Category: Game Design (Page 19 of 22)

Great Pyramids!

March 2, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Mike Rozak recently announced on MUD-Dev that he’d posted a new article on a new gameplay landscape theory he was throwing around, which he called the Player Pyramid. It got me thinking about things – and getting me to think about something other than football on Superbowl Sunday is no easy feat. Yeah, this article has been brewing for a while, and be warned, this is a long one… Continue reading

Thottbot: Ambrosia for the Impatient

February 24, 2005 / Damion Schubert

The most remarkable and innovative part of the World of Warcraft experience wasn’t coded by someone at Blizzard – it’s Thottbot, as in “Dammit, which god damn tower does this quest say I’m looking for? I’m paging out to Thottbot.” Now, of course, quest info sites are nothing new, but the twist for Thottbot is that instead of being built by a dedicated staff of people with no lives, it’s built by anyone who happens to run a popular UI mod for the game (and yes, it’s optional) – the data is collected from that player’s play experience, and forwarded to the Thottbot service, which then compiles it for all to see. Continue reading

Wyatt Cheng’s Blog

February 23, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Thought I’d give a quick shout-out to Wyatt Cheng’s blog over at Planet Cerulean. Lots of good design thought there, with charts! He even has an analysis of the game mechanics behind the horrible Fox reality show ‘The Will’, which he claims are far superior to standard ‘voting off the island’ mechanics that most reality shows have. His best article that I saw at a glance says that the best games focus on five seconds of gameplay (contrast with experience-driven design). Thought-provoking stuff.

I’d also point out that Dave “Mahrin Skel” Rickey claims to be active again, after his fruitless attempts to get a life. I kid!

Outcome Variance

February 22, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Jamie Fristrom adds a new word to our game design lexicon: variance.

Variance is the amount of randomness in the outcome of your game. Poker is extremely high-variance: even the best player in the world will lose regularly. Chess and Go are very low-variance: Kasparov will beat me in chess 99,999 times out of 100,000…maybe even more…The SSX series is high variance, whereas the Tony Hawk series is low variance. When I play Tony Hawk, with most of their challenges, if I can beat a challenge once, I can go back and repeat my performance almost every time. This is because of the Tony Hawk rail system is really tight: you can use rails in Tony Hawk to line up shots and create repeat performances. With SSX, on the other hand, slight differences in timing and pressure on the analog stick can cause you to miss the rail completely and end up doing a totally different run than you might have originally planned.

Be sure to read both parts of his article, they’re thought-provoking stuff. MMOs, for the most part, are pretty low variance, which is one of the reasons they feel ‘grindy’. Are high variance games in our future? That’s hard to say.
Continue reading

A Random Thought on Change

February 14, 2005 / Damion Schubert

For years and years, the only kinds of shooters were unrealistic, future fantasy games with completely unrealistic physics, and deathmatch was the only flavor. The games that tried to do realism all crashed and burned. “No one wants to die in one shot,” claimed many a designer. Now it’s impossible to imagine a shooter without a sniper rifle. Continue reading

Five-Baggers and Dead Sharks

February 9, 2005 / Damion Schubert

I’m always on the search for new terminology to use in the science of game design. No, I don’t mean building a game design lexicon for academics (although I’m glad someone’s trying to). What I mean is building a slang that makes me look smarter and hipper than I actually am. Fun terms: toyetic, pattern-breaking, high school problems and no man’s land.

WoW Easter Egg Site

February 4, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Regarding our recent discussion on fluff, here’s a good list of cultural references hidden inside of World of Warcraft.

I applaud their team’s devoted and obviously systematic approach to populating the world with nods to the real world, as opposed to do what most games do and get totally enamored with their own backstory. That being said, I’m curious how much legal care they had to do to ensure they didn’t cross any lines. You never know when someone will sue you for being even marginally close to their own intellectual property.

Pattern-Breaking, Metapatterns and a Theory of Fun

February 2, 2005 / Damion Schubert

In this thread, some people challenged my assertion that WoW has long-term staying power:

Remember WoW is a nice game, any game when it comes out the starting grind and game experience is usually fun and fresh because it is new. Once the player has reached the top level one time repeating that on multiple characters doesn’t stay fresh it becomes an annoyance.

Certainly, that’s the way it’s been in the past, but if it must ALWAYS be that way in the future of MMOs, our genre is doomed.

I suspect we’ll hear more complaints about the grind in WoW in the future as these issues come to light. When people hit max level quickly they will start alternate characters, and it feels a lot more like a grind when you have to complete 90% of the same quests again, run through and explore the same areas again, hope for the same rare drops again.

And here I disagree. Continue reading

Pattern Breaking

January 28, 2005 / Damion Schubert

A lot of talk has been happening about World of Warcraft, and what they did so right to enjoy such success. The general consensus amongst most observers is that, well, there just isn’t a lot new there. And so, unsatisfied with the response that people came because the game was simpler and dumbed down from standard RPG fare, people have been asking what is it about WoW that the hardcore gamers have decided is better? The same answers keeping coming up: the quests and the lack of a grind. Continue reading

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