Three Shortcuts Game Designers Should Stop Taking

Three Shortcuts Game Designers Should Stop Taking

Everyone who creates something wants to make it the best they can. But sometimes, whether due to limitations in time or resources or plain laziness, shortcuts must be taken. In the case of video games, most shortcuts go unnoticed, and sometimes they even work out for the best, as in the case of Silent Hill’s iconic, draw-distance-concealing fog. But for every over-wise teenager trying to get home before his parents, there is an unscrupulous electrical engineer creating a recipe for disaster.

Here are three shortcuts game designers take that they really shouldn’t, and what they might try instead.

1. Bosses So Nice You Fight ‘Em Twice

I haven’t actually seen this one in a while, but it still bears repeating, and anyone who went through the uncompromising gauntlet at the end of Viewtiful Joe knows what I mean. Not satisfied with your ability to defeat these bosses once, the creators of that game made you fight them all again. Right in a row. Without letting you save between them. It’s enough to make a person rage-quit. Which I did, after my seventeenth failure, and now that’s the only thing I remember about the game.

It’s not just Viewtiful Joe, of course. Hell, even The Wind Waker fell victim to the Siren Song of Do-It-Again. I suppose the point might be to build up some tension leading up to the final boss fight, but isn’t that kind of what the rest of the game is supposed to be about? Then again, it might also be about artificially adding length and difficulty to a game considered to be too short, but that’s like putting extra potatoes in a breakfast burrito: it is bland, tasteless filler that only causes one to get fed up more quickly.

What they might try instead: Make the final boss harder. Or add one more boss before the final boss. Or hey, just cut out the rehash. It’s simpler, cheaper, faster, and nobody will miss it.

2. George Lucas Morality

Obi-Wan Kenobi once said that “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” Well, not really; one of the cornerstones of the Star Wars series is that the Jedi are totally good and the Sith are pure dag-nasty evil. Light Side, Dark Side. There is no Gray Side.

And so it is in games, as well. This has actually been discussed a lot lately, with the release of games like Infamous and the upcoming release of Mass Effect 2, and people seem to be in agreement: there are more nuanced ways to handle morality than making gamers choose between taking a box full of kittens to an orphanage for blind children, and eating the kittens, then burning down the orphanage and salting the earth so that nothing will grow there again.

What they might try instead: The consensus seems to be to make morality more fluid, and less stark. Give players choices with actual consequences, both good and bad, that may not be immediately apparent. But also, let’s not forget about the object that has single-handedly kept realistic moral choices at bay: the Morality Meter.

Every game that employs morality as a play mechanic, at least in recent years, has had some kind of Morality Meter that reduces player choices to numbers on a scale. Did you give some money to a homeless person? The Morality Meter goes up three points. Did you explode a busload of nuns? The Morality Meter goes down two points. Not only does a Morality Meter oversimplify complex actions, it also ensures that each choice a player makes occurs in a vacuum, in which one’s decision to stab an old lady can be “cancelled out” if followed immediately by a trip to the park to feed the ducks. At the park, nobody is saying, “Isn’t that the guy who just stabbed your grandma? What does he want with those ducks?” They’re saying, “Aww…he loves those ducks so much.” Kill a hundred innocent people in Fable 2, then give a million gold to a beggar and you’ll see what I mean.

So please…get rid of the Morality Meter. Give us something real.

3. Hobbit Game Design

Also known as "There-and-Back-Again" Design, in Hobbit games it is not enough to go from Point A to Point B to Point C and then done; instead, the game takes players from A to C, then back to B to pick up anything they might have missed, and then returns them to C to deal with the trouble there, and then, seemingly for the hell of it, sends them all the way back to A to open that Mysterious Door they walked by during the tutorial. But only after a quick stop at the hitherto unmentioned Point D to pick up the key.

This is not much of a problem in open-world games, which are all about exploring and becoming familiar with a persistent and well-trod environment, but some of the most beloved games in recent memory have succumbed to Running Out of Levels Syndrome.

Halo has a lot going for it, but there is no denying that at a certain point in the game, it forces players to turn around and go back from whence they came until they end up pretty much exactly where they started. Sure, there was some stuff on fire on the way back that was not on fire on the way out, but they were the same areas, leading to the same places. For all their innovation, the makers of Halo only made half a map.

Metroid Prime 3 almost get a pass here because it is a fairly open experience, but it is a bit much near the end when the proceedings grind to a halt while the player revisits every planet to collect hidden fuel cells. This is, in fact, not much different from having to fight all of the bosses again, except that it takes quite a bit longer and is, in several important ways, less fun.

What they might try instead: Trim the fat. There is nothing wrong with making a short, linear game if what is in there is worth playing. If the world is small, fill the space between Points A and B with fun things to do, but keep it moving forward. Likewise, if a game is more open, let it feel that way. Don’t make gamers return to places because they have to; let them return because they want to.

Thoughts? Additions? I’d love to hear them.