Perfectly demonstrative of why, regardless of gameplay, is StarCraft II's 4v4 games. Despite a large userbase, matchmaking in 4v4s still takes a while. Because of this, it's essential that prepared parties match up against whomever's available, regardless.
This means anyone not on a prepared team is at a huge disadvantage, because the communication and teamwork will be exceedingly disparate in comparison to the opponents.
Teambased games require communication, which does not exist in random matchmaking. So this can only reasonably happen with prepared teams, of which there will never be enough.
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Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobile
Please get this elitist snobbery off the website, Vader. You're just jealous of the Housers success.
The collectibles in InFamous and Crackdown were the best, obviously very similar in their placement. I think it works best in those games because traversal is the enjoyable par tof the game (as opposed to just getting you to the next shoot-out as with so many other games).
To that point, I guess i'll talk about traversal and pacing. It is the two things in a game that can make all the difference.
So, I'll set up my terms first [and for now I'm only talking about third person action (3PA)] :
Traversal - how you get from one conflict or story point,
Walking/ jogging/ running as in, GTA/ The Force Unleashed/ Mass Effect,
Climbing vertical/ dangling/ acrobatic jumping as in Uncharted/ Assassin's Creed/ Prince of Persia/ Tomb Raider/ The Sabotuer,
Vehicular/ horse as in Mass Effect/ Red Dead/ GTA and,
Flying/ gliding as in InFamous, Crackdown.
I'm not going to give specific examples of poor traversal, experience has instructed me that you guys just get bogged down on defending specific titles, but I'm sure you can think of good and bad experiences you've had with each of these. It is difficult to comprehend that there are still 3PA games being made that rely only on walking/jogging/ running to get from one action point to the next. Titles that can still get away with this tend to have outstanding combat, or some other distraction like brilliant set dressing or theme. Or particularly good story, which can be relayed while in traversal.
Games which have gotten greater attention this generation tend to mix it up at least a little. Uncharted compensates for it's so-so combat with great story, but mostly it is the feel-good traversal. Assasin's Creed the same. If a game is novel enough, like Mirror's Edge, it can make traversal the core experience. Games like Grand Theft Auto III made getting to the next story point often more enjoyable than the intended source of diversion.
Regardless of how you get from point to point it is the pacing, the rate at which non-traversal events occur like story, combat or puzzles, is also key to how enjoyable a game can be. Too far apart and the traversal gets old (particularly if it consists only of walking/ running). Too close together and the player will turn their attention on how good or bad the combat/ puzzle/ story is. The best of games combine all forms. Bioshock, which has mundane traversal, has excellent combat, novel storytelling and fairly mundane puzzles to keep the pacing at an engaging level. It combines the rate of these experiences along with their variation to keep the player involved and interested.
Some games with mundane traversal increase the rate of action points, which in the case of a 3PA causes it to devolve into a first-person shooter (usually not a strong point for the game to begin with).
Often you will read people talking about poor level design when they are actually having difficulty with the pacing of story and combat events and the means by which you get from point to point. Poor level design can certainly contribute to both of these factors, but I'll let someone else write on that topic.
Professor Aspro excellent post. Alan Wake is the basic running from one location to another kind of game but I feel like many times the distances are spaced out to far between action segments. Some of this is to tell the story which isn't all that great. Most of it occurs at the first 3-4 hours where most of your time is spent wandering woods, not only is the running repetitive the background is too.
If Ihad to think of a game that does this perfectly, Batman: Arkham City comes to mind. The combination of gliding and grappling up on top of buildings felt sublime at times. Plus, the added challenge of encountering/evading enemies on the way kept it from ever feeling tedious.
travo said:One of worst experiences with traversal was Infamous. The map was way too large for just running and jogging. I found myself ready for that game experience to be over very quickly because of all the tedious running around.
If Ihad to think of a game that does this perfectly, Batman: Arkham City comes to mind. The combination of gliding and grappling up on top of buildings felt sublime at times. Plus, the added challenge of encountering/evading enemies on the way kept it from ever feeling tedious.
