lame. I think Capra is one of the best parts of the game because of the dynamism of the capra/dog combination. I recently beat this fight using a character at default level with an unupgraded default class weapon, and it was very fun.

So lame that he complains about the channeler in the gaping dragon fight. That was a great touch, similar to the dual dragonrider battle in dark souls 2.

I’m fine with the toxic dart blowers considering the dung pie trick, and that they’re positioned in areas with lots of cover, few enemies, and projectiles are easily avoidable. Also your shield doesn’t have 100% block for status effects, dongus.

Yeah the claw monster on the wall is odd. Clunky design.

He should have recognized by now with the poison mosquitos that flying or jumping enemies don’t actually jump. Their bones are still attached to the ground. This is true of the player as well, which is why you take damage from sources underneath you even if you jump, and activate those switches in sen’s fortress even if you jump over them.

unrelated but love his remarks on the estus flask in the first video and the stamina bar in this one compared to LoZ and SoM. The remarks on the general combat system are great too during the quelaag fight.

He’s right about the undead dragon, I never considered that before. Same with it being poorly designed as an encounter.

Love the slow motion footage of havel’s weapon clearly connecting when he claims it doesn’t.

Damn straight Sen’s is fair.

I noticed the elevator went up an extra level after arriving at the intended destination from the chains I was watching while waiting for it to come down. I intentionally stayed on it to see if there was a secret up there and got killed. I also detected the mimic on my first try and just hit every chest from there on out before opening it. Another tell is that mimic chests breathe slowly.

I found the hidden bonfire to be thrilling, because I thought that the lack of a bonfire was weird, and eventually I looked over that edge to see what was down the side, noticing the bonfire platform.

I eventually found the cage platform, but not on my first playthrough.

I found the first enemy of anor londo to be troublesome because aggroing it by itself was scary as fuck on my first playthrough. I didn’t realize its aggro range was reduced to let you run past and I was scared carrying all these souls with no nearby bonfire. I managed to barely beat it before finding the bonfire.

I agree that the roof you need to run up in anor londo to the rafter room is hidden as hell, not standing out very well. I had to look up how to progress online for this part. The later roofings and rafters are much better designed visually to lead the eye. It’s a good piece of level design in its challenge otherwise.

He’s reiterated this a lot, but yeah, ranged attacks break souls games. Glad they did away with that in bloodborne. They should have had more anti-ranged options on basically all enemies, and less stun/damage probably.

I was disappointed too at the gargoyles in dark souls, considering the same in demon’s souls could fly.

I like the archers, I like the gargoyles before the archers. There’s no surprises here, there’s plenty of space to fight them, you can see everything coming, it’s fair as fuck, just hard. I’ve gone over this before in a previous ask. Also speedrunners have a guaranteed strat for the archers, the second archer was repositioned to prevent it from shooting your back when you get close enough to the first one, and you can parry.

I’ll agree with ornstein’s buggy dash attack being crap, but the rest of his complains are unfounded, except the magic and summoning one. Boss AI (all the game’s AI) handles multiple players poorly.

He says he never dies because he backpedals all the time and waits for safe openings. You can do this with nearly all the bosses, but it’s not as efficient. There are plenty of opportunities to take risks to speed up the fight which aren’t purely backpedaling. Watch a speedrun, they don’t have the luxury to backpedal, and most routes use a melee weapon, even if it’s an extremely strong one.

As usual, I disagree with every instance where he says you should introduce enemies 1 at a time.

You can attack through walls, just only partially.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/416986/webm/Dark%20Souls%20through%20the%20door.webm

Solid observation with the nonlinearity making for an uneven difficulty curve relative to level/upgrades.

I don’t mind the ghosts in new londo, You’d be dumb to let them all rush you. They’re all clearly shown and you’re given chances to avoid them.

I disagree with the implementation of making the player be weaker as necessarily a bad thing. I think the only one of these areas that’s really poorly designed is lost izalith with the T-rex butts.

“you are meant to avoid nito’s spear by sprinting away so it thrusts where you were just standing” What? I thought you were meant to avoid it by timing your rolls in sync with the audio cue.

What I did with the elevator for new londo is simply push the button each time as I run off. It’s an interesting dynamic

The traps in sen’s fortress don’t actually reset when you die or leave. The arrow switch after the first boulder encounter turns the boulder launcher offscreen, which you can hear an audio cue for. The elevators being in a set position instead of magically at the top or bottom when you arrive is not the same as things resetting to their original state on death. Having a 2-way elevator might be less time consuming.

