Listen up, idiots. Tommy Millar here. I'm a UI artist at Criterion with a game design lesson for you stupid japs. > With #ELDENRING rapidly approaching, I’m going to discuss why I believe the iconic Soulsborne “YOU DIED” screen (and the preceding “falling piano” death design theory) is actually a fairly bad #gamedesign tenet to follow, in the traditional sense. One of the fundamental game design tightropes you walk in #gamedev is, “how do I punish a player whilst allowing them to continue learning?” - in Super Mario Bros, for example, you’ll notice many “safe pitfalls” precede a bottomless pit. Even if they fail, they do not die. In more complex games, we offer this by increasing margin for error, or ability to recover from mistakes.
>The player should be punished without stopping the session - if you stop the game (game over) to force a restart after one mistake, the player is not learning anything. Glibly, we refer to tiny margin for error moments or sudden game overs as “piano falls” (referring to the Looney Tunes trope of a grand piano falling on a character out of nowhere). If the player has no opportunity to recover before game over, the “learning momentum” stops. Imagine a hypothetical Dark Souls-like where, instead of being punished by a “YOU DIED” game-over screen, your immortal character simply resurrected on the spot with a new “Soul Scar” - you could continue to learn/fight the enemy, but have that visual reminder of failure. This is just one solution to maintaining the difficulty whilst removing the archaic trial-and-error style of design which was largely dropped in the 1980s. We should always strive to keep the player **in** the game to teach them. If we slapped the clarinet out of a musician’s hands the second they played a bum note whilst learning a new song, forcing them to restart the whole thing every time, learning that song would take forever.
lot of UX designers are stuck in the idea of making everything easy, automated, and effortless to use. Which makes sense in a UI but they make the mistake of trying to apply this to game design, where the core appeal of the game is how you interact with it. A perfect UX is one you dont have to interact with, but a game you dont interact with is a movie.
Hunter Sullivan
>resurrected on the spot with a new “Soul Scar I recognize that reference. I disagree, I never cared about how scarred my character was?
wow, I am glad this guy isn't in charge of any game I could potentially care about
Jayden Watson
The whole Elden Ring UI debacle revealed to me just how mentally corrupted these western game dev freakshows are. At least the ones with twitter accounts.
Video games got commercialised way too early in their lifecycle which meant they didn't have time to be art before soulless scumfuck product designers decided that the only way to make games was their way. That the benchmark for a game's quality is of their grandmother could play it. Why? Because the game with the best accessibility is the best product. Therefore modern game design philosophy is invariably tangled with marketability concepts which, while an important part of making games, are not an important part of making good games, simply good products. If games were designed like how these people want them to, games'd be fucking boring and the first game to come along that went against their stale MCU-tier design philosophy would hit massive mainstream success despite other flaws- Oh wait that's exactly what's happening. These ignorant pseuds should maybe take it as a wake-up call to expand their thought process and understand that there are as many types of games as people and no 'right' way to make them aside from obvious "it doesn't brick my computer' shit. Soulless, artless sellouts. The lot of em.
>commercialised way too early in their lifecycle This,
Colton Clark
>you could continue to learn/fight the enemy, but have that visual reminder of failure. How would this even work? If the enemies don't heal or respawn, then all you're teaching the player is to bash their head against stuff until it dies, nothing else. And if enemies do reset, then how is it any different to dying and respawning?
Thomas Baker
Criterion as in Criterion Games? The Burnout guys? The ones making the new Need for Speed?