But you are supposed to rail ride and glide boost around the city in Infamous.
travo said:One of worst experiences with traversal was Infamous. The map was way too large for just running and jogging. I found myself ready for that game experience to be over very quickly because of all the tedious running around.
If Ihad to think of a game that does this perfectly, Batman: Arkham City comes to mind. The combination of gliding and grappling up on top of buildings felt sublime at times. Plus, the added challenge of encountering/evading enemies on the way kept it from ever feeling tedious.
But Travo, in Infamous you quickly develop skills to enable you to glide around the city, slide on rails and powerlines etcetera. It's pretty much just like ACity. I respect your opinion, just letting you know in case you did not get far enough into it to use those powers.
Archangel3371 said:Man I really didn't care for the shards in Infamous myself. Pushing the right stick all the time to help locate many of them was a real pain and a lot of the time they were obscured by some of the other map symbols. 300 was too many as well. After getting the last one I never wanted to see another shard for a very loooooong time.
If you are going after all of them I can see how that would get old fast.
Great thread Aspro. i'm enjoying it thus far. I just played 30 seconds of Dark Forces to try out a mouse and it's inspired me to go into the whole Doom/corridor shoother thing from the podcast. Will do so later, but in the mean time, Yoda was right as usual.
aspro said:
I'm not going to give specific examples of poor traversal, experience has instructed me that you guys just get bogged down on defending specific titles
aspro said:travo said:One of worst experiences with traversal was Infamous. The map was way too large for just running and jogging. I found myself ready for that game experience to be over very quickly because of all the tedious running around.
If Ihad to think of a game that does this perfectly, Batman: Arkham City comes to mind. The combination of gliding and grappling up on top of buildings felt sublime at times. Plus, the added challenge of encountering/evading enemies on the way kept it from ever feeling tedious.
But Travo, in Infamous you quickly develop skills to enable you to glide around the city, slide on rails and powerlines etcetera. It's pretty much just like ACity. I respect your opinion, just letting you know in case you did not get far enough into it to use those powers.
I just, I joke. 
The first lesson in game design would be not to aim to directly copy or ape a certain game. You should make something original and unique. Even if your game does end up somewhat like another game, it shouldn't be your aim to copy it during development.
The second lesson is more simple:
Allow users to assign control inputs themselves, letting them choose what button does what. And make sure you allow the sticks to be inverted, godamnit.
gamingeek said:The first lesson in game design would be not to aim to directly copy or ape a certain game. You should make something original and unique. Even if your game does end up somewhat like another game, it shouldn't be your aim to copy it during development.
The second lesson is more simple:
Allow users to assign control inputs themselves, letting them choose what button does what. And make sure you allow the sticks to be inverted, godamnit.
I always invert, I dont think I played one game this gen that didnt let me do so.
I'll try and avoid repeating what I said on the podcast, that being issues of movement speed and how the initial corridors are used mainly as funnels from one larger area to the next, rather than as focuses themselves and part of the set pieces beyond key finding.
Basically Doom simply wasn't a corridor shooter of the time, at least comparatively speaking. You only need to go back and play the likes of Dark Forces which follows the same initial funnel structure, with the major difference being, that the larger areas that you are funnelled into are usually filled with massive structures or are mazes so that you're effectively going through corridors around big buildings with enemies above you, or you're just going through corridors without a ceiling. Of course there are mazes and the like in Doom but they're used tastefully, and to good effect.
As for Doom 3 I'll concede that it's much less of a corridor shooter than Call of Duty etc., but the drastically slower movement means that even if they literally copied the level design of Doom and Doom II it would become more of a corridor shooter because of how much movement speed and controls of a FPSer affect the mechanics of level design. One big difference between Doom 3 and other modern corridor shooters that it should be lauded for, though, is that it does have enemies popping up behind you, or to the side, which so many corridor shooters do not.
