Game Design

[MaestroUGC]

I like talking about game design; what works and what doesn't, and I figure some of you out there do too. So here's a place for us to discuss the game design of all kinds of games, both bad and good. Just a couple of ground rules to keep discussions in order:

1) This is not the place for idle praise or bashing of games. If you cannot explain your views in the context of design points, do not post here. I would like to keep these discussions organized and on track, and there's nothing more disruptive than empty posting.
2) You will be expected to behave if your favorite game gets negative criticism; you will also be expected to behave if your most hated game receives positive criticism. Check your emotional attachment at the door; just because you have strong nostalgic feelings to a game doesn't mean it's objectively good, or bad for that matter.
3) You might begin to realize that while personal opinion can drive what is seen as "good" or "bad", there are certain things that work or don't for the video game medium. Flawed or broken design isn't opinion, your tolerance level is.
4) Discussion will be loosely guided, so please try to stay on topic. While the occasional tangent is alright, if things get really off topic the thread will be nudged back on track. I'll try to keep track of these tangents though, so if a good subject for a conversation comes up, I'll file it here for future reference.
5) Just remember there's a line between Personal Opinion and Objective Design. Just because you like or dislike something it is not necessarily a reflection of is success or failure; however common consensus is often a large factor in what works for game design.

Design Topics:
 - Paper Mario: Sticker Star

[braix]

Seems interesting enough, though I doubt I can contribute much to this thread

[MaestroUGC]

Since we were talking about Paper Mario: Sticker Star in the Nintendo Direct Thread, I figure we can pick that up here.

What I said

Here's the thing regarding Sticker Star and everything it does wrong:

Defining RPGs

1) RPG's are more than just turn-based, isolated combat simulators. In fact, the term "role playing game" is so broad there isn't even a real consensus as to what it means, where the line between that and other genres are, and the line of "western" vs. "eastern (or jrpg)" just blurs that distinction even more. The Paper Mario series (at least the original two) and Super Mario RPG from which they are a spiritual successor, are very much in the vein of the traditional model of RPGs. What's more is that they are some of the functionally easiest RPGs ever made. You mention the complexity of "classes", "menus", and other details are mitigated by a few things. You're party during a single battle consists of 2 people, Mario and a Partner. Mario's move set can grow, adapt, and improve as you see fit; while his partners have clearly defined strengths and weaknesses, with both parties having independent health meters. Your moves can be improved by using items for varying effects, and you even have a mana system to allow for stronger attacks. It's very much a lite version of the classic Final Fantasy formula, and it's all turn based without having to worry about additional things like speed and attack frequency, or class development. There are no classes in Paper Mario, you have Mario who has the capacity to play whoever you want, and your partners who have specific skillsets which are very fundamental. There's no added complexities to the core gameplay mechanic, and each battle nets you experience, money, and items to improve your stats as you face stronger enemies.

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An Example of Good Change

2) Super Paper Mario changed the central gameplay mechanic by getting rid of the isolated battles, but it adopts a real-time RPG system, like dungeon crawlers, and tracks your stats with every enemy you defeat. They adapt the partner system the not only help your now necessary platforming, but also make them useful tools when engaging with enemies. In addition they increase the party by giving you other people to play as besides Mario, giving you multiple methods of play and problem solving. Still not classes to track, and they remove menu navigation almost entirely with the exception of using items and changing your on-field party. While the game changes it's primary method of gameplay, it still preserves the central tenants of RPGs and core themes of the series.

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A Broken Core Mechanic

3) Sticker Star, being the fourth entry to the series, further changes things; but this time far more drastically. First, they change how you battle; the isolated fights return, but none of the mechanics typically seen in an RPG like this do. They replace the menus containing your moves and special abilities with a new method of play with the stickers. These stickers are now your moves that you can perform during your turn, which isn't immediately a bad thing, but the problem comes in when you realize they are a finite resource. If you're out of stickers, you're out of moves. Typically, the only time you run out of moves to use in this style of game is when you run out of mana and can't use your special or powered-up moves; you still have the ability to perform even the most basic attacks with all of the extra improvements you've applied to your stats. This is exacerbated by the fact that not only the fact that you're limited to how many "moves" you can have at any one time, but by how limited they are to acquire in the first place. Outside of finding them randomly in the world, you're only resort is to buy them from shops. You should not be forced to use resources earned just to have the ability to engage an enemy in which the central conceit of the game is engaging enemies. Imagine if your sword in any Legend of Zelda only have 10 swings before it just broke, forcing you to constantly buy a new one just to continue playing. Sure, you could argue "well you should just manage your resources better," but that only serves the point that being able to interact with your environment shouldn't be a finite resource.

