So it’s cumbersome, takes up space, you can accidentally click on it and fill your inventory. You will never equip it, and the gold its worth is such a miniscule number that walking over to get some honestly takes more time than killing the next monster for some actual gold.

So why is it there? It’s there for the purpose of making Blues and better feel cooler to receive.

Let’s propose that white items are removed from the game entirely past Nightmare. What happens when a monster explodes? Well, sometimes gold will pop out, and once in a long while you’ll get an item that’s worth something. Meanwhile, if you kill a monster and white loot pops out, there’s a visceral feeling to it. It’s the “non-reward” reward. The same kind of feel-goodness you get for any marginal benefit. You get something without getting something. It incentivizes stabbing demons to dead piles of hellish flesh without putting more gold into the game’s economy.

When something spins out of a monster, you now do not know what it is until it slaps on the ground and makes a little clunk or jingle. Suddenly because all loot has a chance of being something awesome, instead of all monsters potentially dropping loot it has more of an effect. Imagine for a second that you hate a type of candy, but there’s a machine where if you put a dime into, it has a 1/10 chance of giving you your favorite candy, or the candy you hate most. Despite the fact that you will never, ever eat the candy you hate. Your dime suddenly feels like it has more value. White loot of course, has no actual real-world cost (besides a very marginal amount of bandwidth and storage space). The very act of getting an item that’s useful to you now feels better because every action between it feels less wasted. The process of getting the item you want is more satisfying and there’s less emotional high/low. It’s more high/”ehhh”.

So what about turning it into gold?

Another issue is the what I’d like to call your path of wrath. When you kill massive piles of monsters, you leave a trail of crappy items. Like a marking of “hey I just messed some dudes up” as you progress towards your goal. You’re too good for that stuff. In your feverish killing of thousands of monsters, you’re better than them.  You’re not even looting all of their precious things. You showed Diablo who’s boss by blowing up his minions and there is now a trail of things you don’t want. You’ve left footprints of useless trinkets. I actually think this is fun, maybe I’m weird though.

Now, here’s the other thing about this: consistency. It would probably feel weird if you just walked over some items and turned them into gold, and walking over others doesn’t automatically pick them up at all. This would lead to a few weird (but solvable) problems if you had a full inventory.

I thought about this briefly. The gold it would offer is marginal. The biggest problem with white loot? You never wanna click on that stuff, it feels crummy to want to stab a monster and if you mess up, suddenly you’re wasting space. That’s basically the worst thing about it, but the benefits it adds and the reasons you don’t just get free gold for white items is justifiable.

I’m spending way more time actually playing it than making the site. When the rules feel more fundamentally sound, I’ll post them up.

Diablo III is fun! Strangely, building a character in D3 feels like it most closely resembles deck construction in a card game.

Bigger post on DIII will be made later.

So it’s important than when making these characters. There’s place for people to expand their expertise and try new things. Usually the more options given to them, the more likely this is to happen. However, it’s bad to pile on tons of mechanics without reason because you’ll just overflow the character with power or make their package incohesive and confusing. This is where the toy comes in.

The toy is not a tool that is designed to have an express and central purpose that synergizes with the whole of a character’s abilities. Instead, a toy is a move or ability that has very limited, or no, apparent function. It could have a novel mechanic to it, or just do something that no other move does and has as little power as possible. This is a toy. The toy is the room to grow, it’s for the experts or the people with open minds to try to apply. Toys are for players to find something new and interesting, or use to solve problems in different ways. When you give a character a set of toys, it also creates a wealth that that a character has over none other.

When a game is being learned, most players are trying to optimize the clear purpose of a character. When that is done, there’s two more directions to grow. Mastery and limited discovery. Mastery is just getting the fundamental mechanics down better than anyone else, and discovery is finding the niche and the new that no one though of. While most primary abilities and moves on a character can do this, toys are where this really comes into play. With plenty of toys that are designed as such, there remains mystery to unfold still. With a tightly designed character, this aspect of game longevity doesn’t exist. Toys leave wonder and exploration in your game. That’s why they’re important. Oftentimes toys are the weakest aspect of a character. For example, when making a fighting game character with really good zoning, your up close toolset is going to be the weakest part of the whole package. This is where players are going to find many of their toys.

They allow for rewarding behavior. I know this sounds absolutely baffling in a competitive game. Isn’t the point to push the person who makes the correct choices further towards the winning objective? Yes. HOWEVER: If this choice “feels” bad, then it will not be grasped easily. A very basic example is in League of Legends and the way gold on kills works. You get 300 gold for killing an opponent.  If you die after a long kill streak, you give bonus gold to the people who killed you. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just make basic kills cost less gold to “average” this out? Well, no. 300 gold looks a lot nicer than 200 gold for killing someone, and feels better relative to the other sources of gold intake in the game. The other side to this is if someone is losing and the highest threat gives more gold, a player with lesser understanding of the game will put the picture together faster. It’s very natural feeling to kill that person now, rather than the lower hanging fruit. There’s a lot more that goes into this little micro-economy, but this is the gist of it: Kill a dude, it feels good. This can only be enabled by how the snowball and comeback mechanics relating to gold work. The basic objective of the game feels rewarding without it spiraling out of control.

