This is something that’s foundational enough to my beliefs about game design that I want to publish an article about it that I can point back to, but it’s also simple enough that I’m not sure there’s a full article’s worth to even be said about it.

What’s hard about a game should also be what’s interesting about it.

It’s the reason some reviewers disliked the focus on meter management in Pathologic 2, where the interesting stuff is the mystery and atmosphere.

It’s the reason why it’s frustrating to have your choices overturned by QTEs in Until Dawn, a game that sells itself as a game of decisions and not one of controller memorization.

It’s the common thread behind these house rules for card and board games that seek to eliminate memory- and inexperience-based challenge in order to emphasize interesting strategic-based challenge.

It’s the reason why my proposed changes to Akiba’s Trip combat are “specifically looking to reduce uninteresting difficulty - things that are hard for stupid reasons. This actually allows for increasing difficulty in more interesting ways.”

What’s hard about a game should also be what’s interesting about it.

So, the folks behind Furi are now working on a game called Haven. Details have been scarce but there’s now a gameplay trailer and press release with some more information.

The game is definitely on my radar, but the aspect I want to focus on right now is this quote from creative director Emeric Thoa:

“The story of a couple fighting for their freedom, an established relationship: what love looks like when you’ve moved past the early seduction phase, when you can be your true self with one another… I don’t think that’s been done much in video games.”

I agree with this and I’m interested to see it done well. The plan for Haven is especially interesting given that Thoa describes the game as “Journey meets Persona.” It’s unclear yet what this means (if indeed it means anything; it’s very easy to just list some popular games without that proving anything about your own game) but I find the Persona comparison intriguing.

Modern Persona games place a large emphasis on character relationships, and it looks like Haven will do the same. But where Persona provides a handful of varied characters with whom the player can establish relationships (in the game’s terminology, taking the “social link” from rank one to rank ten) it looks like Haven provides a single character with whom the player can explore an already established relationship (the social link starts at rank ten).

This feels like a bit of a gamble - if I imagine a Persona game providing only one social link with the combined depth that’s currently spread across all social links, that’s an exciting idea if the expanded social link is with my favorite character and a disappointing idea if it’s with my least-favorite character. The depth really only pays off if the player likes the characters.

But this isn’t really a fair comparison. Persona characters can be varied because there are several with the same depth. It’s good for the characters to have distinct personalities with traits that will endear them to some and put off others. No Persona character is everyone’s favorite, but every Persona character is somebody’s favorite. If you’re making a game with only one relationship, now the pressure’s on to make that character broadly likable, in a mass-market homogenization kind of way.

So I’m a little concerned that the characters in Haven could end up generic with any controversial edges filed off - tolerable to everyone, but not anyone’s favorites. Unobjectionable but unremarkable. I hope this isn’t the case. There isn’t really anything in the trailer that makes it seem likely; I’m just concerned about the market forces involved.

What is in the trailer, though, is a dialog choice. This seems like a possible solution, if done right - if there are many such choices and they don’t drastically change the story (so that there aren’t right and wrong choices) but do change the character personalities and interactions so they can be more extreme and more to the player’s liking. I’m not sure if that’s where Haven intends to take things, but I think it could be a great way to handle it.

The original Clicker Heroes is one of many idle/incremental games based on a series of concentric gameplay loops that get slower as you go, intended to provide a functionally infinite treadmill of progression. It does a few interesting things and it’s a mostly-harmless way to pass a few minutes here and there as long as you don’t get addicted and let it become a bottomless time-sink - the problem is, it’s free-to-play with microtransactions, so the developer/publisher is incentivized to try to hook the player. Once the game started leaning its design in this direction by adding a social element with daily responsibility, I wrote it off as (mildly) evil.

But the sequel is very specifically and purposefully avoiding this. The CEO of Playsaurus (the developer/publisher) put up a blog post in November 2017 explaining that Clicker Heroes 2 was a one-time purchase so that it could be a better and more ethical game. (My complaints about the fact that they needed to explain this is a separate rant.) This prompted me to pre-order Clicker Heroes 2 in support of their philosophy.