I’m surprised he called 4kings a good fight, doesn’t fit his MO.

lost izalith is terrible and I make no apology for it.

I second that it’s lame that the late areas of dark souls don’t have the same interconnectedness of the world, and lament that no souls game has had that same type of connectedness since.

The forced death against seath is indeed bullshit and shouldn’t have been in the game.

Come on, he should have noticed by now that you can attack through thin walls. I did this against the darkwraiths in new londo, and a ton of other places.

I second that the crystal caves are a boring gimmick. I think the duke’s archives in general are a good area though. Dude has too much trouble with ranged attacks + melee enemies, which I consider an extremely reasonable bread and butter combination.

The critique of the mace versus sword is dumb. Also the sword doesn’t weigh more than the character. The dark souls weight units are pounds or kilograms, and most swords aren’t actually that heavy. They animated the thing that way, accept it. You might as well criticize the stutter on not having enough dexterity.

He doesn’t realize with the backstab that you’re not allowed to backstab when your shield is up.

You’re allowed to roll the instant you get up, it even buffers so you don’t need to be good at timing.

I disagree with his statements on the story, there’s very clearly meaning to a lot of it, and I like the presentation style because it’s so out of the way of the rest of gameplay.

Overall I think his critique is extremely well presented even if I disagree with a lot of it. I’m amazed it doesn’t have more views, he knows what he’s doing and I’d like to see more analysis in this style from everyone.

I know you’ve talked about Extra Credits in the past, but what do you think of this video?
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6UuRTjkKs

I think it’s funny how they assume that the average player of the 80s on the NES was young and male. I’m going off Sean Malstrom’s depiction of the market back then, but in a lot of the commercials and TV spots from back then regarding the NES, there were both boys and girls. It was typically shown as a children’s product, but I think a lot of adults played the NES too. I mean, we had Robin Williams name his daughter Zelda, and Steve Wozniak top the high score charts for Tetris.

That and I wonder why they mentioned male considering they’re trying to push the games inclusivity thing, given the market actually was gender diverse back then. It also seems to imply that games were challenging in the way they were back then because the audience was male, and a male audience would be the one to enjoy challenging games, which is subtly sexist on their part. Maybe it’s to lay down a basis that things used to be all male, and therefore bad, and now they’re more female and therefore good? Sorry, nitpicking a small detail that stood out to me.

Coin op meant they were difficult, but also short to complete the whole thing and it didn’t take much time to get back to where you were struggling. Pokken tournament recently failed in this, allowing you to play for like an hour if you’re as good as a games journalist at the game, guaranteeing it couldn’t raise a large profit relative to the time people played the game. The games had to succeed profit-wise whether players won or lost, being simple enough that anyone could play them, hard enough that few could beat them, and deep enough that those who could would come back to try again or that players who couldn’t win had another tactic they could try.

The first console games were similar to arcade machines in that they couldn’t save. The average NES game can be beaten in a couple hours from beginning to end, to compare to a youtube longplay. However the punishment of getting a game over in console games was lessened, because when you got a game over, you didn’t need to start the entire game over, just resume from the beginning of the world usually. Games later in the NES’s life got save features or password functions, like legend of zelda or metroid, and became much longer games as a result.

Games shifted from the difficult model of arcades because players could afford to sit down in front of them for extended periods of time without fear of losing their money. Notice that computer games of the time didn’t follow the arcade model of difficulty from the get-go because they evolved in this environment to start with. Players could be expected to learn more complicated control schemes through more involved tutorials, and put up with more boring long cutscenes and not cost the arcade profit for their time. Not to mention that arcadey type of game wasn’t what most people aspired to create, so the developers shifted, a lot of people wanted to push a more narrative/immersive experience that wasn’t possible in the arcade.

The biggest trouble here is, they don’t clearly define up front what the actual difference between, “punishing” and “difficult” is. Something I learned early on was that there’s a difference between a game simply being hard, and being “challenging.” We’ve all played I Want to Be the Guy by now, Kaizo Mario, or Super Meat Boy, so it’s pretty obvious that these games are hard, though not the most enjoyable of games. The conclusion I came to is, they don’t have a lot of depth, a lot of range for expression, because of the way their difficulty is constructed. They force players through a funnel.

