5 star takumi was like, the third character I got. I’ve had ridiculous luck in this game.
I’m Takumi-less but I’ve been enjoying myself plenty with Setsuna, who I’m fairly sure is constantly stoned off her ass.
This has been a consistent strain of thought reaching back to IC. I understand some of the thinking behind it, maybe. It’s just interesting that it’s persisted for so long. In another medium I’d assume the criticism would fall in line with that terrible earnest-seeking binary of “Slick Production = Corporate = Dishonest = Bad || Clipping e-guitar + lo-fi = Anti-Corporate = Honest = Good” but I think the criticism from game to game on these boards has referred to visual “polish” and how willing the game is to make a mess/let you get frustrated. Flow? Or something? Idk
I get this feeling about Naughty Dog, particularly in Last of Us, which follows “how to screenwrite” so well in addition to “how to game design” that I am never surprised or invested; my only pleasure is from a clinical evaluation of how well they’re pulling off the beats that, yes, yes, should be right in this exact spot.
Latter-day Nintendo has a similar issue particularly in Mario with a cadence of ‘delightful surprise’ that I find exhausting and ultimately shallow though it’s not terribly; I’m not a big fan of Tokyo’s Mario output but I keep appreciating the craft.
In the interest of being genuine I’m assuming the logic is that Shovel Knight seems “machine produced” in how it calls back to old nostalgia and successful design. If that were the case, if it were lifted directly from old game titles and didn’t experiment or take risks, I could see the point of argument. But that’s not actually what’s happening in the game, so I’m confused each time the case is made.
SK doesn’t feel “by the book” so much as it feels like genuinely clever expansions on old ideas that became obsolete in the progress of technology.
it me, shovel knight hater
i don’t want to take credit for anything, honestly, but this talk probably dates back to my aggressive shitting on SK several months ago
for me personally, SK is too boring of a game to actually play enough of it to argue about it, but it’s definitely, definitely, definitely not a case of [quote]
“the game was designed TOO WELL”
[/quote]
it’s fun to press the buttons and stuff! but the entire experience fills me with existential terror. truly.
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it’s a fun game, I beat it without hating myself, but the designed too well definitely applies because it doesn’t convey anything other than Level Design From That Iwata Asks thing. I can see that this is a weird complaint, but when it is so by the books, when in every room you know that the next one will be the same challenge but with holes of death instead of safe floors, when the influences are so traceable, the game seems like an amalgamation of gamasutra’s first page
that’s why my favourite parts were the ones where it bends the rules, like that kickstarter mansion thing and the final boss. the game shows heart in these parts, but the rest is a laboratory.
tbh “designed too well” is a nonsense phrase. it cannot possibly be a coherent criticism based on my understanding of those three words in succession
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it depends if you think of “well designed” as a sucession of interesting ways to interact with the game (with contrast or wabi-sabi, for example) or if you think about it as a sucession of efficient (not necessarily interesting) ways to convey what they want
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my point is if you are finding flaws in it, those are in fact lapses in design, regardless of whether that design hits all the relevant checkboxes. if it hits them and is still flawed, well… take your pick. something doesn’t add up
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I played like 20 minutes of Night in the Woods and feel a little ambivalent about it. It’s obviously a striking game with a confident art style but I can tell where it’s heading and I’m fairly certain the themes its tackling are well-worn at this point. I will admit that maybe I’m no longer on the same wave length as the ideal demographic for this game, but that doesn’t excuse the lack of imagination I’m seeing in the writing.
I for one am absolutely sick of stories about millennial ennui and the hopelessness of middle-american culture. There are scarier things in life than coming home from college and seeing your friends slip into obscurity or losing touch with your parents. However, “indie” games sure seem preoccupied with concerns like these when the real pressing issues are never really addressed in these toothless pieces of shit.
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I think our language isn’t communicating properly. Design implies both a process, repeatable, efficient, communicative, and the intent of making games, a form of pop art, requiring creativity, wit, and insight.
I get paid for 80% the former and 20% the latter. I get bored by games made following entirely the former; best practices as known at the time. I revel in heaps of ideas, roll around in them (by the way everyone needs to grab Oikopolis Oikospiel right now), but I can also say they’re not well designed, or done carelessly or amateurishly – it wouldn’t meet standards of work I produce, but it interests me more.
It’s funny both how breathlessly we uncovered these emotional spaces untouched by games and fell out of love with them before the Kickstarter was released. Nearby someone gripes about Hyper Light Drifter feeling derivative…of an aesthetic it shocked into creation with its Kickstarter!
Culture is burning too fast, or, everything just barely pre-2017 feels hopelessly out of date. Actually I think this is true and as brought up in the decades thread we just hit a hard cleave.
The difference between Naughty Dog making the perfect AAA game with something like The Last of Us vs Yacht Club making Shovel Knight is that
TLoU
- It’s not perfect
- No one has really made shit that good ever
- There’s still unique interesting characters that have motivations and can be understood (even if they’re not perfect)
SK
- It is kind of perfectly executed
- People have made shit that good before
- I could care less about Shovel Knight or any of the other characters or the environments because none of them are interesting
In fact, Shovel Knight is the posterboy for why games are going hardleft away from mechanics. Mechanics are dead. Shovel Knight wasn’t the one who did it, but it sure as hell is an example of why mechanics are boring. They’re so boring that the fucking gorgeous art surrounding it isn’t enough.
That said, this is like complaining about the world’s best pizza. I mean, shit, it’s something we’ve had as kids and it’s cool that it’s done really well. But if you’re looking to be the best of the best you aren’t going to be making a fucking pizza for Pamda and Tommy C, you know?
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Elaborate!
(frankly I don’t love either but I enjoy Shovel Knight more than Last of Us because it’s…funner)
This is why I keep insisting people play Plague Knight. Look at this goofball!
Hell, this speedrun does a great job of showing off how much potential the potion jump mechanics have.
Thanks CourierRice for showing off the absurdity that people have to go through to make mechanics mentally stimulating.
@BustedAstromech by “mechanics are dead” I mean that mechanics are solved. Almost anything can be gamified. With enough resources most games can be made. The thing that’s interesting now is wrapping that game around an interesting/important/valuable thing.
The majority of the best games of the past years haven’t played significantly better than the best games of years before, yet they all have attempted to say significantly more through their narrative. Mechanics are a relatively solved system, and now people are looking for experiences more than, like, fun. That second part is a generalization, so there are going to be a handful of people who disagree with me, but the first part is pretty much just fact. Name a scenario that Jesse Schell can’t game design around or a system that youtuber-with-a-masters-degree can’t break down and I’ll be really surprised.
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I don’t agree! I think we have perspectives that limit where we think games live --certainly 2D platformers with 2 buttons have been well-trod, but I think you’re underserving slight, gradual improvement, and especially the stuff that is elegant enough to seem natural, for example, the evolution in wall-jump mechanics with western Indies.
I don’t think games normally or ever pitch themselves purely on mechanics. That works on an experiential level. Fly a spaceship, explore a field, run a farm; these all needed mechanics to support them but marketing and even player language doesn’t encompass the how nearly as much as the what.
As a small-scale dev you can think about what you need holistically. Art, mechanics, theme–you know it all has to grab people. I think it was always thus.