Grand Theft Auto, Oblivion, Fable. Bigger is better, right? With special thanks to GTA3, too many devlopers look for the bullet-points on the back of the box: free roaming open-city, 50 hours of gameplay, realtime day-to-night transitions. There is commonly held belief that the player wants more. More content, extended gameplay, graphics wow-factor that has no impact on core gameplay. Is there room in the budget for all these things, probably not and it’s the game itself that suffers. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘game design’
It’s A Matter of Scope
Monday, July 2nd, 2007+3 Saving Throw Vs. Bad Design
Monday, December 25th, 2006
Over the years, I’ve seen a lot a poor and misguided game design. Both in games that I’ve played (going all the way back to tabletop games) and in many of the products that I’ve worked on. The industry as a whole suffers from a lot of copy-cats and me-tooisms.
Back when I worked at New World Computing, I overheard a conversation between two our lead designers.
“So, how do we want to handle modifiers to ranged attacks?”
“Between 0 and 50 feet, let’s have no modifier, from 51 to 75 a -1, from 76 to 100 -2, and beyond that a – 3.”
“That’s good, but let’s extend it out to 200 feet.” (more…)