It’s not just about consistency of rules, obviously if you change the rules there’s trouble, but it’s about giving the player a chance to find out what the rules are and experiment with them. The most annoying examples of inconsistency I can think of are in Witcher 2 and Limbo. In Limbo, there’s one section that is a spike trap where you need to avoid stepping on the wrong section of ground or be killed by spikes. They raise one section of the ground as an obvious tell, so instinct for most players is to avoid it, but surprise, the areas around it are what’s actually trapped and you need to step on the raised ground to stay safe. Then immediately after that, they have a small raised section of ground, so considering you JUST learned to step on the raised part, you do and surprise, it’s actually a button, and you get stabbed by spikes. This is a dick move.

Witcher 2, fucking everything is inconsistent. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the combat system. Sometimes I slash with a pirouette that deals damage quickly for 3 hits, sometimes I get a long slow attack that has crap for range for no real reason. Sometimes I slash quickly in a combo, sometimes the enemy blocks attacks, sometimes they don’t, sometimes I can dodge away after hitting their block, sometimes not, sometimes they can block EVEN WHILE THEY’RE ATTACKING. I have no fucking clue with that game.

I don’t think they chose the best example for consistency with dark souls. They probably should have pointed out one ofthe parts of dark souls that people think is inconsistent but actually isn’t? Though if people think it is, then it might as well be inconsistent maybe.

They mention giving the players different tools, this lines up directly with depth as I mentioned above.

No, I don’t remember games where 90% of the pits would kill me, and a few would have hidden bonuses with no sort of telegraphing. That stuff was usually telegraphed in some way, even in older games.

I think they really chose the wrong terms with punishing versus difficult. Challenging versus Frustrating would be a better dichotomy.

Lowering iteration time also lowers challenge by testing consistency less. If there is a checkpoint immediately after something, players don’t need to be consistent at it, they just need to beat it once (maybe this is why checkpoints come after bosses, we’re not expected to be consistent at them)

The Warframe example I find funny considering I used to wavedash everywhere in Warframe with shift > control > W and repeat, or do a jump at the end for the dragon kick move.

Difficulty spikes can be memorable moments, like the anor londo archers, or like undyne in undertale genocide. They tell you that shit just got real and you gotta learn to deal. Though I’ll generally agree that it’s true that ramping up the difficulty too soon will drive players away because they haven’t gotten good enough yet to overcome that, even though difficulty is ostensibly what players are chasing after.

And I’m running out of stuff to say, and I’m practically being a contrarian at this point, so I’ll move onto the next one.

And this video?
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MM2dDF4B9a4

Technically correct. A lot of people in the souls community called this “organic difficulty.” The idea is essentially you can self impose a challenge to make the game harder in a way that’s not very difficult or arbitrary, or you can choose nonarbitrary ways of making the game easier. I haven’t really come to a consensus on what I think about this yet, because I have a few different factors motivating me here.

On the one hand, I believe the player should attempt to break the game and the game should resist being broken, or at minimum that the means of breaking it should be inefficient, slow, etc. Players should do all in their power to win by any means necessary and the game should work to thwart their efforts.

On the other, I recognize the value of a self-imposed challenge, or a mod, and the value it can add to a game. Self imposed challenges can avoid centralization of the metagame and bring out aspects of the game that normally wouldn’t be stressed.

On the other, such a thing is outside the original constructs of the game. Should we judge a game based on a rules construct that isn’t even a part of the game? I know there’s a certain, “Oh, that’s bullshit” feeling to someone telling you that you only didn’t have fun or experience challenge because you played the game wrong.

Is it really an aspect of good design to allow the player to set the difficulty through imposed challenges rather than explicit pre-game modes? Players have a natural motivation to seek the strongest weapons, positive feedback is essentially anything that makes the game easier. Why should they be expected to forsake more powerful weapons to tailor their own experience in a game that is ostensibly about growing stronger numerically to meet numerically harder challenges? (because RPG).

And in this video, they encourage the viewer to play dark souls 2 in the least fun way possible, even selling it as intended. The spell limits in the later souls games were put into place because using mana, with mana regeneration, was too broken and allowed one to cheese all the bosses slowly but surely.

That and the statement about James Portnow, a game designer ostensibly, or game design consultant, “Now many people play Dark Souls for the difficulty, but James likes the Lore and the World.” Welp. What a shocker!