It’s still in Early Access, and while I don’t normally play games before they release I finally tried this one out after a recent major update when I was sick and wanted something low-pressure to play. And while there’s a lot about it that I like better than the original already, in its current form it’s hard to see how they’re going to give it long-term appeal.

I wrote in my review of the original that leveling up heroes speeds up the monster-killing loop, leveling up ancients speeds up the hero loop, and leveling up outsiders speeds up the ancient loop. This is true, but I left out the fact that the mechanics are complicated enough that you actually had some interesting choices to make along the way here. Like, the bonuses granted by various ancients actually fed into each other in interesting ways and enabled at least two different play styles. So even though you were repeatedly losing all progress on a given loop, you did it to get a bonus on the next loop and bring you further along your overall progression in a chosen direction.

Currently, Clicker Heroes 2 has a very different distribution of interesting choices between its loops. As you defeat monsters you gain experience levels and thus skill points, which allow you to buy skills that function sort of like the ancient bonuses in the first game. Alongside this is a brand-new and very interesting addition - the Automator. This allows you to set conditions and actions - for example, activate Clickstorm if Energy is at least 90% full. There are a lot of available conditions and actions and many rules can be active simultaneously, so you can set up quite complex systems and let the game mostly play itself. I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface but I still set up a very effective automation that let my character breeze through world after world with no intervention from me at all. Once I’d done that, I didn’t have to bother with combat or buying upgrades and I just opened the game periodically to spend accumulated skill points and further speed up the game’s self-driven progression.

Every thirty worlds (if I’m understanding correctly) your character must “gild” to continue. This causes you to lose all of your skills but gain a huge damage multiplier. Then you keep going, gain more levels and skill points and this time maybe explore a different section of the huge skill tree. You do keep your Automator setup, but until you get back the skills it relies on it’s not very useful.

And that’s where the problem is for me. You could certainly argue that this is my fault and not the game’s, but right now I don’t feel compelled to try a different build, because the gameplay is largely passive anyway once you get a build going. So I just feel like getting back the skills I gave up so my Automator setup will be effective again. But then I’m just expending effort to get back to where I was, with the only benefit from gilding being the damage multiplier - which is the least interesting possible reward. It doesn’t feel like further progression along a chosen direction, nor does it feel like I’m getting to try playing in new ways.

I acknowledge that this is a really hard problem Playsaurus is trying to solve - how do you make progression interesting indefinitely? I don’t think they’ve solved it yet, but the game is still in Early Access. I hope they figure it out, or at least get closer. I’d like to see Clicker Heroes 2 do well.

It’s a few months later and Google has done nothing to position Stadia as streamer- or esports-focused, which seems to kill my previous speculation. Also, they’ve revealed pricing details and as explained by Shamus Young, they are nonsensical.

My view of Google Stadia has shifted from “it might be a reasonable service for which I am simply not the target audience” to “probably a bad idea that will fail unless it pivots significantly.”

A while back I wrote that I wanted a single-player game where you play as a healer.

Some of the most fun I’ve ever had in a game was playing as a healer in City of Heroes. (Oh, how I miss that game.) Running around in hectic fights, dropping AoE and targeted heals and juggling my cooldowns for maximum efficiency, avoiding aggro and damage myself, popping the Absorb Pain panic button when necessary, keeping my allies standing and reviving them when they fell. It was a game of frantic and reactive resource allocation with clear stakes and feedback. I loved it. I was also good at it - many players told me I was the best healer they’d ever teamed with.

But there are some problems with MMOs and I stopped playing them. After which I was never able to find a game that recreated that experience I’d so enjoyed.

There are games that are about healers on the story level, but this doesn’t generally show up in the mechanics. Dr. Mario is fundamentally a match-3 puzzler. Princess Remedy is a shoot ’em up. Trauma Center is a surgical sim. About the closest I’ve seen is A Healer Only Lives Twice, but that’s an unwinnable roguelike without a lot of depth or polish.

