What's Your Biggest Worry?

by marmot 1333 , Friday, July 26, 2013, 07:15 (4140 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I want to respond to your thoughts but it's a lot to go over.

First off, a lot of what you say you are worried about seems like things that are going to happen. As in, they've already talked a lot about player investment, we can be pretty sure there are save states of some sort (the game won't be a roguelike).

Some of your general ideas seem to really honor the old NES era games, where they were hard, you played through the game each time and had to start over everytime you turned the power off. Those games were often designed that way to get around limitations of the hardware--the cartridge couldn't hold a lot of content, so they made the game really hard to pad out the run time. Savestates break THOSE games because they were not designed for saves! Modern games can be challenging without utilizing the same [no] save mechanics of the past. I haven't played it, but I get the sense that the Dark Souls games are this way (hard but your progress is saved.)

Personally, I was never very good at those old games. They were appealing to me because that's all I had at the time, but I never beat SMB1, for instance. Not for lack of trying, but for lack of skill & contiguous blocks of time required to win.

You say this: "since you can't save exp, weapon progression, loot, or anything like that." But isn't that the complete opposite of the demo they showed at E3? Players had EXP and levels. Loot & Weapons were show to drop, and have individual item progression. Arcade games had one goal: Take quarters as fast as possible without scaring the user off. I would definitely disagree that arcade designers mastered arcade games being "constantly engaging and novel." If anything, my experience was the opposite--repetition and ramped-up difficulty seems more common to me.

It doesn't encourage lazy game design to have loot. If anything, they'll have to work even harder on balancing issues.

"Is this mission fun without the ability to save? No?" you could look at this another way: Will the payer even MAKE IT to this point in the game without a save? Not having some kind of save system severely limits access to huge portions of games. This isn't even marketing, this is just--people have limited amounts of time to play games, and they don't want start at the same place and being doing the same thing every time they boot up the game.

I guess I'm confused about what your "worry" is, since it seems that you're worried about very fundamental design choices that are not going to go away. We're not going to get a Halo:CE or a SMB1 game here. Bungie are moving into the future, not the past.

"It would work as long as your skill as a developer was high." This is true of anything in life. Ideas are easy. Execution is hard, time-consuming, and expensive.

Have you played FTL or any other roguelikes? The genre has a lot of the elements you describe.

Finally, have you ever thought about designing and building your own game? You're obviously passionate about it, and you think through these things.

To the OP: I loved the Star Wars influences. I like the (minor) fantasy influences there are as well. When I first read your post I thought you were trolling us: " it's like nails on chalkboard - especially the original trilogy." (I am still undecided on that point.)

Bungie has said you will become Legend. I took this to mean: the more you play,the cooler stuff you get, the more you can customize your appearance and people will see and fear you. "Whoa! She got that super rare sniper from Venus already! With a helmet from the Cabal! It must have taken her hours!" Stuff like that.

As for my worries? I've said it before and people gently mocked me, but I trust in Bungie. I trust they will make a game that I'm going to enjoy. Even if it was just what we saw at the E3 demo--I would troll those public spaces looking for noobs to help, upgrade & customize my sniper rifle, spend hours riding around on my sparrow, search for the corners of the playable world. I'm excited. I will become Legend.