Ok, go watch this:
Done it? Ok… What you’ve just seen is a small trailer for “Glorg: The One Button Dungeon Crawler”, and it’s a procedurally generated dungeon crawler where you use just one button to play the whole game.
While I actually don’t know how this actually translates into a fun experience in practice, I’m curious about the results…
One button games like this or “The Adventures of One Button Bob” always throw me into this kind of idea frenzy, in which I think of cool ideas for games that only use one button; although I’m not sure I could actually pull it off, thinking of games in terms of “one-button-interface” is really helpful to help focus on the game concept and removing the fluff… It’s a way for a game designer to really optimize the game actions and to see if his/her novel idea can really shift from “novelty” to “innovative”.
Comming back to the topic of my last post (the World of Warcraft pre-Cataclysm patch), it seems more obvious that Blizzard really screwed up… the game is so full of bugs now (characters that don’t log off completely, 60% speed mount when you die) and so unbalanced (mages, warlocks and DKs are completely op, while holy pallies and balance druids have been reduced to a steaming pile of crap) that players are in a general state of outcrying… if we consider that Blizzard’s revenue stream depends on players being happy and playing, this was all a dangerous move…
The thing that impresses me the most is why none of these problems came up during beta… I know people just leveled to 85 and nobody actually played at level 80 (so the balancing issues might not have been apparent), but considering this patch was schedulled for almost two months before Cataclysm (and new levelling) came about, it seems like a mistake to do a patch trying new game systems and not forcing some level 80 testing on them…
I know several people already considering rerolling (after been playing the same class for five years!!!!), or giving up the game altogether… this general state of unsatisfaction is serious from a game design/testing perspective… a lesson Blizzard will learn the hard way, I think…
Lastly, I’ve been playing “Professor Layton and the Pandora Box” on the Nintendo DS, and while the game seems to have a good concept (minigames galore to solve mysteries), the storytelling system itself is soooooooo annoying that it kind of takes the fun out of the game… The cutscenes take too long, and impart very little new knowledge about the game or the story… seems like a constant reminder of everything that’s been going on for the last 5 mins, done in awfull voice work… I feel bad, because I really like the concept of the game (a kid/puzzle version of the Mystery Case Files games from Big Fish, definite must-have games!)…
That’s it for today, have fun everyone!