And of course there are restoration games where the experience and mechanics are actually about healing, though you’re generally healing objects or landscapes rather than people and there’s none of the hectic resource management.

These games are all worthwhile, but none of them provide the experience I was looking for - reading a constantly-changing situation to see where I am needed most and rushing there to avert disaster and enable my team to succeed. In a sense, the games I’ve found that come closest to providing this are actually Musou games like Dynasty Warriors and their spinoffs!

Several years ago, I made a proof of concept of a healer game which I called Triage. It’s extremely rough, unwinnable, and not fun for more than a minute or so, but it did prove to me that there is a fun core here and I would in theory like to return to it and flesh it out some time.

Meanwhile, please let me know if you know of any good healer games.

One good, one bad, one silly.

1. The Good

I previously theorized that the key to a good Musou crossover game is deep integration of the iconic aspects of the crossed-with franchise, and opined that the first Dragon Quest Heroes had shallow integration of important JRPG elements and suffered for it.

Well, Dragon Quest Heroes II has much deeper integration of these elements, to the point where it’s not even really a Musou game anymore. You can still see the Musou DNA if you squint, but I’d call it an action RPG and the experience of playing it reminds me more of Kingdoms of Amalur than Dynasty Warriors.

I’ll write more about this later, but for now I’ll just say that while I’m still a fan of Musou, this approach really suits Dragon Quest and I’m enjoying this game a lot.

2. The Bad

Fast travel is provided via the series-standard spell Zoom. As in other Dragon Quest games, this spell shoots your characters up into the sky and then back down at their destination. Thus, it can only be used outdoors - cast it in a building and your characters just hit their heads on the ceiling.

This is cute in concept, and the first time you bump your head in Dragon Quest Heroes II you get a trophy/achievement for it - like you’ve fallen for the game’s little prank but it’s showing you it was all in good fun. You learn not to cast the spell indoors and move on.

But certain outdoor areas also have obstacles above your head - rocky outcroppings, half-collapsed ceilings in ancient ruins, forest canopies, etc. - and these also block Zoom. It’s not so funny after the first time - the joke gets old fast and you can only get the achievement once. It’s just a delay - instead of warping to your destination, the spell fails and you must reposition yourself, go back into the menu, pick Zoom again, and pick your destination again.

This could be leveraged for tactical depth - there could be areas that are dangerous because you can’t Zoom out of them. In practice, I saw no such pattern, and it seemed to just be based on the visual world design that I doubt was created with this mechanical effect in mind. Even if that were the intent, they could just gray out the menu option when you’re under an obstruction rather than letting you attempt the spell and pick a destination when it’s just going to fail.

And the cherry on top of all of this? You can’t look straight up. You can’t confirm for sure whether the spell will work where you are currently standing. Multiple times, I’ve angled the camera as far up as it will go, seen what looked like clear skies, cast Zoom, failed, moved, tried to look up again, cast Zoom again, failed again. This no longer feels like it’s all in good fun.

Zoom should just always work outdoors. Failing that, it should gray out in the menu when it can’t be used. And failing that, the player should be able to look straight up and see whether the spell will work. The current arrangement wastes the player’s time in a frustrating way for no benefit.

3. The Silly

Several times in the game’s story, you prepare for an audience with the king. Each time, one of your party members tells you you’ve got some time so you might as well do some shopping or whatever, and the next time you talk to her you can go see the king.

At one point, the story pretends it’s the end of the game. You’ve won and it’s time to go see the king again for a big celebration. A couple of things give away that the story can’t be over yet, like unexplored map regions and huge dangling plot threads, but my favorite clue is the way the party member talks to you before the celebration. Her tone is less, “We have some time to kill, so do some shopping,” and more, “No, really. Do all your shopping. If there’s any shopping you think you’ll want to do, do it now. And save your game. Then we’ll go to the castle and I’M SURE EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE BUT JUST DO ALL YOUR SHOPPING FIRST ALL OF IT.”

vezouta asked:

Another bit of trivia, the bulldog moblins of Spirit tracks showed up in Hyrule Warriors definitive, a Koei developed crossover between Zelda and Dynasty Warriors released 2018.

