The best games often have the highest complexity they can manage without forcing difficulty. A more complex game is always more difficult, but a more difficult game isn’t always more complex. So let’s step into the kitchen and see how this curry was made.įirst, I’m going to explain the difference between ‘difficulty’ and ‘complexity’, as they’re what get mistaken for each other in these conversations. And if you try to explain why it’s bad, the response is always “I guess you just can’t handle spicy food.” That chili adds nothing to the flavor of the dish, it’s just to disguise the fact that it was improperly made.ĭarkest Dungeon uses a ton of chili flakes to try to stop you noticing it lacks a lot of flavour. It means they’ve made a not-spicy variant of that dish, and then add chili powder to taste when they serve it. It’s like seeing spiciness options on the menu of an Indian restaurant: If you have the option, odds are high that they haven’t made the dish ‘properly’ in a way that got that spice. That is to say, playstyles that seemed to break the spirit of the game but were entirely within the rules of it.Īs a result, I have a special rage-button in my heart for any game that excuses bad game design as an intentional ‘difficulty’ feature. This is infuriating when you look at a lot of the cases of what constituted ‘optimal play’ Narrow playstyle options, usually involving a specific kind of ‘cheesiness’. That a bad experience was only logical because of bad play. After about 2014 there became this trend in gaming that all criticisms of a ‘hardcore’ game was to be met with ‘get good’. It’s an interest I’m usually pretty quiet about, mostly because it’s too much on the Wholesome side and not particularly heavy on the Rage.Ģ5 hours of playtime sunk into Darkest Dungeon changed that though.
It’s a topic I still have a lot of latent interest in, trading in my magazine subscriptions for online blogs like Fortress of Doors, Designer Notes and Design of Dragons.
So I found those questions more interesting to ask about movies and novels.īut still. None of my code got used for that project, but a lot of my jokes for achievements and loading screens did. I actually got my first creative industry apprenticeship at a game studio, which is how I learned I wanted to be a writer more than anything else. What made things feel fair or unfair, and what were the game’s intentions. It’s what got me interested early in the questions of what made things fun, and why other aspects were grindy, and why you kept playing games you weren’t enjoying. The ones where you knew it was going to be a good guide because they’d put the effort in to make an opening that looked Unlike many it was because I loved reading game dev magazines and studying the walkthroughs that got passed around in the early 2000s. Like many my age, my first real career interest was in video game design.
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