Category: Design Reviews (Page 2 of 5)

Goodbye, Diablo 3 Auction House

September 17, 2013 / Damion Schubert

The trick with playing with real money is when you start letting that real money drive game design decisions – or even give the appearance of doing so. When Diablo III launched last summer, most people (myself included) felt like the game just wasn’t as sticky as it was in the old days. Since the one thing that was significantly changed in the design was the introduction of the Auction House (for either real money or in-game gold), this was pointed to as a culprit- clearly, said the players, loot rates were driven down to make people used the auction house (this link is a very good read, btw). Continue reading

Design Review: Last of Us

August 20, 2013 / Damion Schubert

I just finished “Last of Us”, or as my wife likes to refer to it, the “Dumpster Moving Simulator”. It is good — very good — but I found it short of the accolades that I had heard about it so far, which were all along the lines of ‘we should stop making video games, because it’s been done now.” There, I would beg to differ.

Don’t get me wrong, there are aspects of the game which are very well designed. The characterizations of the two driving characters are both excellent, especially Ellie the girl. There’s a grim horror going on, and yet the writing still does the good job of reminding you that she’s a teen, struggling with teen problems and feelings, while all of this horrible shit is going on around her. Naughty Dog did a marvelous job here, and there are definitely lessons that Bioware could learn. That being said, I have some quibbles. Continue reading

Design Review: Don’t Starve

August 19, 2013 / Damion Schubert

Don’t Starve is a fascinating little game available on Steam. The best way to describe it is that it’s a crafting game with the soul of a Rogue-like. Your character is dropped on an island (for no discernable reason) and given a simple mission: survive as long as you can. This is harder than it looks – it took me several tries to get past the 3 day mark.

The island you’re dropped on is randomly generated, with nothing but raw materials you can use to craft tools, shelters, and other things to help you survive. And much like a Rogue-like, your fate is often in the hands of the random number generator. Start in a world without much flint, for example, and you’re in for a very short game, since you won’t be able to create an axe you need to chop down trees which you need to craft a fire, which you need to keep away the evil… something or other. When it’s dark, it’s real dark, so who knows who ends up munching on your little hiney. Continue reading

Shared Experiences vs. Algorithmic Content

June 16, 2009 / Damion Schubert

Every now and then, I see someone whose idea of the perfect MMO is one that works like real life. Where all of the experiences they encounter in an MMO are unique, created via algorithmic content or by a game system such as a virtual ecology. One thing I see come up a lot is that, when you kill the Red Dragon Above the Village with your guild, then by golly, he should stay dead. You should not be able to kill him next week. Another guild should not be able to kill him 15 minutes later. He’s dead.

Realism is one cited reason. Realism is the wellspring for about half the bad game ideas in the universe. Fun should always trump realism, so lets put that aside. Continue reading

My Wife’s One-Line Rock Band 2 Review

September 19, 2008 / Damion Schubert

“No one told me there would be Linkin’ Park.”

My Brief Conan Review…

May 22, 2008 / Damion Schubert

A very good game marred by some utterly incomprehensible UI decisions. More to come.

My Call of Duty 4 Experience

March 28, 2008 / Damion Schubert

So far, it has some of the most spectacular scripted events I’ve ever seen in a video game, visually.

That being said, so far the actual gameplay seems to consist of not quite killing anyone before my squadmates do, followed by being blown up by unavoidable grenades.

Dear Burnout: Paradise Team…

March 20, 2008 / Damion Schubert

The whole GTA-like open city thing…. did it ever occur to you that someone might want to run the same race twice in a row?

Please, find the designer/producer that foisted this horrible decision on an otherwise great game, and bop him on the back of the head once for me. Kthx…

Rock Band

November 25, 2007 / Damion Schubert

So we got Rock Band on Wednesday, and have been playing a lot of it. Not non-stop because, well, it’s exhausting. I now have a whole new respect for drummers. Even on Medium, the game kicks my ass.

It’s kind of impressive how much better, slicker and more polished Rock Band is on every level than Guitar Hero III. Seriously, the latest GH seems pretty amateurish in almost every level. The exception: the GH3 guitar is seriously much more playable and responsive feeling than the new stratalike that comes with Rock Band, and we’ve been using it almost exclusively.

The game is good solo, but its quality increases an order of magnitude once you get it going multiplayer. So far, we’ve only done 2 players – I can’t wait to see how it plays once we have a full band going.

Guitar Hero III First Musings

October 31, 2007 / Damion Schubert

Played just a little bit of Guitar Hero III last night. Played it unlocking stuff on easy (wife wanted to play, and her wrist is still not up to 100% from her surgery), so your mileage may vary.

The new wireless guitar is awesome. It feels good, it’s responsive, and has the most accurate ’star power’ detection since the first guitar from the first game. So at least in this one area, it’s an improvement. The song list is also mostly good, although there is one tier where it seems your entire song list is 70s songs I could care less about.

Things I didn’t like:
1) Whoever thought it was acceptable to ship a rhythm game where activating star power causes a notable framerate hitch, throwing off your rhythm, needs to be taken out back and pummelled.
2) I was expecting to be shocked and disgusted by the ’strip club’ level – or at least be forced to pretend to be so for my wife’s benefit. Turns out, I got one entirely clothed dancer who … danced bored. Really, we’re playing Rage Against the Machine, and she’s dancing like she just downed a bottle of valium. I was actually insulted – because I could have sworn my rocking deserved better than that.
3) I think my wife counted 15 fonts used in different places. It felt like a bad MySpace page. Somewhere, an art director needs to be hit with a clue stick.
4) They replaced my beloved Pandora with a Japanese schoolgirl? Are you kidding me? God, she was awful.

And then we get to the boss fights. It turns out they are exactly as non-fun as I thought. Even worse, they are anti-fun. If these boss battles ever came into contact with actual fun, the universe would fold onto itself. This is a clear example of a place where design should have iterated on the idea, and then afterwards gone to a bar and shared a beer while talking about how collossally bad a game design decision it turned out to be. Instead, they shipped it.

Original comments thread is here.