(In regards to this post.)

Ironically, that is one of the spinoff Zelda games that I have played - and written a few things about too! But I admit I wasn’t looking closely at the moblins’ faces.

vezouta asked:

Well its dumb because the Ocarina of Time remake for 3DS kept the Bulldog moblins. Spirit tracks for DS featured Bulldog moblins as well. Also outside of color, the only difference between moblins and Pig warriors in the switch version now is their ears, lame! Also it comes off as a retcon.

(In regards to this post.)

Ah, I didn’t realize there was more recent precedent for bulldog moblins. That’s what I get for basing my answer off a quick scan of the wiki, I guess :) I have to admit I haven’t played a mainline Zelda game since the original Link’s Awakening, so I’m very fuzzy on the details.

Given that, I agree this is a bizarre and frustrating decision on Nintendo’s part, inconsistent with their own precedent and with the attention to detail the remake otherwise seems to be receiving. Now it bugs me too. :)

vezouta asked:

What also bugs me about the Link’s Awakening switch graphics is the original game had Bulldog Moblins AND Pig Moblins, the remake removed the bulldog moblins so now we just have Pig Moblins, lame Nintendo.

(In regards to this post.)

I didn’t know about that - that is disappointing!

I was ready to get all huffy about how rising costs of graphical fidelity often mean we lose artistic variety along the way, but after looking into this it seems like a much more interesting problem. Maybe you knew all this, but it was news to me - apparently moblins were originally bulldog-like but after a few games became more pig-like. The original Link’s Awakening is one of the few games on the cusp of the transition and so features both the bulldog moblins and pig moblins.

I’d assumed the remake dropped the bulldog moblins to save costs, but it looks like they still get their own model, it just also looks pig-like. You can see on the Zelda wiki - the formerly-bulldog moblins are the current default page image for the Moblin article, while the pig ones are the page image for Pig Warrior.

So this isn’t about costs or laziness - it’s about artistic direction. When Link’s Awakening was first made, moblins could look like either bulldogs or pigs - but for a long time now, they’ve only looked like pigs. I can understand why Nintendo would decide to update the design to bring it in line with what most people today know moblins to be, but I get why it bugs you and I do find myself wishing they’d taken a different approach.

I don’t understand the appeal of the toy/diorama/tilt-shift aesthetic for the Link’s Awakening remake. To me it’s an incorrect nesting of metaphor, similar to adding lens flares and related effects to video games.

Like, when you’re playing a game and it’s raining and some water droplets get rendered on the screen like it’s being filmed with a camera with a wet lens - unless you’re playing a game where the conceit actually is that you’re looking through a camera, this is immersion-breaking, not immersion-reinforcing. Like, I was driving around the city rocking out to the radio and looking for trouble, now I’m apparently… watching a video feed of that happening instead? I’m trying to pretend I’m actually in the world of the game - why shove this additional camera metaphor in the middle and distance me from that world?

With the toys - it’s been a couple of decades since I played with my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures, but the way I remember it, the fantasy wasn’t “Oh man, what if this molded plastic could move by itself?” It was “Oh man, what if the turtles had these crazy adventures I am making up?” The toys were a gateway, a jumping-off point for the imagination. They stood in for the turtles the way they looked and sounded in the cartoon.

When I played the original Link’s Awakening, it was the same thing. In my head, I was on an adventure on Koholint Island. I was getting to know its inhabitants, bravely exploring dangerous dungeons, and prevailing against monsters in combat. The low resolution monochrome graphics, the tinny chiptune music, it was all a gateway.

