Feature Complete
Ernest Adams, game pundit, regular speaker and professional top hat owner has a new article up of Gama Sutra.
Looking at aspects of game design, he picks out particular gameplay mechanisms or design issues which seem to crop up again and again.
Normally the column is pretty solid. Good common sense stuff, which every designer should be aware of. However, today's piece highlighted an issue which is not neccessarily true (warning: opinion ahead).
Novelty is one of the many ways that video games entertain, and a quality that sets video gaming apart from, say, board gaming. Mahdi Jeddi writes to complain about games that present all their features in the first few levels, and then don’t have anything new to offer in the later stages of the game. As he says, “If they have budget limitations, they can spread the introduction of new features across all levels, and maybe make some special levels for one feature. This way the game will maintain its freshness to its end and the player will be saved from boredom.”
This is becoming more common, making players struggle through level after level to find new toys or access new skills.
In some cases it works, if there's a logical reason for it. Look at a game such as Half Life 2. You don't find certain weapons until you meet the troops who use those weapons. It makes sense.
In many cases however, it's shoehorned in, with no regard for logic, plot, storyline or any other damn thing.
Even the best games can suffer from it. Metroid Prime (1 & 2) both let players ooh and ahh over Samus's abilities and weapons before taking them away and making the player slog through hours of gameplay to retrieve them all.
It's not necessary. It's annoying and it immediately penalises the player before they're had a chance to do anything. It's not a quest - it's a punishment.
As games grow more complex, increasingly movie-like (and god forbid 'realistic') having characters find or unlock capabilities like jumping a little further, learning to swim or new attacks, just destroys the carefully created consistency of the game.
Finishing a chapter and 'unlocking new moves' highlights a flaw in the original game design rather than rewarding players for a job well done.
Next week: John Romero V. Mark Rein, in a masked FPS circus of pain...
