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[valrus]

Thought: the opposite is to make something that clearly isn't X but call it X because it's the closest resemblance, like in Rain World. This feels like a sign of much more genuine imaginativeness, where you're introducing so many new ideas that you're concerned with comprehensiveness rather than coming up with new fantasy words.

This was done well in the novel A Deepness in the Sky, where the aliens have an appropriately alien civilization but all the description of it renders it in as ordinary words as are available.  Like it begins that the main character "drove his car down to somewhere because he was taking a leave of absence from graduate school" or something like that, which is only a sort of analogue for what he's actually doing.  Colors off in the infrared or something, that humans can't see, are just translated as "plaid".  (Later in the book it turns out that this was a conscious translation choice -- the alien parts of the book are rendered according to a translation schema that some other characters in the book invented deliberately, in order to play up what they share in common with humans and make humans approach the aliens as people rather than monsters.)

[valrus]

zelda is mor elike the old dnd where anything would be amomnbster or trap. the like like being a fine example.

in genmeral, japanese high fantasy feels better than western high fantasy. japanese wgot malboros, those knife latern guys, living cactii, ostriches as mounts, undead trees and trains, while western got yet another ogre, goblin, spider and troll.

Does anyone know when western fantasy games got so grimly serious?  Because the Japanese fantasy games stem (via Wizardry) from a style of western fantasy game that was often pretty silly.  The whole 70s nerd culture out of which RPGs sprang had a lot of silliness at heart.  These bad RPG stories of going into the dungeon of <author's name backwards> to get the magic sword of <whatever> weren't being played straight... until at some point, they were.

Was it something internal to gaming (like a particularly successful more serious RPG that I'm not remembering)?  Something external, like the turn towards grim fantasy in books in the 1990s?

[s0]

i think it was just a result of everything becoming grimdark and edgy in the 90s (not just fantasy books, but also comics, cartoons etc) and it got kinda stuck on that i guess. scifi retained some of its wackiness tho.

tho there are also good rpgs with serious stories and more low-key settings.

[starsrift]

Nothing wrong with big, but I do find it really tiring to see the same old tolkienesque creatures in favour of originality in fantasy games. I'm not really into sci-fi, but I suppose it would have similar problems, and from the few sci-fi things I have watched a common problem seems to be that every life form is a humanoid more or less.

And the mix of "archaic" English, faux-Norse (sometimes with hilarious results like LORTHEIM) and a bad dragon cypher in the Bethesda games is a bit painful as well. They should've either done it properly or just stuck to the "archaic" English. At least those games don't fall straight into the orcs and elves and dwarves and men cliché, tho; they were slightly more creative with the creatures.

I keep wanting to respond to this and just saying "nah, don't bother", so I guess I'll get it out of my system.
Originality doesn't sell like familiarity does. Genius lies in making the audience familiar with the original, but not everyone has that peculiar talent, and that's the reason why many fantasy stories are about a modern person being sucked into an extra dimension or whatnot (Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, etc) because it's a cheap shorthand to try to maintain an audience POV.
And Narnia and Hogwarts or Diagon Alley are hardly original, but it took that level of audience handholding to get those broad audiences that they enjoy.

Try to write a truly original script or idea, and then shelve it, and look at it again in a few years. I've tried it - and the result was truly alien, it's just simply impenetrable! And I was the one who wrote it!

[s0]

We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.

Stanislaw Lem, Solaris

[oahda]

i know very well that that's the marketing / businessperson viewpoint

but i'm not a businessperson

[FrankieSmileShow]

My number 1 pet peeve is when a game's level design is so boring and uninspired that you honestly cant tell if they were procedurally generated or not.
You know, when the limitation of their level design toolset becomes very obvious, you can see a clear "grid" in the layouts, you see a lot of repeated rooms or design stuff, there is a general lack of a "narrative" thread going through the mini adventures... It all feels kind of like, the level is a place where enemies and goodies are placed in a balanced kind-of-mathematical way, as opposed to something made by a creative person with ideas.