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No Incentive for Playing

4) There's also the matter that, unlike every RPG like this ever, you don't get any long-term rewards for beating enemies besides bosses; at most you'll get a some coins and maybe a low level item or two. You don't get any experience from fighting enemies, experience which when accumulated makes you stronger or at least gives you more abilities to work with. This is such a central idea to RPGs that the fact it doesn't exist in Sticker Star is astounding. Sure, you can still have an RPG that doesn't have a traditional leveling system, but there still needs to be long term rewards for engaging with enemies; experience is more than just points, they a reward for getting better at the game and give you an opportunity to face bigger threats and beat them. It's a positive feedback loop every video game needs, an incentive to keep you playing. By taking that away you have no reason to engage with enemies, no reason to risk losing stickers that could be useful in a future encounter that you can't avoid; tying back to how you have a limited move count at any time in the game. Normally if you don't want to waste your special moves or item on common enemies you'll still have basic moves to deal with them without wasting your mana or items; and this is further aided by improving your stats with each encounter making dealing with low-level thugs all the easier. In Sticker Star, not only do you not have an incentive to not engage with any enemies (which is one of the main gameplay mechanics), but you're encouraged to actively skip them so as to be better prepared for boss fights. It forces you to play Sticker Star like a stealth-shooter like Metal Gear Solid, except the game isn't designed to do that; you can't sneak around something in a functionally two-dimensional space (which is what all Paper Mario games are, given that it's just a series of hallways with limited movement possible on the z-axis). Imagine if in Star Fox you only have 50 shots in any given mission, and if you ran out that was it; you'd be forced to make it through the level without firing your gun except in certain unavoidable situations, god help you if you got into a situation where you were forced to fight a large group of enemies without being able to reload (which is a recurring theme in Sticker Star). On the flip side this means there's no grinding, which is good for those who don't like that; but that also means you're not actively playing 70% of the game itself.

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Failure to Adapt the game to Changed Fundamental Mechanics

5) To compare Super Paper Mario, which itself changed a core mechanic to a new idea, Sticker Star took out all of the central themes of an RPG but didn't replace them with something else. SPM took out the battle system and replaced it with Mario-esque platforming, but kept all of the other RPG elements while also adding a level of platforming puzzles. Sure, it was a strange side-step from a working formula, but it at least adapted the RPG elements to this new style of gameplay and actually managed to enhance the experience because of it. Sticker Star took out all of the above points and didn't replace any of them; they reduced your main method of combat to an incredibly limited resource, removed any incentive to actually engage with enemies, and reduced it's own central mechanic to literal obstacles you have to overcome. Oh yeah, not only are this stickers limited in combat, but you have need some of them to not only get through the levels but some of them are needed to even beat some of the bosses. And before you say, "well that's not a bad thing, it just means you need to be extra careful about which stickers you use," to which I say would be fine, if you had any indication that you'd need them in the first place. Sticker Star doesn't telegraph, which you might think isn't a bad thing, but it's crucial to really any game. Telegraphing is how games let you know what puzzles are coming up, or even how to solve them on a smaller scale, so you can be prepared when you encounter it directly. Game Design 101: you're running through a level and you see spikes coming up and down in a sequence in a separate area from you, a little later you come across spikes directly in your path following that same pattern; you already know what the puzzle is and the game showed you how to solve it. Later it'll do this again with more complex patterns, but because you know how the puzzle works you're equipped to handle it as it gets harder. An enemy will jump into the ground to hide and surprise you, and later you'll be able to see him already hiding because you know what that looks like. Sticker Star doesn't do any of this, which becomes a problem if you accidently use a crucial sticker before you needed it, resulting in forcing you to backtrack to maybe find it again or buy it if you can. Now, I'm not saying games can't or shouldn't be cryptic, sometimes you have to rely on your intuition to solve a puzzle, but bad game designers create situations where you're left with guessing solutions to a problem. Sure, water beats fire, but unless you input the exact item the game wants, you can't solve this thing blocking your path, and there was no indication prior to this that I'd need this specific item.

