How important do you think developer intentions are? Do you think stuff like poor control schemes, are acceptable, just because it’s part of the scheme the developers envisaged? Are horror games “supposed” to have bad controls?

A long time ago, I’d say, “Not at all.” I’ve reached a more mediated stance as of recently.

The role of developer intention is complicated. Primarily, it’s related to defining what the game is in the first place, but the actual game is what the player decides to play. Since games are contracts, developer intention is filtered down through the design of the game, and the textual feedback of the game to communicate to the player what the game is supposed to be, then the player interprets that and creates the contract of play for themselves. The developer intention creates the framework for how the software is to be interpreted as a game, and I think that’s just about it. Continue reading →

What would you consider to be “good” open world game design and “bad” open world game design?

Okay, so what are the benefits of open worlds? The benefits are, you have this huge amount of content available at one time, much like a metroidvania, except instead of the levels being hallways, it’s one big continuous space. This means that players can approach any given area from a variety of angles, and they are capable of engaging with any of the content open to them across the entire world instead of engaging with the content in a set sequence. Progression is defined by event flags instead of through the areas open to the player, or the player’s progress through specific areas.

Drawback: Big continuous spaces are bad level design. There need to be walls, pillars, and other barriers that . And because every point is connected to every other point, you can usually go around any sort of roadblocks in your way. In MGSV this meant you could run around the outskirts of almost every encampment and not engage in the core stealth gameplay. A lot of afghanistan had big pillar cliffs organizing the map into giant “hallways” as a result. Far Cry 3 blood dragon had a fair amount of success enclosing every camp in giant walls, limiting the entry points so the inside could have real level design. Continue reading →

When it comes to comp FPS multiplayer. How would approach balancing? looking at games like destiny and overwatch balance seems impossible with patches to fix things which may cause other problems and so on.

Okay, balancing a game like Destiny is probably impossible. It has random loot drops if I’m not mistaken, the complexity is way too high.

Overwatch seems more workable. I’m admittedly not an expert on the game, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.

Basically, Overwatch has a ton of character types that seem fairly useless, like all the snipers, turrets, and Mei. They’ve never been good, they probably never will be good, given the format of the game. They’ve been consistently bottom tier since the game came out. They’re strong at one thing, but have weak versatility, and are generally not objective oriented. Continue reading →

What’s the best way to make interesting bosses, or enemy encounters where you fight more than one boss, or enemy at the same time?

Well, I’m not gonna say this is the best, but some things to consider are the ways different enemies divide up space. Like in Nier Automata, some enemies have lasers that cut across a part of the battlefield, some shoot huge clusters of bullets that need to be shot through or moved around, some get up close and flail their arms to keep out a constant hitbox, making them actually exploitable to get perfect dodges.

The key thing is making sure the enemies overlap in different ways. The most common example of this ever is a ranged enemy plus a melee enemy, or a rushdown enemy plus a slower enemy with wide hitboxes. Continue reading →

What do you think of backtracking in videogames?

I like planning routes across a large map. It’s not a direct gameplay challenge with discrete success or failure, but it’s an amusing side-element. I’ve been playing Nier Automata and had to backtrack so much I got practically sick of it. I wish you had a faster max run speed. I wish you could fast travel from anywhere. I wish the checkpoints were more conveniently placed, especially the amusement park one. Still rather enjoyed planning routes, just wish a lot of it wasn’t dead time running across the huge environment. Wish you could at least run 200-300% faster when no enemies are around.

Backtracking is neat when you give people things to do along the way that feel purposeful and not just time-filler-y, like collecting things or investigating things. So they can naturally string together a lot of tasks across the map rather than just running from one end to the other.

If the game is oriented around backtracking, it’s nice to give main missions that at least partially facilitate this, have you trekking across areas you’ve covered before, so you have an excuse to pick up all the side mission collectibles as you pass through. Ori and the Blind Forest notably does not do this, segmenting every main mission off into its own self-contained linear area, and it lacks fast travel, so picking up all the collectibles all across the map once you finally have the abilities to grab them at the end of the game is kind of a pain. Definitive edition added fast travel, fixing this. Ori had all of its mission critical areas kind of tied up in themselves, and you didn’t spend a lot of time going back and forth across the areas inbetween, where all the collectibles were hidden. Not the best metroidvania style design.

Dark Souls did a clever thing having fast travel only available in the latter half of the game, when all the goals were spread across the map and the world became unreasonably large to traverse on foot.

Symphony of the Night has a great nonlinear structure, even if I have misgivings about its level design. Castlevania games post-sotn usually do very well with this. It feels like mini-expeditions from savepoint to savepoint. You have challenges along the way, and it’s kind of tricky to figure out how you’ll fit together trips between points of interest.

Nier Automata drove me kind of nuts with the backtracking though for side quests. You needed to run across the world a LOT, without a lot to do on the way, and you didn’t move particularly fast relative to the scale of the world. Having you speed up more as you run further seems like a good solution to this type of thing. It means you can’t move super fast in battles, but also reduces travel time across long distances by a lot.

Whats you opinion on giving the player all abilities in the beginning vs gradually gaining them as you progress? Does it matter? Or you can do both but it depends on the execution?

Giving abilities over time prevents decision paralysis/analysis paralysis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis

Unlocking abilities over time basically never gives a game more depth than having them all from the beginning, unless later skills overshadow earlier skills, reducing the relevant depth of the game (though ideally not more than they increase the absolute depth of the game). So in that case, the game isn’t able to explore all the depth possible in its system unless you play both with and without all the abilities at once.

One approach that I like is the Symphony of the Night approach where you actually have all your spells from the beginning, but just don’t know them. You need to buy or find scrolls that tell you the input. This means that experienced players can play the way they want to from the beginning without needing to unlock anything, while newer players can be introduced to things as they have time to digest that information.

The ability to unlock new abilities over time can contribute to the depth of a speedrun if the time at which you gain each ability is negotiable, making it an interesting optimization constraint to gain certain abilities sooner or later.

On a simple level, it can help the game have a different tone and structure to its gameplay at the beginning relative to at the end. The first example of a game where later abilities overshadow earlier ones to reveal a different style of gameplay is probably a more productive implementation of this.

On a more psychological level, away from the notion of depth, there’s a simple feeling of reward in response to obtaining new things to play with. It feels good to work your way up to something and being given something new, regardless of whether that process is fun or not. This is why collection elements are so strong in so many games.

Some games, like DMC, are clearly more fun when you’re playing with a full deck, where others do better with a steady drip feed, like ……. Well, I can’t actually think of a good example here. Nioh? Oh. Metroidvanias. In those, even progression is tied to abilities.