So I suppose what we can take from this is that the first two Dooms do feature cover shooting, but the genius of their design is that they also do everything else, and extremely well. This variety means that obviously they're not corridor shooters because that's only one aspect of their level design, where as there are a million corridor shooters that do literally consist almost exclusively of corridors and nothing else.
Dooms design was masterful, its pretty remarkable thinking about it now. So many FPSs went backward.
Dvader said:Dooms design was masterful, its pretty remarkable thinking about it now. So many FPSs went backward.
I could play it endlessly. it's immediately engaging, yet incredibly deep. If I could only play one more game again it may just be Doom...
...Okay, it would be FIFA. 
This thread is for you guys to pick a subject of game design and basically describe why it works or doesn't work and how to make it better.
I will start this off with an aspect of games that have been around for a while but is getting a bit common and very lazy. The random collectable object in action/adventure games. I think GTA3 was really the first game to do it in the way I am going to talk about, the 100 hidden suitcases randomly placed in the giant game world. Since then every sandbox open world game has copied GTA in almost every especially in the collect 100 random useless objects. Some do it better than other but for the most part these things serve no purpose except give the player busy work to do if they want to 100% the game. In many games these objects are placed in such obscure places you have to use a strategy guide to find them all.
This mechanic is basically used as a crutch to fill this large game world with things to do, sadly most developers dont give a crap if its fun to collect these things or not. One of the worst offenders of this is LA Noire and its golden reels. I maybe found 4 of these naturally throughout my play, these objects are in the most stupid locations, places you never have to visit. It is clearly just busy work for the player, this does not make your game better, stop doing it if you are not going to put any effort into it.
Lately this is starting to be found in linear action games, huh? Uncharted had 100 treasures to find, since the game is linear they put these things in stupid random corners or behind a tree or something. Plus they serve no purpose and give you nothing for finding it all except a trophy. I have seen Enslaved do this with a bunch of orbs, and now Alan Wake with thormoses and pages to find. This is not fun exploration, its busy work.
Totally random treasure placement, I am so glad I checked this random corner, yay... so lazy.
This mechanic works well when the game creates actual reasons for the player to get these objects. Randomly stubbling on an object that shines is not good gameplay, having to solve a puzzle to get the object thats good gameplay. Making the objects a core aspect of the exploration and traversal of the game, that makes it work. Now let me give you some examples of what I mean.
Batman Arkham City has the best use of random collectable objects in an open world game I have ever seen. There are over 300 of these and all of them have some action that has to be performed to get to them. Some are as simply as using a bomb to break open a wall while others make use of your gadgets to solve a puzzle. Some are riddles, some are skill based but the main thing is they all make use of your characters powers. Also the game provides a full guide to keep track of all the ones you have found and are missing. There are enemies in the game that can give you the location of the riddler trophies, this way you are not aimlessly wandering the map for what you are missing. No need for an outside guide, the game itself makes sure you have all the tools to find them all, I cannot stress how important this is. That is excellent design and finding these trophies add a bunch of quality gameplay and makes exploring the city much better.
Easy to follow guide to make sure you know where every object is, its not about finding them its about what you have to do to get them.
Infamous is another game that does the collectable objects well. In this case they are a bunch of shards out in the open but they are positioned in a way to create platforming sceanrios for your character. These are often placed all over buildings and along power lines where you must use all your skills and powers to get your character to that shard. Its not about randomly locating the object, you can clearly see these objects and you have a radar so that you can easily find them. Its about what you have to do to get them, make them a part of the gameplay.
Infamous' objects are always placed in areas that require some skill to reach.
Why is getting all hearts in a Zelda game so much fun, because to get a heart you usually have to do a side quest, play a mini game or really use your tools to explore. The hearts aren't randomly hidden behind a tree, just sitting in a random cave. You have to do fun gameplay related actions to get them. This is what developers need to understand, just throughing objects in your game world does not create a better sense of exploration. You have to give the player a better reason to find these objects than simply wandering around hoping to stuble on them.