Cardinal sins of game design

[Walsingham]

Hold on, we're getting kind of strung out here. I'm not afraid we'll get ambushed by Indians, but unless we get some coherence then what's the point of all this?

 

My summary so far, which I suggest someone improves on:

 

1) If a task, like a leap, has a high probability of failure, then re-attempting it should not take a long time to set up*

2) Changing the things that make the game enjoyable into something else for no apparent reason. e.g. force swapping party members, mini-games**

3) er...

 

Solutions:

*Prince of Persia. Walshmatic: random possibility of the reload making that particular leap into a different puzzle.

** If the forced change has to happen (I can't imagine why, but I'm not a dev), then give at least a choice of two. Even a little choice is better than none.

[taks]

then the game took an about face and turned into Diablo for the last half of the game.

oh please don't sully diablo (which was by no means my favorite game) by making that comparison... it was far, far worse and vastly more meaningless (huh?).

 

I eventually just quit because it was terrible.

yes, me too. one of my unfinished games. man was it awful after barcelona.

 

taks

[Gorgon]

I played on a while after Barcelona and eventually forgot what I was supposed to be doing. There was some shtick about a chosen one and a prophecy but the difficulty decided to jump from challenging to impossible and I eventually just gave up.

[taks]

uh, yeah... that brings up another cardinal sin: character choice determines whether or not you can actually win the game. or a lesser sin would be that characters are unbalanced in such a fashion that it does not make sense to choose certain character types. i believe lionheart was impossible for pure casters, correct? weren't there also some bad choices in arcanum.

 

ooh, speaking of arcanum: females had strength caps. oh boy did they piss off a segment of the gaming population with that one.

 

taks

[Gorgon]

I don't see why, I'm pretty sure men on the whole are genetically coded to be physically stronger, while women live longer.

[Moatilliatta]

The problem with that line of thought is that we're not dealing with average people in RPGs but the super supermen variety.

 

Being pissed off by it is taking it a bit to extremes though.

[LostStraw]

ooh, speaking of arcanum: females had strength caps. oh boy did they piss off a segment of the gaming population with that one.

 

taks

Every race/sex had caps on all their stats. The females started with one less point in strength but one more point in constitution which lead to one less possible maximum point in strength but one more possible maximum point in constitution over their male counterparts. I played both female and male characters, it really didn't seem like that big of a deal

 

Edit: That one point made very little difference as far as combat/gameplay was concerned

Edited September 17, 2008 by LostStraw

[Slowtrain]

ooh, i got one: baddies that automatically level with the player

 

Think the last game I played like that was wizardry 8. The encounters would scale to the party in pretty much any dungeon. Didn't play the game long...

 

 

I think there was some scaling but I do know there were plenty of areas that were way too tough at low levels, and the earlier levels became easier at higher levels.

 

 

Wiz 8 has has some scaling in that areas are rated for a range of monster levels, from a min to a max. So the Arnika road might be rated for monster ranges 3-11 while the Rapax castle might be 18-24. The game wil generate encounters for your party from a range of two or three levels either way from your party level. But once yoru party has reached and past the max encounter level for that area, you will find it pretty easy going.

 

I thought Wiz 8 handled the level scaling pretty well.

[DemonKing]

Seven Cardinal Sins of CRPG development:

 

* Thou shalt not decide to create an "Action" CRPG.

* Thou shalt not create a 1st/3rd person real time combat system for your party-based CRPG.

* Thou shalt not create a game that looks and plays like a FPS but where your chance to hit an opponent is based on statistics.

* Thou shalt not waste precious development resources on romances with irritating NPCs.

* Thou shalt not require us to play inventory tetris.

* Thou shalt not throw so much treasure at us that by the end of the game we are leaving +3 swords lying in the dirt.

* Thou shalt not be so lazy and unimaginative that the only way to sustain the challenge throughout your game is to autolevel our opponents.

[Nightshape]

then the game took an about face and turned into Diablo for the last half of the game.

oh please don't sully diablo (which was by no means my favorite game) by making that comparison... it was far, far worse and vastly more meaningless (huh?).

 

More meaningless than Diablo.... That's not possible, surely, even if a game has meaning for 2 seconds it's got more bloody meaning than Diablo.

[taks]

no, the sum of the diablo mindlessness gives it much more meaning than lionheart could ever achieve. have you not played it? oof. lionheart went negative after barcelona, drawing life out of me like a vampire. that is time spent i can never get back, never...

 

The females started with one less point in strength but one more point in constitution which lead to one less possible maximum point in strength but one more possible maximum point in constitution over their male counterparts.

hehe, right or wrong, they got hammered publicly on that decision.

 

taks

Edited September 17, 2008 by taks