Category: Game Design (Page 3 of 22)

This is a version of an article that appeared in the January 2013 issue of Game Developer magazine.

When Magic: the Gathering first entered the gaming scene back in 1993, the mere idea of a game based upon an ever-evolving pool of collectable cards was just a zygote of an idea. Richard Garfield and the rest of Wizards of the Coast knew the game had real potential, but no one really knew how the game experience would really play out.

It’s not surprising that they got some things wrong. Their limited playtesting was not nearly enough to find all of the convoluted strategies that players would devise, and they had no historical data to look at problem spots. Sophisticated analysis of the game did not yet exist—they did not know (or fully appreciate) how powerful drawing cards would be in their game, and thus printed a cart that allowed a player to draw three cards for one mana.  And many of the rules were written to be ambiguous, so new expansions that introduced new rules brought in unexpected conflicts, and made it clear that card rules language needed to be much more structured and unified than it was previously.

They also underestimated their own popularity. They expected players to buy a deck and a couple of booster packs. Hardcore players started to buy booster packs by the case. Rare cards that Wizards of the Coast assumed would only show up once or twice in a deck ended up being highly sought after, and soon devoted players were packing 4 of each (the legal limit) in their decks, and destroying their less-invested opponents in the process, often in a couple of turns. The value of the best rares shot into the stratosphere, creating a legitimate aftermarket for cards.

Wizards has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, reinventing the board games industry (and in the process saving America’s gaming and comic book stores) in the process. But it was clear that Magic had some bad structural problems that would need to be addressed. Fortunately, Magic had a winning core game design, which gave them the resources and time they would need to fix these structural issues. Magic was a game that had a long life after ship, and their game designers took advantage of this to great effect. Continue reading

This is a reprint of an article that first appeared in the October 2012 issue of Game Developer Magazine.  It has since also reappeared on Gamasutra at this link.

Ultima Online and EverQuest represent two very different game philosophies. Ultima Online‘s creators tried very hard to create a virtual world with physics and interactions that mimicked the real world, so players could interact with each other in ways meant to model reality: You can chop down trees, dye clothes, build houses, attack almost anyone anywhere, and steal anything that isn’t nailed down.

By comparison, EverQuest is a simple game, not much more than a combat simulator designed to mimic the basics of combat found in tabletop board games and old online Multiuser Dungeons (MUDs). Combat in EverQuest is very deep and intricate compared to that in Ultima Online, with far more ways for players to attack and manipulate their enemies. However, combat aside, EverQuest was perceived to not be a very feature-rich game. Most of the world interactions in Ultima Online aren’t in EverQuest, and when they are, they aren’t particularly deep or fleshed out—to the extent that many observers felt thatEverQuest would be too simple for the newly invented massively multiplayer genre. As it turned out,EverQuest easily beat Ultima Online‘s numbers, and a few years later, a rematch of the two MMO design philosophies paired Star Wars Galaxies against World of Warcraft — with a repeat of the same end result.

As it turned out, Ultima Online has a lot of features, but many of those features don’t have a lot of depth to them; it is broad, rather than deep. EverQuest has fewer features, but a combat model that is very deep (and became deeper as new boss mechanics were added to respond to an increasingly savvy audience).EverQuest is a game about depth. Continue reading

A version of this article first appeared in the June/July 2012 issue of Game Developer magazine.

Football is a sport with a lot of situational game decisions – the plays that the coaches call are going to be very different if they are sitting on a 30 point lead are going to be very different than when they are down a field goal with two and a half minutes to go.  Indeed, the fact that the playbook varies so strongly based on the situation is one of the reasons why football can be so deep and strategic – the team that is behind needs to score quickly and needs to leverage certain rules, such as running out of bounds, in order to stop the clock. Defenses adjust in order to limit these likely plays from happening, but often in doing so leave the field open for a high-risk, high yield play.

This kind of play is interesting, but there is another kind of situational play in football that is more strategic and less tactical – teams spend a considerable amount of time preparing for every game.  Most football teams only bring a limited number of plays they will call, and so time is spent studying the opponent’s film.  If they have a prolific quarterback, defenses may opt to sacrifice run defense in favor of better pass defense.  A key injury on the other team might prompt an attempt to exploit the second string player taking his place.  Even the weather factors in – heavy rains may prompt a coach to abandon the passing game, and strong winds may limit the effectiveness of a kicker.  Continue reading