Design

The boredom of circular based multiplayer games

Submitted by Duion on

I already covered why linear story based games are boring, but this applies mostly to singleplayer games and I thought there must be an equivalent for multiplayer games, since somehow multiplayer games also feel boring, but it's not so clear why, so I try to break it down as well. At first I thought there may not be enough content for an article about this topic, but I will try anyway. The first problem was that I did not really knew how to call it, so I called it circular based, which sounds a bit weird, but I will now get to why I chose those terms.

The ultimate bad game design choice: Money

Submitted by Duion on

As the Bible already stated it: "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." This also seems to apply to the video game industry and to artists.

I already felt it pretty soon when writing those articles, that many of the bad game design choices have one big thing in common and it is the love of money or the intent to maximise monetary profit over everything else.

Bad game design choices: Remakes, Clones, Sequels etc

Submitted by Duion on

What is worse than creating something? Creating nothing. How can you create something while at the same time creating nothing? Well you simply copy. Artistically a copy is nothing, or close to nothing. I once heard that the definition of art is to create something new and unique aka being creative and if you just copy, you are not being creative or artistic by definition and therefore a remake game, or clone is not good game design, as nothing or not much new is actually created.

Bad game design choices: Invisible Walls

Submitted by Duion on

Almost every gamer probably also knows this one, it is those invisible barriers that prevent you from going out of the map or going somewhere you are not supposed to go. For game designers this is often a necessary evil, because there is no other way to do it based on their resources, but it is an ugly solution, therefore a bad game design choice.

First this was planned as multiple articles, because there are many kinds of invisible walls, each for different reasons, some physical, some metaphorical, let me make a list of the basic types of invisible walls in games:

Bad game design choices: DLC

Submitted by Duion on

Let's get back to bad game design choices to finish off the list I made in my notebook, the next one is DLCs.

What are DLCs? DLC stands for DownLoadableContent and such downloadable content are in general add-ons to the original games that can be downloaded and in most cases those cost additional money. DLC are more of a recent invention with the upcoming of digital distribution platforms.

Some basic game design theory

Submitted by Duion on

My last blog post reminded me of my childhood and probably the main reason why I was so fascinated by video games and this was that in video games you could do anything you want, full freedom of choice. Well in reality you probably have more freedom of choice then you can ever have in a video game, but that is because of technical limitations, the real problem with reality however is, that reality has harsh consequences, that you might not want to deal with. So the reason why video games were so cool was, that you had freedom of choice to do the things you could not do in real life.

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