Poll of the Day > GameTok with Lok: Hardcore game design genius (me) explains all!

(+) Yeah! (+)

Since I'm pretty much the best ever and most informed (despite procrastination), AMA me anything about game design and I'll ker-pow ur ass with prostate joy not unlike the first time you played Super Mario Bros and accidentally sat on the atari

---

In mother 3, why do the characters need to get a fever before learning psi? Why dont they just learn each spell at a certain level?

---

Greenfox111 posted...

In mother 3, why do the characters need to get a fever before learning psi? Why dont they just learn each spell at a certain level?

While this has little to do with game design, it is an interesting piece of artistic design...

Itoi wanted the character growth to have a different feel than just a reward after beating up monsters; so he made the fever system based on how people tend to feel great after recovering from a fever.

Of course, his original idea was that instead of a fever it was.... menstration; you're undergoing psychic cramping (imagine if he had full reign to make the game as intended without Nintendo interference)

---

Why are so many console games using a cursor type interface for menus now?

Its so dumb and really annoying to navigate a cursor around a menu with thumbsticks.

---

Mead posted...

Why are so many console games using a cursor type interface for menus now?

Its so dumb and really annoying to navigate a cursor around a menu with thumbsticks.

Lol wut?

Ok, my first thought was moving a virtual mouse around which is hella stupid... that's legit bad design. But my second thought was that it could be ok if there's item/list snapping, it'd basically be like the cursors in old games like the main menus of Mega Man.

My guess is that it's lazy porting

---

ok, i'll offer y'alls a question:

Why do main bosses in ARPGs (diablo-likes) suck?

I don't mean monster champions... those are usually good, I mean the main bosses.

---

With Disney owning Star Wars I wonder if in the next Kingdom Hearts they'll take Culex from Mario RPG, re-anglicize it as Kulex and make it's Luke's nobody?

---

Lokarin posted...

ok, i'll offer y'alls a question:

Why do main bosses in ARPGs (diablo-likes) suck?

I don't mean monster champions... those are usually good, I mean the main bosses.

I don't usually find that they typically suck, but they do often require different skill sets and emphasize different builds than you use for mobbing, which is what a lot of people like to build for because that makes up the majority of the game. They also often fall into the same trap as platformer bosses in that they spend most of the fight being invulnerable (whether mechanically or because the player's too busy dodging the ouch to realistically damage them), which means that once the player becomes skilled enough that dodging the ouch is easy, they effectively spend most of the fight waiting for openings while they go through the motions.

Back when Mario Odyssey first came out, I saw a couple people praising the fact that it managed to subvert that trap, which is commonly a real annoyance for speedrunners. Nearly every boss in that game has something you can do to interrupt their attack phases almost immediately if you're skilled enough, meaning the skill ceiling for speedrunning those bosses is vastly higher than it would otherwise be (which also gives non-speedrun players something to do during the attack phases).

---

Please explain the world congress in Civilization 6.

---

adjl posted...

I don't usually find that they typically suck, but they do often require different skill sets and emphasize different builds than you use for mobbing, which is what a lot of people like to build for because that makes up the majority of the game. They also often fall into the same trap as platformer bosses in that they spend most of the fight being invulnerable (whether mechanically or because the player's too busy dodging the ouch to realistically damage them), which means that once the player becomes skilled enough that dodging the ouch is easy, they effectively spend most of the fight waiting for openings while they go through the motions.

Back when Mario Odyssey first came out, I saw a couple people praising the fact that it managed to subvert that trap, which is commonly a real annoyance for speedrunners. Nearly every boss in that game has something you can do to interrupt their attack phases almost immediately if you're skilled enough, meaning the skill ceiling for speedrunning those bosses is vastly higher than it would otherwise be (which also gives non-speedrun players something to do during the attack phases).

So here's a novel concept - why not make the bosses based around mobbing? World of Warcraft does this quite often

__starsnostars posted...

Please explain the world congress in Civilization 6.

I haven't played it

---

Why do so many games use 99 / 100 as a limit when the hexadecimal storage used allows up to 255?
---

DeltaBladeX posted...

Why do so many games use 99 / 100 as a limit when the hexadecimal storage used allows up to 255?

2 digit display, easy

---

And the 100 ones?
---

DeltaBladeX posted...

And the 100 ones?

In older games it is sometimes represented by 00, or **; but for the most part it's the Eurocentric attraction to base 10 numbers.

---

Lokarin posted...

So here's a novel concept - why not make the bosses based around mobbing? World of Warcraft does this quite often

Conceptually, the idea of having bosses be a different experience from mowing down the rank and file enemies is an attractive one. It makes thematic sense, it mixes up the gameplay, it offers an opportunity for a more cinematic, exciting fight... It's just that the whole "Attack phase-->Vulnerable phase :||" thing gets a little tedious as soon as the attack phase stops being a genuine challenge, especially where the bosses that are meant to be difficult often have particularly long attack phases. When players are farming said bosses repeatedly and trying to do so as quickly as possible (because clear speed meta), that becomes even more pronounced, and if bosses don't drop enough unique loot to be worth that extra time investment, it becomes more efficient to just skip them entirely. That doesn't necessarily mean the bosses suck, just that they aren't worth spending time on if you're maximizing efficiency.

At the same time, though, if bosses are just more mobs, they have a harder time feeling special. That's not a problem if you only care about optimizing the gameplay loop, but it's a fairly small subset of players that only care about that. Most people (including the developers, in many cases) do place enough value in having an interesting world, story, and theme to warrant trying to design bosses that stand out.

In the case of WoW, you don't actually run into the build specificity problem to the same degree. Unless the game has changed a lot since my days of playing it, mobbing either consists of using crowd control to fight one enemy at a time (in which case you're still just doing single-target damage) or spamming your class' best AoE ability (which rarely even has the option to invest talent points in, let alone being a significant investment). It's pretty rare to see separate specs for mobbing and bossing outside of extreme min-maxing.

---