Steambirds: Survival , the sequel to our original steampunk airplane strategy game was just released today. You can go play it right now ...
In this still-relevant piece from 2010, Daniel Cook of Spry Fox discusses how building a game around modes rather than levels can result in more depth, fun, and longevity. Obviously narrative games have different priorities, but there’s a lot to consider here for the design of systems-based games.
It’s not just patches that devalue physical media. Game of the Year (GOTY) bundles that include DLC via vouchers do it too.
Marvel’s Spider-Man was released by Insomniac nearly a year ago as of this writing, and it’s received a number of patches, free content updates adding new costumes and such, and three chapters of story DLC.
A Game of the Year edition bundling the DLC was announced a couple of days ago. But rather than re-press the discs with all the updated content present, it looks like it’s the same disc as always, along with a voucher for the DLC.
So anyone buying this “complete” game has to enter a code into the PlayStation Store and wait for the DLC to download. (I assume the updates as well; if they didn’t re-press the discs for the DLC I doubt they would have for the free updates.) They won’t be able to re-download any of this when the store’s not accessible.
And my favorite part? The cherry on top? There’s a tiny disclaimer in the bottom-right corner of the cover reading “DLC voucher expires 08/28/2022”.
The voucher expires after three years. There could certainly still be copies of this on the shelf then - this is the game used to sell the PS5’s performance, after all. Any copies of this bought after that point ARE JUST THE BASE GAME.
0 CommentsWhen we play games for fun, we often need a goal system to shepherd us along. This is what makes it a “game” instead of a “toy” - the goals direct the player toward particular experiences. In most cases, the game designer tries to make the experience of achieving those goals enjoyable (though there are deliberate subversions of this as well). But since games are an interactive medium, the designer can only give the player a set of tools and suggest how to use them in ways that will be fun. It’s up to the player to decide what to actually do.
This presents a problem - the player may choose to use those tools in a different and less-fun way if it seems to be a more effective way to reach the game’s goals. As Greg McClanahan put it in his fantastic post Achievement Design 101, “What game designers in general often seem to ignore is that when players are presented a goal, their first inclination is to devise the most efficient (not necessarily the most fun) means of reaching that goal. . . . Show the player the end point, and that player will take the quickest and easiest route, regardless of whatever path the game intended for him to take.”
After I played Dragon Quest Builders, I made a list of improvements I’d like to see in any then-unlikely-seeming sequel. Well, now I’ve played Dragon Quest Builders 2 and found it a textbook example of how to make a good sequel, with several ways it improved on the original. So I thought it’d be fun to go back to my ridiculous pie-in-the-sky I-want-a-pony pipe dreams and see how many came true.
Spoiler alert: it was almost all of them.
Here’s the list - my commentary will follow each item in italics.
One of the small things about Dragon Quest Builders 2 that I really like is that Explorer’s Shores mean a lot of important resources are infinitely renewable.
It felt really good to unlock infinite wood and know I’d never have to commit deforestation again to be able to make what I wanted to.
And at one point in the Furrowfield chapter, I basically stole an entire hill from a remote section of the map in order to do some landscaping. As amusing as it was to feel like Carmen Sandiego, I felt bad for defacing the natural environs. Once the Explorer’s Shores were available, I could go steal all the earth I wanted and it would just come right back.
0 CommentsI am a completionist. Not everyone is. This means certain game design decisions affect me differently than they affect other players.
See, for example, my post about Smash Ultimate giving a unique spirit to people with Dragon Quest XI save data. The non-completionist sees this news and thinks something like, “Oh, that’s a cute little reward to remind me of this other game I enjoyed!” Meanwhile, I’ve been maintaining a complete spirit collection so I see this news and think, “Dammit, Smash, why are you giving me homework?"
My reaction isn’t invalid, but neither is the other one. The annoyance I feel at the news is a fact about me and not an objective quality of the game itself. At most, I could say the decision to distribute this spirit in this way is likely to annoy completionists (especially ones who, say, already bought DQXI on PS4 ages ago) and not that it is an inherently annoying decision. That’s a statement about audience, not just about game design.
My completionism affects how I feel about a lot of game design decisions, but I don’t always realize that’s what’s going on. I’ve fairly-well internalized that some players aren’t annoyed by the things that annoy me about certain achievements, for example, because it doesn’t bother them to decide not to get an achievement. But that’s mostly because there’s been a lot of discussion about achievements, so I’ve heard other viewpoints and it’s easier for me to avoid the typical-mind fallacy. There are other less-discussed areas where I’m pretty sure I wrote things I wouldn’t have written if I were not a completionist, without acknowledging that as a factor.
It’s important to separate what’s true about a game and what’s true about an audience, so I’m going to try to be better about this.
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I’ve written numerous times about why many people tend to not care too much about scores in videogames. In these writings, I explained that the reason for this is that videogames score syste…
I often don’t care about point scores in single-player games, even when they aren’t ruined by multipliers, and this article (and its two linked predecessors which are apparently not still up on that site but are available via the Wayback Machine) convinced me it’s because most games use scores badly. Keith Burgun, lead designer at Dinofarm Games, discusses the philosophy of score that informed the design of then-upcoming game Auro, and it’s one I can get behind.
How to better set up your (game) communities for kinder user experiences.
Healthy communities don’t just happen. Victoria Tran, Communications Director of Kitfox Games, lays out what to consider when creating and maintaining a space for a game’s community, and in particular how to bake kindness into the community’s design.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has cross-promoted other Nintendo properties by adding new collectible spirits on several occasions already. I should be used to it.
They’ve now announced that if you play the Switch port of Dragon Quest XI or its demo, you’ll get a new Tockles spirit in Smash at some point. There’s not much info available yet, but I assume what this means is that at some point, Smash will get patched such that if it detects DQXI (or demo) save data on your Switch, it’ll gift you the spirit (similar to the Partner Pikachu and Partner Eevee spirits you got for having Pokémon: Let’s Go save data before).
This bugs me and I’ve been trying to figure out why. I think it’s because unlike the Spirit Board events that the game seems to have mostly settled on and which require you to defeat the relevant spirits in battle, this promotion requires you to download and perfunctorily engage with a different game. It’s not a new challenge with a corresponding reward - it’s just a hoop to jump through that’s basically equivalent to clicking on an ad. As a result, it feels much more manipulative and devalues the experience of trying out Dragon Quest XI. (I talked about the causes and effects of this in my article about engagement rewards, but the short version is that an external reward for a specific but easy action instead of for performing at a high level makes that action less intrinsically rewarding.) And as a Dragon Quest fan, that makes me sad.
It’s not even a good spirit! Fog immunity is easy to come by and not an ability you need to double-up on.
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(Comic by Adam Ellis, as seen on his Instagram.)
So, like, I do chuckle at comedy about item hoarding, but it also bothers me a bit, because it’s often totally rational behavior by players who’ve been burned before.
Some games brutally punish players for not hoarding equipment, and it’s not always obvious right away what kind of game you’re playing. I don’t think I’m ever going to forget how betrayed I felt in Dragon Quest VIII after telling myself, “You know what? This time I’m not going to hoard things,” and then found out a while after selling my starting equipment that I could have used it to make great stuff using the alchemy system and it was going to be a while before I could replace it and overall in that game you should just NEVER EVER SELL ANYTHING EVER. After that experience, I can’t blame anyone for being careful.
Hoarding items unnecessarily is silly, sure. But if you want to make fun of people for doing it - don’t blame the player; blame the games that taught them they needed to.
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