What do you you think about this video about RNG? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNs8aB0huoc

Aaaaaaagh! I watched like half of this guy’s videos like a month ago, and this one was the one that was bad enough I wrote up a long comment on it, then my browser crashed and I lost the whole comment, because even my comment saving extension can’t save fucking youtube comments because their text boxes are so fucked.

The entire early diatribe about true randomness is unnecessary! We should know that computers aren’t really random, getting true random numbers doesn’t actually matter that much. Pseudorandom numbers based on modern algorithms are entirely suitable for most purposes! If a person cannot determine why a particular thing is the way it is, then it’s effectively random from a game design standpoint, even perfectly deterministic things like something being purely based on framecount, like item drops in darkwing duck on NES, or the items you get in Mario kart 64, which are based on the frame you press the button to stop the roulette.

He then props up pseudorandom number generation as a better fit for what we want out of games than true randomness, which is misleading. Pseudorandom number distributions could still be based on a true random seed and be exactly as useful. I myself think that pseudorandom number distributions that are weighted to certain outcomes are preferable, however most games don’t use this, and the distinction between true random numbers and pseudorandom numbers isn’t actually important to discussing probability distributions. Pseudorandomness versus true randomness is practically a theological topic from the perspective of game design, it’s only important to cryptographers!

Conflating true nondeterminism with skewed probability distributions is really fucking dumb. The real topic should be even probability distributions versus skewed ones. https://www.random.org/randomness/ Here’s a rundown of true random numbers versus pseudorandom numbers.

And he mentions pac man, which is deterministic, not random. And Extra Credits. Please.

I’m going to ignore his initial conflation for the sake of sanity.

He asks if fair randomness is oxymoronic, bringing up poker hands, saying that if your opponent pulls out a 17 of spades, you know something’s up. His claim is that you know the full range of possibilities and they’re constrained within a certain set. However this has nothing to do with whether a distribution of random numbers is fair or not. You might know all the possibilities, but your opponent might simply get a better draw than you all the time or at all the critical times.

Competitive Tetris, Super Puzzle Fighter II, and Chess 960 are all games that involve random elements, however all of them are fair because their randomness is equalized between the players.

And he continues to reiterate that games don’t want true randomness, despite them effectively having even probabilistic distributions in a vast majority of cases, including ones he brings up himself.

The differences in RNG structures between per-call RNG, or RNG using the system clock or framecount as a seed largely don’t matter, because they don’t operate in a predictable enough manner to be controlled by a live human. The fact that TASers can manipulate RNG, or even that speedrunners can manipulate RNG is largely useless from a game design standpoint. We aren’t building games in assembly anymore, you can use Math.random(); all you like and it’s going to return a satisfactory non-deterministic result in most languages.

Most of the video doesn’t cover specific game design applications of RNG, just methods of building pseudorandom number generators and how rarely they can be abused. In my opinion, this isn’t useful to players, even if the game is competitive.

Late into the video talks a bit about actual probability distributions finally, like the distribution method used by Valve for Dota 2, which has small odds on events occurring twice in a row, but larger odds for each time they fail to come up, until it becomes certain that they occur. This skews the distribution to conform better with gambler’s fallacy, the illusion that when something hasn’t happened for a long time it becomes “due” or that it’s unlikely for something to occur twice in a row.
http://dota2.gamepedia.com/Pseudo-random_distribution

Also, it doesn’t matter in my opinion if clever players are capable of manipulating RNG, even in competitive games. If a player is clever and skilled enough to exploit that, then they deserve it. Game systems don’t need to be obscured from the player for the sake of keeping up the illusion of randomness. Games are supposed to be challenges. Overcoming the RNG is another challenge. It only makes sense to keep odds even in gambling games to guarantee that the house makes the majority of the profit. Why do you think card counting is against policy?

That item in golden sun that’s a reward for only the most dedicated players, if someone can figure out how the algorithm works and create a deterministic setup, they ARE one of the most dedicated players.

