With all the entries about old school gaming, now for something hypocritical. It’s time to talk about why old school gaming needs to die . That may be too harsh, there are a lot of things to like about it ( expert level difficulty, tight balanced game play,etc), but some parts of it need to go the way of the dodo. Replaying Bionic Commando Rearmed today on hard and wishing it was in some kind of physical form so I could smash it, got me thinking about some aspects of old school gaming that really should no longer apply to games anymore.
1UPs and continues: I was never a fan of the concept of lives, to me it seems like the ultimate form of arbitrary raising the difficulty of a title. Now some games handle lives just for a level, in the way that losing all of them means having to restart the level from the beginning. Some however use it as a way of ending the entire game. Back during the old days, the concept of lives was used as a way of prolonging game time. As dieing meant having to repeat sections the player has conquered. Today with the technology of having huge levels the idea of having a set number of chances to try a level is no longer needed. The Mega Man series gets a small pass on this as the levels themselves are no longer then a few minutes long and are adequately check point filled. Running out of lives and continuing will start the player back at the start of the level they were on. I believe that the player should not be punished to repeat segments they completed for failing at the current section. Any time someone has to repeat game content they already did, will lower the player’s enthusiasm for continuing. Which leads into the next point.
Level Design Balance: This one is tricky to explain, a good title will have it’s difficulty flowing in a constant path upwards. Meaning level 1 will always be easier then 3, and 5 will always be harder then 2. I know that with every old school game I can think of, there is always one level in the middle that is harder then everything else and I constantly think the same thing “if I can just get pass this part the rest is cake”. The game should not be stopping and starting as it were with providing challenges for the player. The other side of this issue is with level length. If every stage of your game takes 15-30 minutes to complete the final level shouldn’t be 45-to an hour long. Not only does it break the flow of the game, but it makes having a life system an exercise in torture if the player has to restart from the beginning (I’m looking at you BCR), which once again segways into my next section.
Using a save/checkpoint system for difficulty:A follow up of the idea of lives, imposing real life issues into your game design has got to stop. One of the main ideas of old school design is having checkpoints or save points placed so few in far between that the player cannot just end the game for real life issues when they come up but have to find a save point first. Being able to save the game at whatever section your at and having it erased when you come back needs to find its way into more games, this concept is of course called quick save or temp save. Something that is funny in a sad way is that Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter that had a very brutal save system, had this feature. Yet Dead Rising which was made by the same team as Dragon Quarter had a slightly less brutal save feature, but did not have a quick save feature at all. I think the one concept that needs to be accepted by game designers is that all games need a quick save feature of that type. I’m all for using save points as a design or story mechanic (the bathrooms in Dead Rising for example), but real life issues should not become a factor of me losing an hour of game play because there aren’t any saves coming up.
Stat tweaking difficulty levels: This is one as someone interested in game design, I believe needs to go away in it’s more popular form. Most titles that have difficulty levels use them as a way of just tweaking the stats of everything. Whether it means the enemies hit more, or the player can be hit less. I really hate this style as it destroys game balance in my opinion. Most often the game itself is balanced stat wise on normal, playing on easy removes the balance and on hard destroys it. I don’t believe in ever altering the player’s stats with difficulty levels, as having that as a constant allows the player to figure it into strategies. I understand that this is used as a way of attracting newcomers to your game, but there are better ways to do that then with just tweaking the stats. Ninja Gaiden Black calls to mind the best way, the game is set at a hardcore level for all difficulties. In it, the difficulty level doesn’t alter stats but alter what enemies will appear, on the easier levels you’ll fight easy enemies and pick up more health items. In essence the act of changing the difficulty level will change the game, and that’s how I like it.
As I mentioned above, games that are considered old school have certain great traits about them, yet there are some that due to technological reasons or game design, are no longer needed anymore. I don’t want to say that all games should follow the idea of “player – centric” design as I don’t agree with all the concepts of it, but torturing the person who is playing your title with bad design decisions has got to stop.
Josh
