Levels

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Tuesday, February 26, 2013, 16:29 (4290 days ago) @ electricpirate

The intersection of "Player skill" (you) vs. "Character skill" (your level in game) is a classic game design tradeoff. Looked at linearly, Kotor, Baldur's gate, or old school JRPGs sit at one end (all that matters is character skill), while Halo (pre 4) and quake/UT sit at the other.

and I like Halo, especially pre-Halo 4, so you can see why I'm leery of going towards the other end of the spectrum, right?

Enjoyable by the tired, impatient and distracted. Bungie believes that players don’t play games to "work hard, read or go the internet to figure out our bullshit." The core experience, Jones says, has to be delivered as simply and easily as possible. And that pillar led Bungie to "throw out a bunch of dearly-held ideas."

I don't like the sound of that. It sounds like "We're dumbing down this game and making it easy, we're ignoring a lot of our principles, and we don't care about people getting together on the Internet to figure our stuff out [AKA what b.org is mainly about]". I'm pretty sure that's not how he meant it, but it doesn't sound good, and I'm not going to be surprised now if some of that ends up being true.

The last one directly applies to what you are saying. It implies that Bungie won't build a complicated stat systems, and they are looking for things to be easily explainable.

It doesn't matter if it's complicated or not, having any stats that affect how well I do more than how well I'm doing or how good I am will bother me, maybe enough to not play the game.

The others deal with another major problem in Role Playing games: Grinding. Grinding is the act where you repeat a section of the game not because you enjoy it, but because it will get your character stronger. These items are pretty explicitly rejecting that. Notice, "Accomplish something in an hour" and "Variety of content" "A new experience every night." Here, Jones clearly rejects grinding, and strengthening your character without doing something rewarding.

That "accomplish something in an hour" part is pretty vague though, isn't it? All that's required for that to be true is for the player to accomplish something, not necessarily something meaningful or fun.