The issue is that in a lot of your past threads it feels like you haven’t thought about them yourself much if at all.
Like, the answer to a lot of ideas in game design is, very unfortunately, getting out a pencil and paper and trying it in a few scenarios and seeing “Oh, actually, that idea of mine was godawful.”
And I don’t mean that as a slight against you. Most of my ideas are trash. In fact, most ideas at large are of low value when first formed - the “99% garbage 1% gold” expression is born of that!
It’s a matter of how you take the bad thing and make it be not bad.
For example, the lesson that you want to learn from this very thread is “what was something bad so we can never do it again?” is one that we can analyze from many other perspectives using many other games. And we don’t have to look at our community to do it, we can point at professionally built games that have critical flaws.
As a minor example, in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, the plot was terrible for the American Child audience, because they had neither the Japanese Culture of “Home is where you were born” nor the Knowledge to appreciate the game’s main message, conveniently summarized in memetic:
This backlash came because the game is “for kids”, but deals with a more complicated and nuanced theme than can realistically be expected to get through the average reading and comprehension levels of children of the age that were a large proportion of the FFTA audience.
Whether or not that is even bad is something that is difficult to discuss. For example, “Complicated themes in children’s games”… is good, because it gives children something to challenge their brains on which can hone their wit; and is also bad because it leaves children who lack the acumen to get it very displeased with the story - which is the reason I didn’t beat the game for like four years and why I hated it that whole time. The protagonist was completely unrelatable and the only thing I could see him as was a bully.
We can contrast this with opinions on Wargroove. Wargroove is spiritually an Advance Wars game, but it replaces some mechanics with some others and fixes one of the massive issues in that franchise. It ends up failing at being similar to Famicom Wars to feel like Gameboy Wars, but of course it does; it’s Wargroove, not one of the <console prefix’d> Wars games.
But Wargroove is a tile based tactics game that doesn’t have keyboard support with a very oversensitive set of mouse controls. It’s almost completely unplayable from my point of view - and that’s not even the actual game design; because when it comes to that, we have a lot of other things:
-Every unit in the game bobbles a huge amount all the time and the art decisions make it difficult to see unit anatomy.
-Every unit has its own critical condition and a few have unique critical damage ratios. This adds so much to track when trying to figure a fight out.
-The conditions are also not predictable or followable, though I will say most of them are intuitive – “Unit’s position has 2+ terrain stars”, vs “Unit is on a mountain”, “Target is on a road”, “Target isn’t adjacent to a Witch”, “Unit attacked at max range”, “Unit attacked without moving”
-On Commander death, you auto-lose. And your Commander is very good at slaughtering enemies even when they have only 3 or 4 Health remaining, so they can counter-kill trap themselves very easily; and it’s difficult to tell in advance how much damage that pile of units is going to do to your leader. Which, in turn, can easily cause you to lose a map that you were winning because the AI saw that dogpile opportunity.
-Dogs in forests looked like this for over a year:
We can also look at Fire Emblem itself to learn a few lessons: Radiant Dawn makes a lot of action unpredictable due to the insane kill rate between your actual critical rate and proc skill chance. A lot of players despise this, because it reduces the importance of planning.
And yet it’s not all downside: There’s plenty of people who think this is good gameplay - or at least, fun gameplay, to watch the carnage and then figure out how to poise everyone for a good next turn.
Yes, I’m calling you out, Cam.
Compare the difference between your Recent Topics and recent topics posted in Design.
Your topics are 18285, 18191 (this thread), 18106, 18107, 18086, 18082, 18043 (the only not-design thread thus far!), 17930, 17823, 17826, 17824, and 17807.
The only threads in the category that have been posted in after August that aren’t yours are Awakening Opinions, Unit list in hacks (basically a bug report!), Trying new flavors, and Archers & making them worth using.
Do you… not see how this bugs people? It’s not bad to ask questions, but it’s fairly difficult to figure out where you don’t understand things to the point that I have like four or five draft posts in your threads filled with me waffling on what to even say. I don’t have a clue what to help with.