Often happens because the game is huge, ambitious and requires like hundreds of dungeons, and there's only so many you can make with the same toolset before making em all tedious, repetitive variants of the same damn thing, spreading the games' various bits of features and content too thin. Or could be because they are using a level design toolset that greatly limits what they can do in order to streamline the process. Or it can just be because of time constraints, they gotta make as much content as possible in very little time. Or they had their experienced designers work on level design for the important bits and gave the side areas and optional dungeons away for more inexperienced designers to cut their teeth on. Probably some mix of some or all of those causes.

Best example I can think of is most dungeons, caves and ruined castles in Oblivion.

[s0]

man why u gotta diss procedural level generation? there are some pretty damn good level generators in games u know.

oblivion did actually use procgen in its level design process (tho stuff was pre-generated and probably altered by hand), but even if it was completely procgenned it would still be bad level design. pretty much every halfway decent roguelike out there shits all over oblivion's bland prefab dungeons.

[FrankieSmileShow]

Haha, I don't mind procedurally generated dungeons! Procgen comes with its own host of challenges, but it can be done very well. I love a bunch of well designed games with procedural generation. I even love some that have some standard and uninteresting maze-block dungeons, sometimes the rest of the game design really does make up for it, like with Crawl for instance.

Proc gen is used best when its just meant to keep people from playing a game through rote memorization, making the game less about "what you need to do here" and more about "how you need to react in X situation". Thats how Crawl and most roguelikes use it, and its perfect that way. Some roguelikes make much more interesting dungeons than others though!

I still really love how "Incursion" did it. That roguelike had a lot of problems, but it managed to make very interesting floors. Its levels were made out of those inter-connected rooms that all had very different mini-algorithms, they all felt unique.

(the floors are like 4-5 screens wide at least, a single screenshot dont give em justice)
Kind of like the Spelunky/binding of Isaac approach of stitching together bits of premade content to make dungeons, but instead it was more like stitching together tiny little microdungeons with their own tiny generation algorithm, resulting in a huge clump of different layout styles. Each room kind of felt like their own little independent "encounters" in a way. The floors lacked cohesion maybe, but it had kind of a unique approach.
(I now realize that you could probably describe most roguelikes' algorythms that way.... so im not sure why I feel this one is different in how it does it. Maybe its rooms have more range in how different they are? Maybe its just because the game spaces out the rooms more which lets them have more distinct "shapes", while most roguelikes puts rooms closer together and they end up mostly rectangular?)

Making a game with solid, interesting proc gen dungeons takes a very good grasp of level design, yet its often used to REPLACE level design somehow. You basically need to know level design well enough that you can turn it into a literal formula and teach a computer to do it for you, and the computer GETS IT and MAKES IT GOOD. Its really rare that this works out.

But when a game isn't even proc genned but feels like it might as well be? ugh...

[s0]

yes incursion is great

[s0]

i just realized that i dont like "gimmicky" weapons in shooters, like the gravity gun in half life 2 or the plasmids in bioshock. esp when they don't have big tactical advantages and don't add any depth. shootin dudes in faux-"creative" ways becomes tedious after the novelty wears off and u start just using the regular guns.

[Hipshot]

I need good examples of proc-gen levels =)

[s0]

Incursion (already mentioned)
Brogue
Minecraft
Dwarf Fortress
Spelunky

[pelle]

Also non-Anglophones who still only work in English because English is COOL and "everyone speaks English anyway"

I am Swedish, but for several years all my design-notes and all my TODO-lists and comments in source-code etc are in English (or at least Swenglish), even for private projects that I might never share with anyone. It just gets confusing for me to mix the two languages, and now and then there is a reason to send some notes to a collaborator in some other country. I do not know what projects will grow to include others, and most others are not Swedish. And I do not have to translate concepts back and forth in my mind to call them something in Swedish in one document and in English in the other document and remember they are the same. I do not really see any disadvantages to stick to English in my work, no matter if it is cool or not (probably not so cool).

