Reading Response:
I really appreciated this article mostly due to the visual graphs shown. A lot of the concepts presented, such as mastery vs frustration, is an idea that I was familiar with, but never thought of visually. I believe in terms of game development, it helps put things into perspective, and certainly makes me look at games I’ve played over the years and review in depth how the point of mastery and frustration contributed to whether or not I enjoyed the game, or whether I had even bothered to finish it. Being born in 1998, I sort of missed the age of arcade games and early composite games but it’s certainly intriguing to see where the games I grew up with, such as Mario Kart, Super Mario 64, Frogger (the newer, platform series), Zelda, all stemmed from, and how modern games have further composited new ideas and genres into those games to add more layers of complexity. I’ve certainly noticed, as the writer mentioned, that there are big hit and misses in managing these complexities. This not only comes from poor incorporation of different genres, but also control layouts. I think most modern games get away with the latter by allowing users to customize keybinds but there have been many cases where there is simply too much the developers want to implement into the character’s abilities, and it simply eats up so many commands that even changing bindings is a point of frustration. I can also appreciate the last page of the article, describing the work hierarchy that developed within dev teams. It certainly gives great insight as to why it’s well known that the industry can be very brutal, particularly for newcomers, with high turnover rate in positions easily replaceable with others. The same can, of course, be said with almost all other positions of the same degree in different fields such as cashiers, waiters/waitresses, assembly line workers- but the fact that the game industry is more “project” based, each project being a new game or update, means that there is a point in time where there’s a cooldown period, and higher-ups may decide that it’s time to clear house. This structure also explains why over the years, I haven’t, along with many others I’m sure, been extremely excited about new titles (particularly triple-A titles) that have been released. With growing focus on monetization and cost cutting, it’s very noticeable that games have fallen into a pattern of mostly only quantitative changes, rather than qualitative. A good series to take for example is the Assassin Creeds series, which, in my experience, was just reskin after reskin of the same game. The only difference in terms of core gameplay simply being, how many enemies there are, how fast your weapon is, and small adjustments to skill trees that essentially accomplished the same thing in the end. They kept this up for years, until popularity of the game died out- and only then did they decide to rework the game’s mechanics, leaning towards the RPG genre more. It’s for this reason that I’m very satisfied at the growth of the indie game market, which as stated in the article, is growing exponentially as platforms such as Steam, Humble, and Epic Games, allow for easy digital distribution, cutting a large portion of costs that small teams otherwise may not have been able to afford, out of the picture. I’m not a picky gamer, much like music I dip into different moods for game genres, sometimes favoring FPS games, survival games, or story-driven games. For this reason I’m excited for what indie teams have and can bring to the table in experimenting with different niches, and the extremities they will be willing to focus on and incorporate that might be considered unformulaic in the triple-A market. With that in regard, I somewhat disagree with the idea that the market will be cyclical. As technology advances inside and outside the gaming industry, so too will games evolve. For example, with the development of first Kinect and Wii and now VR, the core of which most games are built (being played on a controller or keyboard) has changed. In the process of experimentation there have certainly been some games that completely missed the mark and fell flat amongst audiences and commercially, but the new form of input has opened a gateway to a new wave of experimentation.
Ori and the Will of Wisps Response:
First, I should mention that I did not have enough time to play through the entire game over the break, so some comments I make may not be entirely accurate. I think that this game is very comparable to the Super Mario series, which isn’t to say that it is a clone, but rather that it accomplishes a similar sense of satisfaction. I can certainly tell that they put a lot of focus in artistic immersion, breaking off the original 2D genre to incorporate a 3D world, despite being a side scroller. The animations of the player, NPCs, and enemies all interact with the environment, such as bushes moving around in the background as the player passes, and numerous cutscenes where NPC’s interact with the background. Parts of levels are entirely composed off this idea, such as the third boss encounter at the water mill, where instead of simply fighting a great beast like in the first two boss encounters, the boss dislodges from their den causing a massive flood of water to rush towards the player, focusing the encounter into a platformer level. The level of smoothness in the environmental animation and the character’s movement made it clear to me that the game was fully intended to be played on a controller with analog sticks, rather than the rigidity of the keyboard, (rather conspicuous given the development studio). The flow of the animation, the deep, slow bellows of the kwolok, the squeaks of the Moki, all summarize into a relaxing pattern. Normally, I’m one to rush through dialogue mashing the skip button, just skimming the conversation, but in an artistic sense, I quite like the fact that this game didn’t implement it, for it would ruin that pattern, which I’d argue, is what really sets this game apart from others.
In a recent review by one of my favorite youtubers, videogamesdunkey, he talked about the Super Mario series. Being an avid fan he says, “the only problem with the game is that it stops,” both as a joke that he completed the game but more importantly, in that the game consistently boots the player to the overworld between stages, breaking the flow of the game. Ori addresses this problem in a very interesting way, incorporating slightly, the level design of games like Doom, and the development of new abilities and skills to traverse land like in Mario. The entire world is simply one map, there are technically no loading screens cutting in between the swamps where you start, the colony near the mill, or the underground den of the wolf, exception being if you decide to fast travel. This sets a limitation to the design of the map, it can’t be linear and so expansive that you feel as though you are constantly walking through empty space, so the evolution of traversal is what makes the design interesting. In the starting regions, you fight simple enemies, and for the most part have to ignore the unreachable passage ways littered along the sides. As you gain the ability to dash, double jump, and grapple suddenly all these avenues are accessible. This then brings in the classic arcade formula for difficulty scaling, as these places, despite being in the ‘starter area,” include more hostile creatures, knowing that you must have advanced to a certain point in the game to have the tools to face them. This allows for a much more condensed map, and as a personal opinion, I’d much rather have a small, tight map, filled to the brim with content, rather than a wide open map with a few points of interest, and vast nothingness between.
I can also appreciate that, unlike old Doom and Wolfenstein titles, the backtracking, which can get very redundant and boring, is not technically necessary. This is where player has reign over controlling the difficulty, and why I think that Ori does not require the easy-normal-hard setting at the beginning of the game. You can consistently advance in the main plot of the game with just the abilities that are presented by the plotline, but by backtracking, and checking every crook and nanny, you gain currency to upgrade and buy new passives. If you reach a level that’s simply too hard, you can just leave to get enough ores or spirit light to become stronger and head back in. The passive abilities is one point that I have complaints about, however. I think with all the focus in retaining a certain flow in the game, the fact that you are limited to having 3 active passives ruins the immersion, as in different situations, you have to open the menu and switch in the ones that correspond best to it. Of course, the developers have to consider the opinion of many others in the audience who disagree with me, those who like to pause and strategize which abilities will be best in a certain fight or level and such, but given that in my opinion the main trait for the game is that ‘smooth flow’, the constant pausing takes away from its identity, appeasing those who care less for the artistic side of things and more for their own personal preferences while gaming so that the game may garner a slightly wider audience.