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Modern gaming building blocks
13 years ago
General
'Aluminum to me, aluminium to some. You can shine like silver all you want but you're just aluminum.' Barenaked Ladies, Aluminum
So what's really going on in the heads of developers nowadays? Is the almighty dollar getting to all of them, or is it just the producers that are really ruining things? Consoles are to blame, or just sheer laziness and some idiotic desire to be new and innovative in every game?
What Im talking about is the odd new trend in game series to throw away everything accomplished in previous iterations of a franchise and make something new, and fail at it. Not outright fail, usually, but lose a LOT of the knowledge and input that made the previous games great. Two games I would use as examples are Battlefield 3 and Diablo3.
Diablo3 is the one more people would likely have experience with, so I'll start there. Compared to Diablo 2, D3 is terribly lacking. TERRIBLY lacking. Its a fun game, dont get me wrong, and Im not here to review it or give my opinion of the game itself, but there are so many things going on in D2 that just aren't included in D3 that really should have been carried on. Items, for example, are ten steps back in D3 from where they were in D2. From the variety in set items and uniques, even just the differing base items and progression, to the way magical prefixes and suffixes work and the number of such, everything just seems... worse. They tried to simplify, it seems, and in doing so they lost the way the item hunt is actually interesting.
Now, you hunt for 4 specific stats, and thats it. There are no +skill items, there are no %chance on hit to cast a spell, there are no charges of abilities, nothing like that. Set items only show up at level 60, and the ranges for the affixes are so huge that you can get items that have 'worse' affixes but better +stats. THen, the actual level ranges... Socketed rings show up at around level 16ish, and you can get one with a level requirement of 16. Or, you can get one of level 53... its the EXACT same ring, a ring with a single socket, but vastly differing level requirements... explain that one!
Speaking of sockets, you have only about 4 colours of gemstones now in D3. No more diamonds, no more skulls, no more runes, no more jewels... All those items that added some manners of customization are gone, reduced to these 4 or 5 colours that have about 10 levels of quality. Why?
The game itself is different... multiplayer only, for example. You HAVE to be connected to the internet to play the game, even if you want to play solo. What was wrong with the way D2 worked, with offline and open b.net, and a closed b.net. Closed stored your characters on Blizz servers so as to prevent (or reduce, at least) hacked characters and items, but you could mess around all you wanted with your offline or open B.net characters. Then you have the way the whole world itself was set up. Waypoints could take you through the acts, to any area you wanted, that the host had unlocked. So players could be running around in act 3 after Mephisto, while you ran around in Act4 trying to kill butcher. Or, just clear one area, then the next, then the previous couple, etc. You could jump around. Now you need to start a new game for any new act you wanna play.
Okay, so that's diablo3 vs diablo2. Why so many steps back? They learned soooo much from D2, yet they threw that gathered knowledge out the window and restarted it all! WHY?! Even the money excuse doesn't seem to make a lot of sense... its all up to the developers. The game was in development for years, it wasn't exactly rushed out in a year.
Moving on to BF3 though. Compared to BF2... the physics engine is all wonky, getting killed by 'bad luck' happens frequently and you cant even tank surf or anything! The types of vehicles is way down from BF2, the maps are smaller, the UI is far worse, etc. They even dropped the commander role!
This is happening too regularly, seriously! But there is NO need for it. And it makes no sense! Youre supposed to BUILD your game on what you've learned previously, to make the series BETTER. Not just redo everything and hope for another classic game... you might as well rename the game if you want to restart and redo the entire systems established in those games.
What Im talking about is the odd new trend in game series to throw away everything accomplished in previous iterations of a franchise and make something new, and fail at it. Not outright fail, usually, but lose a LOT of the knowledge and input that made the previous games great. Two games I would use as examples are Battlefield 3 and Diablo3.
