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I was talking to my wife and her words summed up how I feel (paraphrased):

The Death Knight content isn’t great, but it feels awesome. That’s because of the contrast with the typically shitty MMORPG content.

Blizzard got some of the core elements for MMO content right, which is currently a rare sight. The experience is kind of like this:

1. Hey, this new stuff is fun!
2. Wait, aren’t the principles that make this fun things that I’ve seen in RPGs for a decade or two?

There’s also still a lot of Wrong.

Something I’ve heard quite a few times that has never sat well is that designers need to ‘let go’ of what they know and will enjoy in order to make games for different audiences. Essentially, we’re supposed to forget our instincts to make games for people with different backgrounds.

While there’s a useful message in there, I believe it’s a serious mistake to ignore your gut. You don’t want to get rid of your instincts when designing games for other players - you want to understand them. Games are about fulfilling a range of human desires and it’s crucial to understand how any mechanic satisfies those desires/needs.

Whenever I’m working on something that isn’t directed right at me, I find that my instincts are what matter more than anything else. I don’t automatically know what different people want, but I automatically know what I think makes for a good system and what I’ll find fun. As long as I understand why I will find that particular mechanic fun, then I can find a way to translate that to a different audience.

A lot of this ties into stereotypes designers fall into when creating games for different audiences. These are incredibly dangerous because of human nature: we are skilled at taking information and data points and using them to advance our cause. It’s the old contradiction between simple proverbs such as, “absence makes the heart grow fonder” and “out of sight out of mind.” Both statements hold an element of truth, but they’re usually used with a bias towards the situation. An example from game design:

• Kids need everything simple. They don’t want any complexity or depth.
• Kids are ingenious, creative and fast learners.

On one hand, there’s a drive to make everything simplistic when dealing with kids, then to arbitrarily say that a complex issue isn’t a problem because kids are ingenious. Which is right? My initial reaction is to say that it’d be better to say that games aimed at kids need to be accessible, but that they can master complex games. Hey… that sounds an awful lot like an adult! Most adults aren’t going to bang their heads against the wall to get through inaccessible games. Some will, but then so will some kids - they’ll try and fail repeatedly until they get it right. Hell, I was eleven when X-Com released and it devoured all my game time. X-Com is never a game that’s cited for being simple. I’ve spent lots of time watching 4-8 year olds play complex games that interest me. That includes text-heavy games with lots of puzzles played by kids who couldn’t read.

My point is, games need to be targeted but making sweeping generalizations about the audience on a case-by-case basis is wrong. Using those generalizations to disregard your instincts is even worse. Decide what you want and stick with it, then listen to your instincts when they tell you what to do. Understand why you think something is good, then modify it to fit within the constraints of the game.

Of course, this all relies on having a sufficiently strong design sense to ensure that those instincts are good in the first place.

I’ve been playing Dead Space. It’s a pretty good game - solid mechanics, interesting to explore and fight. I don’t think it’s quite deserving of the 9+ reviews. I’m more of an evolutionary designer than a revolutionary one, but Dead Space still feels too much like an updated yet weaker version of System Shock 2 with an emphasis on absurd gore.

Anyways, blogs aren’t about objective evaluations - they’re for ranting! So on to the rant:

The pausing system in Dead Space is horrid. The UI is almost all contained inside the game world instead of in an overlay. That means accessing things like objectives, the map and your inventory means looking at 2D objects in a 3D camera. Aside from making it nearly impossible to read the map in tight rooms, it also means you cannot pause to review any information.

In a game that’s all about throwing enmies at you abruptly, this is another Bad Thing. Examples I ran into while playing the game:

• Seeing a message “Objective Added…” but it doesn’t say what the objective is, so I need to go into my menu to read the objective. I open the inventory, go to objectives and a new cycle of spawns is triggered by the passage of time. Since it involves watching an animation, there’s insufficient time to close the objectives menu before one of the fast zombies is on top of me.
• I clear out a room and go to the shop. Hey, look at this - the shop is another piece of in-world UI. On three separate occasions I had spawns trigger when I was sitting in a shop well after I had cleared a room. All three times they dropped on me from the ceiling, but I was immobilized by the shop.
• Doors are fake loading screens. Sometimes they open instantly, sometimes it takes quite awhile. They have several sections where you enter a vacuum and have no air other than a small oxygen tank. When you open a door to get into a breathable atmosphere, you have to wait for the loading screen equivalent while your time limit counts down. Most doors are quick, but I had one door that routinely took 10-20 seconds to open when I only have just over a minute of oxygen. I also had another door that would just plain get stuck, and I’d have to run away and come back to open it. Meanwhile, I’d have to fumble through the inventory (consumable air item) that I can’t see well due to being a 2D object while I’m running around.
• And the one that really pissed me off: saving. The save points trigger a moderately long animation before the game pauses. At one point, I run into a big bad zombie and run from him. I have to box him up to keep him from chasing me, and then I come across a save point almost immediately after. It’s in a room I cleared recently, so I run directly to the save point… and the zombie I boxed up spawns right on top of me. He’s a boss, so he tears me apart while I’m stuck in the save animation.

If the lack of access to information while paused is an intentional move, I’m assuming that these decisions were made to make the game more immersive and feel less safe. That’s not a bad goal for a survival horror game, but it was misused here. A game shouldn’t feel dangerous when I’m trying to save. That doesn’t make the game feel more intense - it makes me feel abused. It’s bad enough to have a bloody save point system, but it’s even worse to have a setup that can result in player death from trying to access that save point in an empty room. Dying in the middle of a save attempt is a complete immersion breaker.