The Escapist - Ding! Now You Suck Less

Dhruin

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Shamus Young from Twenty Sided writes one of his pieces for The Escapist, titled Ding! Now You Suck Less. As you probably guessed, it's about leveling and how game designers often "muck this up":
4.It lets the player customize both their character and the gameplay to focus on the parts they enjoy the most. "I hate sneaking around in the dark. I'd much rather just lob fireballs at these guys, so I'll put more points into magic."

How game designers muck this up: Too often, games will offer single-solution challenges. This lock must be picked. This guard must be charmed out of the way by your speech skill. This puzzle can only be solved with a fireball. A good game will let you choose any way you like to solve a problem. You can talk the guard into giving you the key, pick the lock or burn the door down with a fireball. A bad game will make you do a little of everything according to the wishes of the totalitarian designer. See also: forced stealth gameplay sections.
More information.
 
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Alternative solutions to quests by using different skills are always a sign of good game design.

Some "minor" forced skill selections are ok - to push the player slightly in the right directon for the game.

For example train "burning hands" or "acid shower" in an early quest, because later in the game the big trolls are coming in hordes and they can only be defeated by fire or acid. And usually deep deep in the dungeon you run out of torches ...
 
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Hey that's a good writeup. I agree with Shamus Young. Almost every RPG I play these days breaks one or more of those rules and suffer because of it.
 
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While I agree completely with #4, I actually disagree with #2 and #3 and at least part of the premise of #5.

I think #2 is best solved by (a) making enemy design such that you can make an educated guess if you can fight something and (b) make running away a good and available option.

Regarding #3, I like having lots of character development information right from the get-go. Don't make it necessary - some people just want to get into the game and play - but leave it there for those of us who like spending hours on character creation.

And for #5, I agree with the part about how designers muck things up, but I still strongly believe in sophisticated difficulty controls. How hard an enemy is to fight is only one element of difficulty and I consider it the least important. I like to see individual difficulty sliders for different game-play elements. I like puzzles, others don't, there's one. I hate time constraints, others like them, there's another. System Shock handled this brilliantly.
 
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Just one small comment: Forced stealth always sucks. I hate stealth.

Yes, this.

Forced stealth sucks, there should always be a "heck with this, I'm just going to kill everyone" option. Somehow it's actually worse when they try to justify it with a really poor plot excuse.
 
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Forced stealth sucks, there should always be a "heck with this, I'm just going to kill everyone" option. Somehow it's actually worse when they try to justify it with a really poor plot excuse.
The opposite is equally true, though. There have been several games where you were able to play through the whole game stealthily and then, at the end, you have to switch to Rambo mode. This isn't irksome just because I like stealth. It can make it incredibly hard if your character development, equipment and playing expertise within that game are geared for stealth.
 
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