The back pain result: thoughts/rants about game design
By Valkyr 1 Comments
Yep it's me again, my Aunt has been using my bedroom to sleep and my back can't stand anymore the uncomfortable air mattress I've been using since my dad came back from the hospital. After drinking a few cups of coffee I started reading 'The art of game design: a book of lenses' so I can stop acting like the software engineering student for at least a few days till I start studying for the final exams I have to go through during February. After a while I started thinking about the design choices in games I've played recently, FF XIII and MGS4, the latter completed yesterday.
Final Fantasy XIII
To give you a general idea of what I think about it: the fact that a 'level designer' received money for the abomination the game levels are is something I can't even compute in my head. So, some dude was paid during 5 years to draw this:
A lot of programming talented nerds developed the Crystal Tools engine (formerly known as White Engine), an engine that delivered one of the best PS3 looking games so far and yet, some stupid dude with the same amount of imagination of an inanimate object only managed to grab a pen and draw a stupid line an get paid for doing it.
The battle mechanics unlike the level design have to be praised, it is really fun to change paradigms according to the situation and the AI that handles the rest of your party is awesome, it always uses the best skills finding and taking advantage of the enemies weakness. The medic paradigm for example, allocates the healing time for each character it is supporting in almost the optimal way possible.
It is very clear that small concepts and pieces were developed in small teams and then assembled, resulting in a very inconsistent an incoherent experience, first you have a never-ending 'tutorial', you traverse the linear hallways and paths killing enemies in order to reach the next cutscene, this process repeats tills an important event triggers and you receive new skills, summons, etc. The game manages to do this for at least 25 hours till you reach the 'open world' part , where it becomes one of the most grindy experiences this generation. By this time you are given 'quests' which are only 'hey! kill X enemy'. Apart from this, the equipment leveling arises as the most important activity, you just go kill a bunch of monsters, buy the materials and upgrade your weapons until you have the optimal equipment for every character. After this I have no idea if the game will change again because I yet have to go through this tedious part if I ever manage to do it.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the patriots
What I feel about it matches almost everything this dude wrote Link . The only thing that comes to my min d is that the level design is very good, you can always find some new way to traverse the levels, especially during act 1 and 2, acts 3,4 and 5 have very little real gameplay and is instead full of behemot cutscenes, the ending one being a 93 minutes 38 seconds cutscene!!!, stupid and amazing at the same time, JAPANESE best describes it.
MGS 3 in my opinion is one of the games of all time, I even cried at the end, A LOT, this time although I knew that the story of Solid Snake was coming to an end, the game didn't manage to get a tear from me, a big let down, I expected to get very emotional but to be honest I didn't like the way the plot was wrapped up