Too Big to Fail (Gaming)

by Claude Errera , Wednesday, April 06, 2016, 16:43 (2941 days ago) @ MacAddictXIV

Portal was conceived and developed as a final project in a college by IIRC 4 people. Gabe newell interviewed them, had them show it off, and hired them all on the spot. Then they re-made it into what is now the first portal.

And did you play narbacular drop? It was shitty and primitive (which is fine, they were students). So Valve took them in, and used its resources to make what is now a classic.

That four person team didn't even get the mechanics right. You could shoot portals through portals rendering the game stupidly easy. Valve decided to make it so you couldn't, thus actually making the game a challenge.

That seems to counter your usual philosophy that developers should work to make the game work completely around existing mechanics rather than limiting players.
Shooting a portal through a portal makes sense, as the portal opens up complete access to a new point in space, so Valve should have designed the game around the fact that you can shoot portals through each other, no? They should make it fun and challenging as-is, per the Law of Cody.

You can set your own rules in your game world. Not being able to shoot portals through portals also makes 'sense'. But if you allow that to happen, you completely gut possible puzzle design. The game is far far more interesting and challenging with that limitation. What you can't do makes what you CAN do more important.

I actually agree with Cody on this one.

I'm pretty sure Korny's point wasn't that Cody was WRONG here, but that Cody was directly contradicting previously put-forth (and put forth in Cody's trademarked 'this is the absolute truth' style of presentation, whether he means it that way or not) argument.

Which, unfortunately, is just going to make this conversation devolve into a Bad Cody/Good Cody argument, instead of an interesting discussion about game design theory. :(