Why game designer fail

[Don]

I found this article:

http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2012/5/3/dia ... ystem.html

I could go over why this article sucks, but I'll just say this is the first guy I've ran into who thinks Diablo 3's ability system was better than Diablo 2's besides the maker of Diablo, so that puts him at 2 versus 2 million. Not saying Diablo 2's system has no room for improvement or even all that great, but Diablo 3's system wasn't even close to good.

A while back I was saying that maybe all designers need to be forced to play their game and be fired if they can't complete it in a reasonable certain time and I think this is a pretty good example of this. Yes if you're just writing it on paper Diablo 3's system sounds like it's pretty good. If you actually have to play the game for extended period of time, you'll see that it really doesn't work because at best you're locked into one of the 3 viable builds. Perhaps its failure is because of other game design elements but you can't just say 'my part of the game is flawless it's the other guys who screwed up'. Yes a Diablo 2 tree system would probably still lock you into one of 3 viable builds for Inferno given Diablo 3 but people associate Diablo 2's tree system with Diablo 2's difficulty where almost anything is viable. You can't say 'well our game doesn't allow viable builds beyond 3 per class so your system would just be as bad' because that's not what you're comparing against. People associate Diablo 2 with tons of viable builds, and Diablo 3 has very few viable builds.

[Don]

Some more random thoughts. While people who are bad at gaming usually don't give useful feedback, I've found that people who are actually good are often even worse. In virtually every genre you can find countless example of a dev claiming something is not broken because it's intended this way and if you only get good enough or whatever it works. Problem is that there is virtually no chance any designer is anywhere near the top of the genre he's playing simply because to get that good would mean you'd never have the time to do your job. In the grand scheme of things, anyone who thinks they're good, myself included, probably sucks compared to someone out there so L2P arguments are almost always fail because there's always going to be someone who can stomp you and make you look stupid.

At any rate catering the game to good players is totally not profitable and no company is in the business of doing that. Outside of a few fringe 'super duper hardcore' games, the goal is try to reach out to as many people as possible. One of the developer for Torchlight 2 recently had an interview saying basically he's not here to figure out how to balance, because that problem is too hard. He's here to figure out how he can have fun because then at least there's some chance that you, the player, might find the game fun too. It is literally impossible for anybody to figure out if rank 1 fireball does 50-60 instead of 52-64 damage does that make the game more balanced or less balanced, but it's not too hard to figure out that if fireball does enough damage that it blows up most enemies you encounter at that level then the game is pretty fun. Likewise you'll never figure out how to put classes balanced in say a MMORPG PvP but you can easily figure out walking in and dying in 3 seconds is probably not very fun, so you should try to avoid doing that.

I remember seeing an interview with Sid Meier and you can tell based on what he says, he actually doesn't understand strategic warfare concepts very well at all, but he's very good at implmenting a system that's pretty fun. It actually doesn't matter if his concept of strategy doesn't actually match reality as long as it's fun. There's no reason for me to believe Miyamoto is going to be super awesome at playing platformer games, or Inafune is going to beat a Megaman game without a sweat, but there's absolutely no reason why they'd need to be good at whatever games they design to design a good game.