Submitted by Duion on
Let's get to the now probably more widely known loot box problem. I decided to combine loot boxes and gambling since they go together in most, if not all games.
What are loot boxes?
In games that have pay to win and/or cosmetic items, you will often also find loot boxes, that have those items in them, but you don't know what is inside yet.
Submitted by Duion on
This another of those little design elements in a game that has the potential to ruin the whole game experience, it is very similar to the minimap and often is combined with the minimap and I call it quest markers. What I mean with quest markers? Well first the thing that is obviously meant with quest markers, meaning graphical elements in the game that show you where you have to go to fulfill your current quest. Those often are placed into the HUD and the map or minimap.
Submitted by Duion on
Early Access for games is a more modern invention, which did not exist in the past, it was once praised as a good and innovative thing, but now I think it has more drawbacks than it does good.
What does Early Access do? It grants users an early access to the game before it is finished, so they can get the game before it is actually finished and therefore help develop the game through testing and giving feedback.
Sounds all good at first? So let us break down what is bad with this model:
Submitted by Duion on
This is probably the "Pay to Win's" little brother. So what are cosmetics, it is the way of the game making money by selling cosmetic items for the game like hats for the player to wear. This is different to "Pay to Win" in the sense that someone who purchases it, does not gain an advantage in the game, so sounds good at first, but at second thought, then why does it work anyway? I mean if cosmetics supposedly don't do anything for you in the game, then why people buy them?
Submitted by Duion on
This is probably the worst design choice you can ever make in video game design history. I should have covered this earlier, because of how severe this problem is and hardly anyone really understands the real problems with it, but whatever lets get to the point why "Pay to Win" is so bad.
Submitted by Duion on
This is a new kind of series of blog posts and it is about bad game design choices that are used very commonly and hardly anyone pointing them out. I don't want to go nitpicking about minor design flaws, but about things that have the potential to ruin a whole game, yes not just parts of the game, but absolutely everything.
Submitted by Duion on
After writing the recent blog post "The dumbing down of games" I started asking myself the question: Is it the dumbed down games that create dumbed down gamers or is it dumbed down gamers that require dumbed down games?
It most likely is a combination of both, the question is more what is the bigger factor or the root cause.
Submitted by Duion on
This is a topic I wonder why not many people already talk about this, it is the dumbing down of games.
It is probably because most gamers today are young and they don't know how it was in the past and for the older people maybe because their memory is not working anymore. However let me tell you how it was in the past and go through each step you needed or did go through in order to play a computer game:
Submitted by Duion on
One issue leads to the next and the potato farmers kind of arise out of the denial of technological progress in the open source gaming community. Most often those are open source game developers or advocates and probably out of their denial of technological progress they use the argument "But it runs on old hardware" to justify, why they never improve or care to improve.
Submitted by Duion on
This is kind of a part two of the open source gaming community in denial. There are so many aspects to this problem, that I probably need multiple articles about it. The last blog post covered the problem that the open source gaming community is in denial of them failing in terms of market share and this one is more about how they do not even understand the concept of improving in technological progress, like most of the rest of the world does. You understand?
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