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Explain Yourself

6) Sticker Star does a poor job at explaining itself. Outside of explaining the main mechanic of the game, you're left to your own devices to solve, well, everything else. I'm not talking about holding your hand while you play it through to the end, I'm just talking about explain main objectives the game wants you to complete. While anything with "Mario" in the title doesn't require you to be a member of MENSA to get to the end, they at least give you a well defined goal to achieve; reach the end of the level, win the race, get the star, don't die. Sticker Star gives no explanation for any of the tasks you need to solve; oh it'll show you that your path is blocked, but it won't give you any indication how to get past it, or even if you can get past it. There is a hint system in the game, but all it does is just highlight the problem without actually giving you a hint. In fact, that same hint system is taken away from you at one point in the game, giving you zero clarification on what the puzzle actually is. Tie this into the limited stickers you have and you're left with a lot of guess work and an equal amount of situations in which you can waste your stickers trying to solve. A lot of the boss fights are actually dependent on knowing the right stickers to use, but you'll never know that based on what the game actively tells you. If a game fails to convey it's incremental goals to the player that have to be met to advance towards the ultimate goal, it tends to discourage them from playing further. I realize that such a claim as this is largely subjective, but Sticker Star at most points in the game doesn't tell you how to beat the levels in order to advance the game. Compared to the other entries in this series, their goals are clearly described and will increasingly leave you to your own devices as the game progresses; but they still tell you or illustrate the objective for each room or area. Even SPM narrows it down to a very simple "reach the goal" for it's progression, but the obstacles in your way are clearly presented and the solutions are at least intuitive enough to solve. In most cases you're given various tools to solve a problem and you just need to figure out the right one to use.

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In summary Sticker Star is a bewildering abandonment of not only the Paper Mario formula, but standard RPG mechanics and tropes resulting in a bizarre non-game with little reason to actively play it. In most case you'll ignore a central mechanic of not only the genre, but the game itself (the battles), but it's other central mechanic is designed to be prohibitive to said mechanic. It fails as a follow-up to what is possibly one of the best designed games in RPGs (Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door), but it also fails at being an RPG in general; a failure which manifests itself in bad gameplay and equally flawed game design.

Your friend,
ZL "Maestro" Hogglesworth, esq.

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What Yug Guy said

If we're on the Sticker Star hate bandwagon, I may as well add some of my own personal gripes with the game:

Thing Stickers

A decent idea in theory, right? Super-charged special attack stickers that can do massive damage in battle, right? Except that they are in my opinion, the worst things to be implemented in the game. It all boils down to one thing: their size. Sticker Star's combat relies on stickers, which are stored in an album on the bottom screen. Since you only have a finite amount of space to work with, it's key to maximize how many stickers you have in the album at any given time so you don't run out of stickers during battle. These Thing Stickers take up the space of about 4-6 regular combat stickers (or more, it's been a while since I've played it), making them space-inefficient in regards to the album. This means that I didn't even bother converting things into stickers at all, because they took up so much space. Problem is, you need these stickers in order to progress, because you need them to solve puzzles in the levels. Meaning you have to exit the level, walk back to the hub world, go to the fling-a-thing shop, go back and then you can finally progress in the level. And if you're thinking, "well why not just turn them into stickers if they're so important?" Because after a while, you eventually encounter enough things where turning them all into stickers would take up nearly all of your album space. Given the finite moves Maestro described above, this is not at all the optimal to play the game. The funny part is, this could've been solved by making one change: letting you use things without turning them into stickers first. BOOM: problem solved.

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Backtracking

Dear god, why do I have to backtrack in a freaking Paper Mario game? If this was just for sidequests and optional stuff like in SMP, then I'd be fine with it, but it turns out that it's necessary to beat the game. Let's start with World 2. In it, you're required to get all the different pieces of the whatever from the different levels. Okay then. So, you go through all the levels and collect the different pieces, and try to put them back together at the start of the boss level. But, there's one piece missing. So, where is it? It turns out that you have to go back to 2-3 (or whatever level it actually is), and find the secret alternate exit, to unlock another level that contains the final piece. WHY? What did this add to the gameplay? In literally every other Mario game an alternate exit leads to secrets and bonuses, they're not required to beat the game! Why couldn't you just unlock the last level normally? Wouldn't that accomplish the same thing? But the king has to be World 3, where you're tasked with capturing the missing segments of Wiggler, which are located in the different levels. And you know what sometimes (always?) happens when you confront a segment? It runs away into a different level. Again, WHY? It was in the middle of World 3 where I just turned off the game and said, "Nope. Screw this game."

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NPC's

Toads. Freaking Toads. They're the only friendly NPC's that you meet in the entirety of the game. Why? Isn't Paper Mario as a franchise known for creating new wacky characters to inhabit the Mario universe with? The last Paper Mario game, had dozens upon dozens of new, quirky, and interesting characters for us to play and interact with. And then you replace them all with Toads. I remember a line in an Iwata Asks the developers did saying that they had a challenge trying to make each of the Toads unique, since they all look the same. You know how many I remember after all these years? The guy in the sticker museum, some wimpy guy that always follows you around, and one that goes, "THAT'S RIGHT, IT'S CALLED A MONOPOLY BABY!"

