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Carpator Diei posted:But why do so many games (not even just fangames) equate ultimate challenges with wasting as much of the player's time as possible? Deliberately using bad game mechanics to make something painful to play might be a bit of a meta-attack on the person playing the game instead of the protagonist, but it's only interesting the first time you encounter it. I've seen discussions about this kind of thing in game design before, I think part of the problem comes down to "game designers like making and playing games, so they make game design into a game where the players are their opponent". And that's not a mentality that tends to lead to good end-user experiences. It's trivially easy to make a game that nobody can beat, and doing that is bad game design, but that's where this kind of thinking leads. Some game designers really do seem to think that making players suffer reflects well on them. Or to put a slightly different spin on it, it's "ooh, what can I do to show off how clever I am" rather than "what will this look like to someone playing it". You see this a lot with ROM hacks and fangames especially, because a lot of them are being made first and foremost for the person making them (or maybe a small dedicated audience with specialised skills) and the creators aren't thinking at all about what it's like for a general audience (or any audience). And they're either playtesting it themselves or drawing playtesters from a very dedicated audience, so they're getting very skewed feedback if any at all. It doesn't have to be malice, just indifference. This game started off pretty strong and looks like it had a fair few good moments and well-designed areas, but by the end it just looked miserable. And I have to say, the reward for actually slogging through all of that being "HAHA LOLRANDOM aren't we such trolls" is really off-putting to me. The tone of this has been all over the place, and there's nothing wrong with any one of the particular tones they've used in various places (I didn't hate all the writing in this!) but the combination of this form of humour (which I must admit I don't care for at the best of times) with it being the culmination of everything this game put you through just feels like a slap in the face to me. This is not the note you want to end your game on, especially if you've just finished torturing them with a helldungeon.
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Oct 29, 2020 14:16
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 17:30 |
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