Archive for the ‘Game Design’ Category

Ten Bad Things About Starcraft II

This is going to be a rough one people. I’ll have to come up with ten bad design decisions for a game I love and have been promoting for a while now. As usual these points will be in no specific order and incomplete. The ten good things will be up on Monday and I’m [...]

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Separating Single- and Multi-player in Starcraft II

I’m knee deep in the Starcraft II campaign and greatly enjoying it even though I’m not at home and my laptop is not taking the engine well at all. You are not getting a review from me just yet because I haven’t finished the whole thing, but I’ll take this time to talk about Blizzard’s [...]

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My Irrational Love for Trading Card Games

I used to play in a lot of Magic: The Gathering tournaments back in the day and still enjoy the game even though I never get to play with real cards anymore and only rarely get to get my fix on in Magic Online. It seems utterly irrational to love a competitive game with so [...]

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Do Sports Really Need To Be Fair?

The football world cup is on and millions (if not billions) of people who usually don’t care much about sports in general and football in particular are watching it and cheering for their respective teams. I am one of those people, finding myself highly entertained not only by my team’s matches but also by other [...]

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The Crux With Elemental Systems

Elemental damage and its counterpart elemental resistance have been part of computer role-playing games for ages now and they keep on showing up even though they are actually quite bad design, in my opinion. Today I’ll step through a few different implementations of such systems, point out the issues and see if I can find [...]

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Paying to Keep the Casuals Away

Alright, the title of this post sounds terribly elitist, let me assure you that I have nothing at all against casual players. What I do dislike is if games are modeled to fit their tastes and not mine simply because there are more of them than of me. Especially MMOs, like World of Warcraft, tend [...]

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Dissecting Awful MMO Mechanics – Part 3

Welcome back to the third post of me hijacking Keen’s series on “Old MMO Mechanics I Love and You Probably Hate” where I tell you that I do, In fact, hate those mechanics but where I also see whether there’s anything salvageable in them. Unlike , most of today’s mechanics really are awful!

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A Dungeon Keeper MMO

We all know how fast MMO content gets stale, forcing developers to produce more and more content to keep the player-base paying happy. World of Warcraft experiences a big loss in active players in the time before a big new chunk of content is introduced, simply because those players feel like there’s nothing interesting left to [...]

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Dissecting Awful MMO Mechanics – Part 2

This is part two of my three part series dealing with awful MMO mechanics. If you missed the first part, . Today I’ll talk about the mechanics mentioned by Keen in the second part of his own series in which he views them in a very positive light. Today’s mechanics actually aren’t as awful as [...]

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Dissecting Awful MMO Mechanics – Part 1

Keen over at Keen & Graev recently wrote a series of posts called “Old MMO Mechanics I Love and You Probably Hate” in which he is right about pretty much one thing – that I find those mechanics to be terrible game design. Spawn camping, trains to zone, and being lost at sea for hours [...]

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