Managing the “checkmate” scenario is another important part. Say you design your game with a very solid set of mechanics. They feel really good, but once a person starts winning, it all spirals out of control. Comeback mechanics can be used to mitigate the “non-play” chunk of this kind of game. Where once it’s effectively over, there’s still things the other player can do, but they are generally meaningless. It also instills a sense of tension here, where the other person is winning, but if a comeback mechanic is carefully managed, it gives the losing player the feeling of just dangling outside of defeat without being there. It’s not hopeless, there’s always a chance for survival, but they have to really work for it. Depending on how your snowball is implemented, this can be a very important way of curbing any unintended consequences while (if well designed), adding more overall options to the player. This is a very delicate balance to hit, and it’s often easier to use comeback mechanics as a counter measure than have perfectly balanced snowball.

Comeback mechanics are the safety net that go under your tightrope. If you make it too big, then it doesn’t feel like there’s any point of the tightrope to begin with. This is what is generally complained about, and gives a very “kiddie pool” feeling to competitive players.

Hitstun is the pause a game takes when two objects connect in a manner in relation to some sort of combative or violent action. A very simple example is when someone slashes a sword, and it slices an interactive object or person. Both of these parts will cease to do anything for a small amount of time than if they had not collided.

Why is this important?

One of the key reasons is for subconscious feel. Through the use of time, a game designer can make a player feel the difference between hitting and not hitting an object. It adds a very basic sense of impact when the two objects collide. The small pause lets the player know, even if they don’t notice it, that they hit something and their action is positive. If they player realize that attacking objects relates to progression, they get feedback that tells them what they did worked.

In addition, when something is moving and it is suddenly halted by an object crossing paths with it, the movement will stop. Even if something passes through another object through sheer force, the friction of the object it is cutting through is enough to cause the object toslow down. Through this, in the simplest terms, it’s going to take more time to hit someone in the face than throw your limb wildly into the air before you pull back into a neutral position. This interruption is conveyed through hitstun.

What is blockstun? What is hitstop?

Blockstun is generally the same thing as hitstun. In most games with combat mechanics, blockstun is very slightly different than hitstun with varying differences for gameplay reasons. Blockstun often plays different effects and is usually shorter than hitstun for the aforementioned “feel” reason. This allows the player to figure out that their attack was blocked, and did not cause damage something. When combined with varying particle and sound effects, it makes the difference clear though various audio, visual and interactive elements. Hitstop is the difference between these two amounts. It is the added emphasis and oomf that makes the reward of hitting with an attack exist.

Now, what makes The Witcher 2 really stand out in my mind is how the story is established. During the first portion of the game, you’re following the King around. He’s leading a war here, and to do so, he shows his knowledge of war. He directs people, he gets involved, he’s at the very forefront of the action. He’s always doing something to further the battle. Every step of the way you can see why your character Geralt (the player character) is involved with him. There’s one scene where he discusses ballista which comes into play later. At no point is the King hiding, and every action is towards a goal. It’s established he gets shit done.

There’s some personality in him, it’s not especially well developed as he, y’know, dies. In the small time you do see him, you can get some idea of what he’s about. He’s ambitious and does what needs to be done. He knows what war is about. This is the kind of guy you want running your kingdom, he’s doing what you’d want out a king in war and notably, his leadership leads to successes.

This is why the king’s death feels important. You’ve gained a connection, some insight into his character through the war you’re in, he’s a leader. When he falls to someone who does a damn fine job at assassination, you feel the impact. His organization and leadership is strong, so when his land goes without rule, shit is going to fall into chaos (it does). If this didn’t all happen, You wouldn’t know why his land was well off with him. So there’s no questioning that when squabbles of his replacement begin, there are problems. There’s conflict that’s been established, the goings-on make sense.

The antagonist who assassinates him also gains legitimacy.  He killed the king during a vulnerable moment which was well set up, he gained a moment of trust and got to him the moment he would be most alone. When someone kills someone of such competence in such a clever way, it makes them as an antagonist feel worthy. Not only of your dislike, since the king was established to be a positive character one might put faith into; but of someone worthy to fight. The game puts emphasis on fighting, so when you’re going to meet swords with the assassin, he’s set up for a conflict you want to win. This makes the context in which you may defeat him more satisfying, there’s some emotional investment from the connection built. Defeating a boss might end up being about mastery of mechanics, but there’s more to it than that.

