More incentive talk

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, July 11, 2013, 14:46 (3945 days ago) @ kapowaz

If it unlocks new 'gameplay' strategies, then the game would have been more interesting and complex with it to begin with, and thus it should have been available from the start. It's not compelling to play a worse version of the game in order to then play a better version.

But there is a good argument for not making these additional facets to the gameplay available from the outset, and that's the complexity. It's a pretty universally-accepted trait of modern games that they will gradually introduce gameplay to you rather than inundating you with it all at once. Even a game as hardcore and overwhelming as EVE does this in part, by placing a time/effort barrier between you and (for example) the ability to pilot larger ships. This serves a purpose, though, as it forces you to learn and (potentially) master smaller, more disposable craft before you get to fly the rest.

The same is true in PvZ; if you give a player all (however many it is) plants right from the outset, whilst you might have more choices, they're not necessarily meaningful choices until you can learn the situations in which they work best.

This is where designing a proper difficulty curve comes in. I think it's bullshit that features and aspects of the game get introduced as time goes on (for instance, grenades not being available in normal or easy in Halo until you reach the end of PoA where the game 'trains' you to throw them, or Portal where you don't get the dual portal gun right away).

Ideally all that should be available to the player from the start (with exceptions, see MegaMan), but the difficulty of the game should be what ramps up accordingly. As the game gets harder, the player has to figure out how to use all these techniques to win.

That's how it used to be done, and the best way in my nuanced opinion.