remetheus

I assume not the title of Darth,

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:

• 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)

• 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.

• 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?"

1. there's nothing wrong with me

2. there's nothing wrong with me

3. there's nothing wrong with me

4. there's nothing wrong with me

5. something's got to give

6. something's got to give

7. something's got to give NOOOOWWWW

I hate steam trading cards.

I hate them so so much. With every fiber of my being. It's not healthy to hate a minor UI inconvenience as much as I do but I do. I loathe these wretched things. I hate the implied insult that I should be excited to receive one. To collect a set. To cash them in for gems!!!?? I hate that I can't turn them off. I hate that I can't even turn the notification off. I hate that, if I google "how to turn off Steam Trading Cards" real, living, breathing motherfuckers will have the gall to be like "Why would you want do that? Hey you could just sell them. You know they make Valve a lot of money right? ;)". I fucking hate that I should, for some reason, be excited that a company is making a money while providing no meaningful value.

I HATE THAT TO SELL THEM I have to confirm every sale on a fucking awful, trash phone app, because my steam account is valuable when it really shouldn't be. I hate that some people think I should be EXCITED because valve made a fucking nickle and dime stock market for psychos. I hate the idea that I'd want to collect this shit to "unlock emotes" or "to have more friends", as if I should need to do that on a service that is ALREADY FUNDED BY ME SPENDING FUCKING MONEY

I hate them. I hate that, if given the option, I will add Cards to Brave Earth Prologue, and people will purchase my game, with real money, to get fake cards, to maybe sell for money? I hate that I will be excited for people to buy my game so they can turn it into an idler for monopoly cards. I hate the idea that I will make money, for making a game, without people actually wanting to play the game. I hate that I'm not financially secure enough to take a principled stance on this.

I hate that, after years of accepting "Yeah, when I play a new game, I'm just gonna get a bunch of dumb notifications in like the first few hours of a game", that valve decided, IN THEIR GENEROSITY to randomly give me a notification EVERY DAY, RANDOMLY for what amounts to spam because idk, it's fucking christmas?? I hate valve almost as much as I hate their fucking trading cards.

The one good thing about them -- the fact that my poor friends can get small subsidies toward purchasing games -- I also hate. I hate that my poor friends have to do the digital version of redeeming soda cans. I hate that shit in the world is so bad, that this infinitesimal way to leach money from weirdos is worth the time of my friends. I hate that it's a pain in the ass for me to even just give them all my cards, like handing a bag of cans to someone on the side of the road. I hate that, even if I do that, the thing that annoys me the most -- the random notifications an intrusive pop-ups -- still happen. I hate that I need a whole ass fucking chost cause putting all this in a twitter thread, a thousand angry little tweets, would be an act of violence toward my twitter followers that even they could not forgive and they fucking follow my dumb ass so their standards are already low.

I cannot escape. There is no reprieve from gamification. One might say "But Kay, why get so mad. This is just a papercut".

To that I would say... it is because it is a papercut, so small, so needless, so inescapabilty sharp, that I hate them so much. If it was worse I'd probably eventually go numb. But these things, these wretched little pieces of digital trash are so small, so minor, that the inconvenience of every one rattles in my brain like a fly that can't escape a room.

I HATE steam trading cards