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That puzzle at the end of World 1/beginning of World 2 I don't really care

FUCK THIS PUZZLE. This might've just been me, but there's this one puzzle I believe at the beginning of World 2 that requires you to paste 6 different stickers in order to open the door. There were 2 flowers, 2 mushrooms, and some other things, whatever. But when I went to paste the last mushroom sticker, it wouldn't let me. It turns out that you need a Poison Mushroom sticker in order to progress. I knew I had one at one point, but I threw it away because why on Earth would I keep a Poison Mushroom in my inventory? So I had to go back to where I thought I first encountered it, and hoped to God that if I defeated enough Buzzy Beetles then I would be graced with a Poison Mushroom. As luck would have it, I eventually got one, and finally moved on with the rest of the game. This was also about the same time where my enjoyment of the game started to go sour. Coincidence? I think not.

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In conclusion, it's a miracle that the development team managed to do nearly everything wrong with this game, despite it's polished aesthetics. Not just on a Paper Mario level, but on basic game design as a whole. The fact that even I, a guy who's only experience with Paper Mario has been via Super Paper Mario could realize how awful it is really shows how much they screwed up. In the meantime, I'll stay cautiously optimistic about Paper Mario: Color Splash. Because damn, those visuals tho.
Yes, I'm a bit salty. No, I will not apologize for it.

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[mikey]

I absolutely hate the "or we can **** the player" that appears in so many games nowadays
Like undertale

[MaestroUGC]

I absolutely hate the "or we can **** the player" that appears in so many games nowadays
Like undertale

Care to elaborate?

[mikey]

You know when they make the player feel inferior to themselves, the maker of the game
If I wasn't on my phone I could provide meaningful discussion, but zileas from riot games wrote an article on poor game design and I think he hits the nail on the head

[MaestroUGC]

You know when they make the player feel inferior to themselves, the maker of the game

I'm not sure I do, of course I'm probably not the person to discuss that with.

[Dudeman]

I probably am, and I'm not sure I do either.

[Sebastian]

I don't know if I trust Nintendo anymore after this. I mean, if you go to YouTube, you can find people's predictions & hopes about the new Paper Mario game and what they want to see in it. At least over half of them would rather have it like TTYD or the original. Why Sticker Star? Why would they do that? xD

I don't think I mind the paint thing if the battle system is the same as the original/TTYD.....but c'mon.....no partners? That's just ridiculous.

[Nebbles]

I thought that the backlash to Sticker Star was apparent enough that the same mistakes wouldn't be repeated. Like, going off what Maestro and Yug_guy said, these are ridiculously bad game design choices, and they're going to just... do it again?

[MaestroUGC]

Sticker Star was the most poorly received Paper Mario game to date, and it seems strange that most critical reviews mirrored a lot of those points, but not to such elaborate extremes. Nintendo as a whole seems to be at a strange intersection of knowing good game design philosophies and being really out of touch with those same philosophies. Who ever is directing the Paper Mario series seems to have more interest in the paper aesthetic than the gameplay itself.

There was a good game somewhere in the sticker mechanic, and from what I can tell they had some difficulty reconciling that with the traditional partner system; never mind that if they treated the stickers as a new move-set rather than the sole functioning mechanic, they could've added this new level to the overall paper aesthetic. This is a classic case of aesthetic driving game design and while that's not necessarily a bad thing it can easily overshadow the gameplay itself. It wouldn't have even been that bad had they made the mechanic less constrictive.

[Sebastian]

Maybe they're improving on the Sticker Star idea. I mean, we've only seen a one minute video on this game. That's hardly enough info for us to draw "set in stone" conclusions. Nevertheless, that one minute video showed a lot.

[MaestroUGC]

If they at least restore the battle system to something functional then it'll be a vast improvement.

[Sebastian]

That and partners will make me happy.

[Yug_Guy]

Maybe they're improving on the Sticker Star idea. I mean, we've only seen a one minute video on this game. That's hardly enough info for us to draw "set in stone" conclusions. Nevertheless, that one minute video showed a lot.

This. Tbh, the only things we've seen so far about the battle system is the whole "flick the card on the gamepad to start a fight." If anything, I think the battle system might be an improvement, since "Color Splash" makes me think that they've gotten rid of the sticker functionality entirely.