Not everyone speaks English, but far more than speaks Swedish, and I really do not have any other languages to choose from.

[pelle]

having various media available in your language is a great way for people who want to learn it to do so in an engaging way, much like you probably often claim to have learned English by playing video games. That's just one of many good reasons to translate games.

I also disagree about this. Translated games (or other software) just leads to splitting up the community. Sometimes I am stuck with some software in Swedish, and trying to follow a tutorial someone wrote in English is just annoying when you need to figure out what they are talking about. I would never use translated software if there is a choice. So much wasted work having to support all the different languages, for the community, not to mention the extra work for the developers. There really should be a common global language, and if English is not a good choice I would be happy to learn a new one as long as everyone could agree on it. Let's not talk about things like programming Visual Basic with Swedish keywords. Imagine if translated programming languages caught on, and trying to understand answers on stackoverflow.

Not that I do not like minority languages. I love old books and it would be a shame to not be able to read them because my language was forgotten. It is difficult enough already to read books written in old Swedish because so many words have changed. They should stop changing things so much or old books will be impossible to read even if the language remains in theory.

BTW wasn't you the person working on RymdResa, two Swedish words combined in an English way to form something not-Swedish, grammatically wrong, aka särskrivning? It still hurts my eyes to see that game-name.

[pelle]

Pet peeve: Rock-Paper-Scissors in strategy games. So simplistic and just feels so artificial. It is great when there are complex relationships so that all unit types are useful, none too over-powered etc, but it should not be as boring and simple as RPS leads designers to believe. I hate playing a game and just feeling how the designer forced types into a neat directed graph where every type is great for beating one other type and is weak against one other type, no matter what are the circumstances, and strategy (hah) boils down to making sure to bring type A units against the enemy type B units etc.

[s0]

Yeh i work in english first because i have limited time for making games so when i do it i might as well do it in the language that the most people understand. Working in german would just limit my audience for no reason. I could understand it for very writing-heavy games because usually people write better in their native language. But my games aren't that, so.

[s0]

Another pet peeve: Skill trees. My problems with them are twofold.

1. More often than not it's a lazy mechanic that is only included because that's how everyone does character progression/customization these days so you end up with lots of boring, generic skill trees.

2. The traditional, Diablo 2-style skill tree more or less forces players to use predefined cookie cutter builds with only minor variations. If you're gonna have customization in your game, let me actually customize stuff goddammit! It also leads to games being designed around these cookie cutter builds and offering less flexibility as a result.

My favorite system is either an almost completely "flat" system with some minor gating a la the Souls series or Path of Exile with its multi-directional stat tree and flat, partially randomized skill system.

[ProgramGamer]

I don't know, there's probably a right way to use them.

A personal pet peeve of mine though is when games introduce a double jump in their games but don't even try to justify it in their mechanics or fiction, like in sonic boom, where sonic and friends can double jump (triple jump for amy) without any explanation for why that is.

Like, super mario world had a double jump in the form of jumping off of yoshi, but it had different implications than just allowing the player to jump in the air a second time for no good reason.

[arzi42]

- Not letting the player quit and resume at (almost) any time. There's really no technical excuse for this anymore, you should be able to stop and resume a game when you want, not hunt for a save point. I can (somewhat)  understand save points as punishment, but not having a quit/resume option. Worst offenders don't even let the player save manually at all, but force them to play until the next arbitrary progression point. Specific points where saving is not available are ok (like in midst of cutscenes or battles).
- As a related point, not offering autosaves and reverting the player back to the last manual save on death is just lazy design.
- Crafting in RPGs. Usually ends up being manual labour/grinding that's included only because most other RPGs do it.
- Overly obscure systems and tons of stats. If I need to figure out whether to equip The Sword of Immaculate Slaying or the Axe of Unabashed Bashing, I want to know what's their actual difference and not parse through dozens of slightly varying stats of +103 Lightning Damage, +97 Frost Damage, etc.

There's a ton more, but maybe that's enough for now :D