Updating the graphics to look like plastic toys makes no sense to me. (I didn’t much care for this approach in Disney Infinity either, though there they at least had the excuse of trying to make it look like your actual figures had come to life in a stylistically-consistent world.) Now the fantasy isn’t being on an adventure, it’s… playing with toys and imagining an adventure? It’s pretending to pretend? Again, why shove this additional metaphor in the middle and distance the player from the world?

In Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, Clank receives an artifact called the Chronoscepter. It does several things, but to me the most interesting is that when it hits objects like broken pipes and shattered viewscreens, it reverses their timeline and repairs them. Throughout the entire Ratchet & Clank series I’d been smashing up the scenery; I found it surprisingly satisfying to suddenly have a chance to restore it instead.

Since then, I’ve played a few of what I think of as “restoration games” based around this sort of mechanic. Rather than running around causing destruction, Flower, Refunct, and Dawn all have you exploring landscapes to restore life and color. I found them all to be uplifting experiences and I’ve been thinking about why I enjoy this kind of gameplay so much.

Thematically, it’s adjacent to what you might call “rebuilding games” that give you ruined farms (Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, etc.) or towns (Dragon Quest Builders, etc.) and task you with building them back up. I like that a lot too, but I think it’s a different niche - those games are about imposing your own will and design on nature, same as normal “building games” like Minecraft and Terraria. The ruination is just there to provide an excuse for why you have to start the farm (or town) over and build it the way you want to - your first task is to clear it out, not restore it.

Restoration games aren’t about your will and design. They aren’t about construction - they’re about undoing destruction. In a sense they are still power fantasies, but ones where you have the power to reverse entropy. You can wipe away the ravages of time and prevent inevitable loss and decay. You can give death the middle finger.

That’s real power.

It’s an appealing fantasy. I’d like to see more such games.

It’s being reported that the upcoming Animal Crossing: New Horizons will not support cloud backups for its save files “to avoid manipulating time, which remains one of the founding concepts of the series.” (Source, translation.)

It’s bad enough that Nintendo doesn’t allow you to back up your own save files manually and makes a paid subscription the only way to protect your data from hardware failures, damage, loss, or theft. That’s already anti-consumer.

But if they’re going to do that, then once you’re paying money for the privilege of backing up your data from playing your game on your console, no game should be able to opt out. It’s ludicrous to charge you for a service and then tell you “Nope, this particular developer didn’t feel like you should get to use the service you’re paying for on the product they sold you.”

Supposedly, developers need “a good reason” to opt out of cloud backups, but in practice the reasons we’ve seen so far usually aren’t good at all. But what I find interesting about this one is how paternalistic it is.

It feels similar to the argument you sometimes hear against the inclusion of easy modes, that somewhere a player might play on easy even though they’d enjoy the game more on hard, and preventing this possibility is somehow worth blocking other people from enjoying the game at all. I don’t care if some player out there uses save backups to finish their insect collection faster or whatever - why on earth is preventing that worth blocking all players from backing up their save in a game that’s intended to be played for months or years?

With all the bad press surrounding mandatory crunch lately, it’s easy to wonder - why in the world do developers keep doing it when it’s such an obviously-bad idea and it makes people hate you?

Because when they don’t, the market punishes them. Hard.

At E3, Nintendo announced that the upcoming Animal Crossing: New Horizons is delayed to March 20, 2020 to “ensure the game is the best it can be”.

This is in line with Nintendo’s philosophy - Shigeru Miyamoto has famously said that “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” (Or words to that effect. Maybe.).

Furthermore, the delay is specifically to avoid crunch and to take good care of Nintendo employees. This is very much the Right Thing to Do.

So naturally, after this announcement Nintendo shared closed 3.53% lower than the previous day, taking more than a billion dollars off their stock market value.

The short-termism the market demands is devastating. Nintendo is one of the oldest and most established developers with plenty of IPs and revenue streams. They can afford to stick to the long view and weather the market’s tantrums in the meantime. Smaller developers without that luxury? It’s no surprise they turn to crunch.