One of my least favourite tropes in modern games is when the story has your character doing interesting dramatic things, and then the gameplay has the player doing tedious busywork. The player does stuff like picking up ladders and putting them down, shooting stuff until it breaks, climbing ropes etc. and this pads out just enough time until the story can get going again. What's supposed to hold the players attention are character beats and narrative tension, but what the player is doing moment to moment isn't exciting and largely doesn't matter.
Reading this great takedown of ladder-centric level design and looking at the experience goals for Uncharted is giving me whiplash!
If 50~60% of what I’m doing in the Uncharted games isn’t hitting their most important goal, it seems like the designers failed to achieve it? At what point in each of these games’ production did environmental puzzle fluff overtake the intended experience? Is this a by-product of prestige games needing to be super long for whatever reason?
I made this post on a comment to someone else complaining about how Power Wash simulator has a overly long and complicated progression design because the game needs to be "longer" to justify it's retail price, since steam users wrongly equate time spent in a game to value.
One of these days I'm going to have to really write about the disconnect between AAA game designers and player experiences. I feel like I should have more cogent thoughts having worked on 3 AAA games, but what I've noticed is:
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AAA Designers only pay attention to AAA games from the last 5 years with a metacritic score above 80. (This was specifically called out in a GDC talk from another designer who said this is what a AAA designer has to play to remain current, everything else is irrelevant)
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AAA designers Don't play many games in general. Hell, I don't really. When I shipped the last game all I had time for was to go to bed after work and maybe play some Quake here and there.
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AAA designers often work in a single genre and then are stuck there indefinitely. For instance: if you work on a 3rd person action title, you won't get hired to work on an FPS. If you mainly work in FPS games, but apply to work on a game in a genre you play a lot (such as fighting games) you won't get the job, because they want "fighting game design" experience or whatever the fuck that means.
So as a result of this the people who do get to make the big decisions are driven by the circular and insular culture of AAA design, of which there's probably a baker's dozen of lead designers actually making the big decisions, most of which copy from the last 5 years. Games are so expensive to make because there's thousands of artists and developers involved across multiple studios, so you can't afford to try anything new, ever. Innovation happens only when a mod gets hyper popular (MOBAS, Battle Royale, etc) and can be copied.
With no time to make new "gameplay" the only way these games justify their massive budgets is through increasingly high production quality. It now takes an entire studio to make one or two levels of something. The levels are so expensive to make that branching paths are out of the question, lest the player miss a hallway that cost $100k or more to art out.
So now we're finally at the point where you carry ladders around and boxes, because if you suggest the player do something besides "Kill" the blinkered AAA designer will go "well, what does the player do?"