This is one of the many things The Witcher 2 does right as a game, and makes the story an interesting contrast to Skyrim. The Witcher 2 is much more finely tuned and narrow in scope, so it can afford to do storytelling like it does. Ultimately, I think that makes it a very good game in its own right.

Unfortunately. There’s a lot of things that contribute to this problem. There’s nothing wrong with a bad story for the sake of gameplay and experience. In this case, I can say the sacrifice was made for that very reason. However, it is still not very good.

I think the biggest offender is the game’s story is told through words, and never actions. There’s almost nothing developed in a way that has impact or meaning. You’re merely told that hey, bad things are happening. Go fix them! You never know why these bad things are so bad. You have no real understanding of the conflict happening. The world will end. Why? How? Yeah, a bad dude is coming to town. I cannot see how powerful he is, why should I believe all this? There’s nothing at stake here. There’s nothing that says. “Yeah okay, if I don’t do this, bad things will absolutely happen”. Like a dragon blew up a town. That’s the only time in the game dragons are a real threat. They’re otherwise pretty long-winded minibosses at best.

There’s no emotional investment in the world. Who am I saving the world for? There’s never any interesting characters to really develop a connection to. Most characters are mostly emotionless actors that serve as arrowed signposts more than actual humans (or cat things). The best character in the game, the one with the most character was M’aiq the liar, a man who appears at random times in random places with interesting things to say that are rather meta. They don’t really have flaws and strengths. None of them do much that’s witty, or have things to do that come off as interesting to stick in the back of my head. Maybe I missed the ones that do, but I’ve played through a decent chunk of the world and thus far, nothing.

A character needs to do more than talk. They need to speak to the player beyond sentences strung together to coherently guide them. They need to do more than debate within each other over conflicts that you have no understanding of. There’s groups that say the problems they’ve had, but you don’t really know the major impact of these problems. You’re working with a primarily visual medium and you’re shown nothing, only told.

I don’t think discussing the main story in extreme detail would do much justice here. The story problems in Skyrim have nothing to do with the writing itself (which is mostly inoffensive and uninteresting at worst). But has more to do with how the story is conveyed. Frozen bears falling down mountains is more memorable than the actual plot. That’s what sells the game though, so I forgive it.

Now, aside from the fact that most players would simply go on as a challenge, or because this is the only viable route. There’s something special that makes these signs work really well as a way of guiding the player. You’ve only known two characters up until this point: your enemy, and the character that has been guiding you this whole time. The latter who recently just betrayed you. This is important, because it’s been established minutes before you see these signs, that your trust has been betrayed.

If there were a splitting of paths after this turn, and you had to guide the player, using signs like these would work really well. If trusting people got you this far, why would trusting the signs end in success as well? Especially since they have the same association as the characters. No one’s trying to help you, there must be something beyond the warnings that will benefit you. Trust got you into this mess, distrust may very well get you out.

Just a cool little thing I observed about how a designer can guide a player. It didn’t really play out into something very useful, but just a way of using arrow signs that aren’t, and a method that might make more players obey them.

Watch the first two minutes of this video. You’ve probably seen this scene a few times before. There’s good reason Ganondorf is considered one of the coolest villains of all time. You’ll notice the most important aspects of this scene are probably subtle to some, and obvious to others. Considering this is the first time Link really meets Ganondorf (disregarding a brief glimpse of him earlier), there’s a lot of impact needed to be developed in this scene.

This is likely one of the best early uses of cinematography in a game cutscene. Specifically, the dominant shot of Ganondorf which implies power. Every shot where Ganondorf is focusing on Link, the camera peers down. Meanwhile, from Link’s perspective, it’s always looking up. Note the horse and Link’s height, which help sell this even more. Through the use of camera alone, the implication of power is there. Without a single word spoken from Ganondorf, you know he’s a badass.

Another really cool thing about this cutscene is it is almost (but not wholly) spoken through actions. Not words. If Ganondorf said nothing at all, you would still have a very strong understanding of what is going on. One of the most important aspects of selling information in other visual based media that also use language (film and comics) and a general golden rule in general: actions speak louder than words. It’s simply clearer to the observer. There is less need for the person to use their imagination, and it can be interpreted without the barrier of language.

You’ll notice that Zelda is your friend (established, but you don’t even need to know this). She’s running from a powerful person. She throws something towards you and looks worried. Since she’s being pursued, assuming you have no prior knowledge, it is implied that she is the victim here. There’s a lot of emphasis placed on the throwing of the ocarina as well. Once Ganondorf enters the picture, since he’s pursuing someone who just tried to give you something, the sides of the story are already spelled out. Once he shows his power off, and you stand up to him but can’t really do anything, it’s pretty clear what’s going on. You gotta go mess Ganondorf up somehow, and that he’s the dude to beat.

Nintendo got it right years ago, while many people struggle today to achieve the same goal. Pretty cool stuff.