Category Archives: Blog
How well missions use open-world space in Assassin’s Creed II
Creating and filling open worlds is a tricky thing. On one hand, you want them to be massive, expansive, provide a feeling that you have a whole sandbox to play in, and incentivize exploration. On the other hand, you also don’t want them to feel like there’s nothing to do, you want there to be content. Pretty much every open world game (that is not an RPG, I suppose) tries to mitigate this issue by adding a bunch of collectibles spread all over the world. That’s content that, if the player chooses to complete it, will have them explore every part of the map. But, to be honest, I consider most collectibles to be filler with very little value. What’s much more important is how the world is utilized in missions or other meaty actual content. And a game that I think is a very good example of open world usage in missions is Assassin’s Creed II.
Secrets Design in Rayman Legends
I was so hooked on Rayman Legends the past couple weeks. You know those games that you’ve tried for a bit and know are really good but didn’t play extensively for some reason? Rayman Origins and Legends are some of those games in my case. And not long ago I played Legends for a bit longer and couldn’t let it go. It’s simply stunning. So well-designed, well-tuned, insanely creative and very engaging to play and the whole package is like, woah! And the music levels. Can’t talk about Rayman Legends without mentioning those. They’re amazing. But in this particular post, we’re gonna take a look at how Rayman Legends handles secret areas. It doesn’t take much to mess up with these kinds of things and make the process of finding them really arbitrary or annoying, but Rayman Legends does everything right.
The Curious Case of The Division’s Dark Zone
The Division is an open-world third-person shooter/RPG set in mid-crisis Manhattan, with a focus on co-op and multiplayer. One of the main multiplayer features is the so called Dark Zone. It’s an area of the city where you can find the most powerful NPCs with the best loot, but also the only area where you can kill other players and take their things. And you can’t just leave the Dark Zone and save your progress, you got to call an extraction which will draw attention of NPCs and players alike. In the end, gameplay in the zone is based on trust (or lack of thereof) and shaky alliances. It’s chaotic, intense, you never know what to expect and provides layers upon layers of player interactions… except all that doesn’t work as planned.
Quests in Alto’s Adventure
Alto’s Adventure is an endless runner with a great sense of flow, tight controls, and it’s just very nice to play. What I really like about it, though, is how it handles quests. Quests/challenges are a very important part of an endless runner, because they bring variety and provide you with other goals than just to go as far as possible, thus influencing the way you play. Most of the time, at least in my experience, the quests in endless runners are random. Not in Alto’s Adventure, though, each set of quests for each level is specifically set.
HUD-less Design of Assassin’s Creed 1
Until the release of Black Flag, Assassin’s Creed 1 was my favourite of the series. But even Black Flag doesn’t have what made the first game truly special. Neither did II, Brotherhood, Revelations, III, Unity, Rogue or Syndicate. One can say, ‘Sure Stas, the first Assassin’s Creed has interesting ideas, great atmosphere, story, and provided a base for the franchise, but it got repetitive and boring, surely the rest of the series is a big improvement over it?’ Well… in a way yes. But in a way no. After all, ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted.’ There is one amazing thing in the first Assassin’s Creed that elevates the experience to a different level of immersion and none of its sequels has it. I’m talking about HUD-less design.
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Creating Great Experience with Flawed Mechanics
Whenever we as designers play games, we always look at them from analytical standpoint. What works? What doesn’t? Why? And of course, ‘What I would have changed to make it better?’ This is a very important exercise that keeps our brain always ticking and trying to improve oneself. That said, there is one big flaw with that last question – a lot of times it’s not something we can put to practice mid-development. During analysis, we have the advantage of calm environment and knowing the final result, something that’s absent when developing a game. It’s messy, there’s a whole lot the team needs to do, and there are times when they absolutely know how to improve certain parts of the game, but can’t. Time restrictions, priorities, other issues. So what exercise would help to prepare for that? Well, a much less perfectionist question: ‘How to make a great experience with problematic parts?’
Game Opinion – Entwined
I want to try and make it a point to write on this blog about every game I play, and if I don’t have any particular analytical topic that I would try to tackle, then to just write a little opinion piece on it. And we start with Entwined.
The 5 Extra Coins in Hearthstone
Hearthstone is probably my second most-played game ever, the first one being Evil Islands which I was playing for about 8 years straight, so it’s hard to beat that, but Hearthstone – I did some calculations, and I probably have spent somewhere 600-700 hours in it so far during the past two years. At the least. So, naturally, I would like to talk about it.
Teslagrad and Progress Gating
A little story. I was playing and enjoying Teslagrad. And then, unexpectedly, the pathway to the last section of the game appears to be blocked by a door that can be opened only if you have 15 scrolls, which are hidden and tricky to get collectibles. I had only 3, there was nothing indicating that those scrolls are needed for anything else other than a bonus (for example, there’s a secret ending if you collect all 36 of them, which is perfectly fine). So to get the rest I’d have to go back through all the locations I’ve been to and search for those scrolls. That made me quit in frustration. In retrospect, I have overreacted, however I still don’t agree with the design decision. There’s nothing wrong with the idea of locking content behind collectibles (and to a certain audience there’s nothing wrong in how Teslagrad does it), but I want to talk about how such gating can be made less frustrating for a bigger audience.
Level Design in Limbo
Today I would like to talk about Limbo. It’s a dark and moody puzzle-platformer, and in my opinion one of the best representatives of the genre out there. It’s short, but it provides a very specific and concise experience of us journeying through this bleak, dangerous world and overcoming the hurdles it throws our way.
Stanislav Costiuc 