Diablo3 is the one more people would likely have experience with, so I'll start there. Compared to Diablo 2, D3 is terribly lacking. TERRIBLY lacking. Its a fun game, dont get me wrong, and Im not here to review it or give my opinion of the game itself, but there are so many things going on in D2 that just aren't included in D3 that really should have been carried on. Items, for example, are ten steps back in D3 from where they were in D2. From the variety in set items and uniques, even just the differing base items and progression, to the way magical prefixes and suffixes work and the number of such, everything just seems... worse. They tried to simplify, it seems, and in doing so they lost the way the item hunt is actually interesting.
Now, you hunt for 4 specific stats, and thats it. There are no +skill items, there are no %chance on hit to cast a spell, there are no charges of abilities, nothing like that. Set items only show up at level 60, and the ranges for the affixes are so huge that you can get items that have 'worse' affixes but better +stats. THen, the actual level ranges... Socketed rings show up at around level 16ish, and you can get one with a level requirement of 16. Or, you can get one of level 53... its the EXACT same ring, a ring with a single socket, but vastly differing level requirements... explain that one!
Speaking of sockets, you have only about 4 colours of gemstones now in D3. No more diamonds, no more skulls, no more runes, no more jewels... All those items that added some manners of customization are gone, reduced to these 4 or 5 colours that have about 10 levels of quality. Why?
The game itself is different... multiplayer only, for example. You HAVE to be connected to the internet to play the game, even if you want to play solo. What was wrong with the way D2 worked, with offline and open b.net, and a closed b.net. Closed stored your characters on Blizz servers so as to prevent (or reduce, at least) hacked characters and items, but you could mess around all you wanted with your offline or open B.net characters. Then you have the way the whole world itself was set up. Waypoints could take you through the acts, to any area you wanted, that the host had unlocked. So players could be running around in act 3 after Mephisto, while you ran around in Act4 trying to kill butcher. Or, just clear one area, then the next, then the previous couple, etc. You could jump around. Now you need to start a new game for any new act you wanna play.
Okay, so that's diablo3 vs diablo2. Why so many steps back? They learned soooo much from D2, yet they threw that gathered knowledge out the window and restarted it all! WHY?! Even the money excuse doesn't seem to make a lot of sense... its all up to the developers. The game was in development for years, it wasn't exactly rushed out in a year.
Moving on to BF3 though. Compared to BF2... the physics engine is all wonky, getting killed by 'bad luck' happens frequently and you cant even tank surf or anything! The types of vehicles is way down from BF2, the maps are smaller, the UI is far worse, etc. They even dropped the commander role!
This is happening too regularly, seriously! But there is NO need for it. And it makes no sense! Youre supposed to BUILD your game on what you've learned previously, to make the series BETTER. Not just redo everything and hope for another classic game... you might as well rename the game if you want to restart and redo the entire systems established in those games.
Being a designer =/ I want to say the designers really aren't at fault and they probably hate what's going on... but since it's not their product really, they gotta pander to the boards and people with money to make the game. Eventually, it just gets dumb... and people get tired of fighting the wall. Though this is me giving the designers the benefit of the doubt. They don't want to make these games, but hey, they want to eat and live life... so... whatever brings the money in.
However, in the case of Diablo, it still doesnt make a lot of sense. There is nothing about D3 that makes sense to have made more money for Blizzard or Activision than improving on Diablo2. As I said, it was still years in development, and all of those features could certainly be replicated without too much delay at that point. Unless they spent all of their time working on the Real Money Auction House...
A truck load of tech, coding, network design, system design went into making the Real Money Auction crap work in their favor. This is actually exactly how a lot of "Free to Play" games work. They try to find a player's breaking point where they are willing to spend money to get things to make the game fun... rather than finding ways to make the game fun. In fact, the few "Free to Play" games I was looking into designing, you are encouraged by your funders to put in mechanics that make your experience less optimal and definitely less fun so you are encouraged to drop them a bit of money and get into the habit of "Oh I just need one more of those, and I'll be good." In the industry, we call a person willing to dump money into these things "Whales" and that's exactly what our companies make us design for. You only need to catch a few whales to make a huge margin.
The stats and mechanics on the gameplay make sense too. The devil's in the details.