Game design issues? Here’s how game developers solve them

For designers to keep creating engaging and exciting games, they must innovate.
Photo from Freepik.com / snowing

MANILA, Philippines — Innovation is a key part of game design. Without innovation, games become stale clones of each other, and players will no longer spend their money on playing these games.

When this happens, developers make less profit and have less money to spend on making new games. The cycle continues.

For designers to keep creating engaging and exciting games, they must innovate. 

Logistics of multiplayer games

Multiplayer games are very expensive to make and also carry significant risks.

Multiplayer games can only be good if lots of people log in to play. However, there's nothing fun about waiting in a queue for several minutes to enter a match. There's also no joy in an open player world that's devoid of life. In MMOs, players want the game to feel alive. They want to walk into a city—and for it to feel like a city—complete with hundreds of people running around.

When multiplayer games launch, they often struggle to get enough players to sign up. This means that the players who were most excited about the game (the ones who did sign up) get a poor experience.

Therefore, developers inadvertently fail the very people the game appeals most to. Solving this issue isn't easy, but designers have come up with innovative new ways to either attract more players or promote player interaction within the game.

Here are some examples:

  • Utilizing social media - By linking social media accounts, players can see which friends are playing the game, and also easily invite new friends to the game.
  • Interaction frequency - Games that support a higher degree of player interaction through real-time communication make it quicker and easier for players to form bonds.
  • Saved interactions - This is where players can see the rest of a conversation after they log back into a game. This has the effect of promoting continued communication between players. If a player logs out in the middle of the interaction, they can still pick it up later.

Pushing boundaries

In MMOs, players want the game to feel alive. They want to walk into a city complete with hundreds of people running around.
Photo from Freepik.com / sitthiphong

There's a constant battle in game design between being innovative and also familiar. When a game is safe and somewhat familiar, players already have a basic grasp of the game mechanics before they play the game.

This means the player will feel good at the game straight away, and when we feel like a competent player, we want to keep playing. However, no one wants to play another rehashed version of the game.

This is largely why the fantasy MMO genre started to decline after WoW's height in 2010. Game developers saw how successful WoW was with its 13 million players, and everyone wanted a slice of the pie. . . so they all made the same pie. It turns out that people didn't want a WoW clone.

Here's an example of unique game mechanics that pushed boundaries to make games feel more innovative and less stale. These examples aren't necessarily from multiplayer games, but there's no reason multiplayer games couldn't use similar methods to offer a more unique experience.

  • Map annotations - Some games on the Nintendo 3DS allowed players to annotate the maps with the information they found useful.
  • Time loops - In Outer Wilds, the player travels from planet to planet, and the sun explodes every 22 minutes. You learn from every loop, but everything is mostly reset, allowing you to explore again and see how far you can get.
  • Worlds with different physics - This can be a tricky one to pull off. Some games will include areas where the physics dramatically differ from the core physics. For example, space worlds or underwater worlds.

Politics in multiplayer games

By politics, we don't mean which political party players vote for or how far left or right from the center their personal views are. This is about interpersonal politics that affect the core mechanics of a game.

Many games even promote the forming of alliances. This is common in MMOs like World of Warcraft where players can form guilds and work towards a common goal. Being part of a guild (or an alliance) has several benefits.

Guild Members can help the player get the items they need, even fighting off enemy players in contested environments.

Of course, a guild isn't required to get more gold and better items, players can also purchase World of Warcraft gold as well as a WoW boosting service from online marketplaces like Eldorado, but a guild helps.

Alliances are generally seen as a positive thing because they encourage the social aspects of the game. So, when are alliances a bad thing? They can be considered bad when they severely negatively impact other players' experiences.

For example, in Classic World of Warcraft, players often spend several hours preparing for a raid. They travel around the map collecting buffs that will make them extra powerful in the raid scenario. Then they have to travel across the world to the raid location and all enter at the same time.

Some guilds will attempt to learn the behavior of guilds on the enemy faction to ambush them as they are on the way to a raid. When this happens, those players lose all the buffs they spent several hours getting.

To combat this, designers place limitations on cross-faction communication. On PvP servers, they also stop players from being able to create a WoW Classic character on each faction, because it could be used for spying.

Eldorado world

For all your in-game needs such as items and gold, as well as services such as accounts and boosting or power-leveling, Eldorado is the secure, easy-to-use shop you can rely on.

Eldorado, a next-generation virtual economy marketplace for gamers, is the best resource for finding the best prices and top quality service in all of the most popular online video games.   

 

If you want to know more, visit https://www.eldorado.gg.

Show comments