You don’t need to balance drop rates for rare items, you need to stop having rare items that unbalance the game. If you have a rare item that is extremely powerful, then you’re not balancing it by making it a rare drop. Think about the lucky player who gets that item, their experience is ruined because the difficulty curve has been upset. I’ve heard that story a few times about players who have gotten the black knight sword in the undead burg in dark souls. Super powerful item drops, now they’re all-powerful and the game is easy. In a competitive setting this is also true. Think from the opposite perspective, you have a rare item that outclasses all the others, but players discover a way to deterministically grab it, so now everyone has this rare item. What’s actually wrong in this scenario? Everyone is of the same power level. The idea of a rare item dropping making a single player more powerful because of luck in a competitive game is even worse than the deterministic abuse of PRNG patterns. The problem isn’t that the game can be broken, the problem is that the game breaks itself. An additional problem of the original scenario is, you’re asking players to seriously grind for hours to get a stupid virtual item.

A key thing he doesn’t discuss but lightly alludes to is the use of random numbers to generate a percentage chance that something occurs, versus using a random number to determine when the next event occurs. The difference between a step counter and a pure random chance per-step. I first learned about the differences in this when TF2 idling was a big thing, because it was originally a percentage chance for every unit of playtime, and it became something that occurs regularly after a randomly generated length of playtime.

The thing this all comes down to is, RNG is frustrating, players find it frustrating, players keep trying to find patterns in RNG that don’t exist, making them frustrated, or harming their ability to judge situations accurately.

About the only interesting point in the entire video is that the RNG in hearthstone is crucial to the game’s longevity, essentially the claim that fully deterministic games exclude people, and people are more drawn into games which aren’t totally deterministic, where the distribution of favorable to non-favorable outcomes is less even against the same players in similar circumstances, but not so much that it completely defies expectations.

The trouble is, this claim has no backing evidence, and ignores RPS type interactions (or interactions with hidden information), which are not strictly deterministic or truly random. Chess is still popular the world over and has been for a long time despite being a deterministic game of perfect information. Hearthstone, or an equivalent like Magic could function perfectly fine if you allowed players to specifically arrange the order of their deck in advance, or even draw whatever card they wanted to at any time.

Though if you let people draw whatever card they wanted, it would limit the usefulness of cards that let you draw specific other cards.

Even if you make these random elements deterministic, then you’re unlikely to upset the balance of the game, because players still can’t see each other’s hands. Any way you can build a deck would have another deck that counters it. You might have to insulate the game against early win cheese tactics a bit, because they’re likely to become centralizing (meta’s likely to centralize on decks that have cards up front that either win the game early, or prevent an early win, and if there’s too many ways to win the game early, versus ways of preventing it, then it’ll become an all-out guessing game), but honestly they’d be broken with lucky draws in a non-deterministic format too. I think combo decks are based on that idea anyway, loading the whole deck with early wins, so you’re guaranteed to draw one.

In this scenario, players can’t afford to settle into patterns, or risk getting countered by opponents. Similar goes for every fighting game ever. Dash dancing in smash bros is a great way of lowering your commitment and avoiding attacks, but if I see you doing it and nothing else, I can just hit you with something that sweeps across the whole DD range. You’ll never see a fighting game match repeat itself in general (though one time a gamecube froze, and we decided to replay a tournament match from scratch and ended up on pokemon stadium with the same lives, same percentages, on the same transformation of pokemon stadium. I was in a losing scenario and trying to get a chance to turn it around by resetting that one game which technically is within my rights to request in that situation. it didn’t work.).

Maybe it’s true that by removing RNG, bad players will never win, and therefore your audience shrinks because you have no bad players. That’s the thing that really hits home for me, that maybe games need to compromise themselves, allowing worse players to win over better ones, or correct decisions with correct execution to not pay off. There’s no empirical evidence behind this, but it’s a scary thing to think about that this guy portrays as a positive value of RNG. And we do already have the highly skilled playerbases of fighting games, arena FPS, and RTS that all have dying communities.

n his closing statement, you could reverse each of his statements to mean the opposite thing and make an equally valid case for it. There are already wrenches in the gears of how people ideally play games, as an infinite number of completely deterministic games could demonstrate.

Overall, I don’t like this guy’s videos, and did not find much value in them. I know not all the information in them is common, but it is entirely information I already have, except poorly communicated with conflations of terms, and a large number of mistakes in explaining technical details. I have this nagging voice in my head at all his statements, “What if you did the opposite of this thing? How could you make that work? If it does work, what’s the real underlying principle?” A lot of these videos involve repeating conventional wisdom without questioning it, and in my opinion, a lot of conventional gaming wisdom is incorrect.

His invocation of artificial difficulty in the difficulty video is especially frustrating. I had to make a comment about that.

Better than extra credits though.