Jaime Griesmer’s “30 seconds of fun” quote still holds true.

Jaime Griesmer was a designer for Halo 1 and 2. His job was to tune many of the mechanics in both games. He worked on the weapons, vehicles, characters, AI, controls, camera, multiplayer, single-player difficulty, “all the stuff [he] called ‘sandbox gameplay'”.

In an interview for Halo 1, he said his famous statement: “In Halo 1, there was maybe 30 seconds of fun that happened over and over and over and over again. And so, if you can get 30 seconds of fun, you can pretty much stretch that out to be an entire game.”

Continue reading →

Fair or not, many gamers have long considered open worlds superior to linear ones. If it can be said that a competition rages between linear and open world games, it has been seen as open world games’ game to lose.

Open worlds promise greater freedom, gameplay depth, replayability, immersion, and content. They allow players to go where they want, do what they want when they want to, approach objectives from any direction, and take a break from the main story to mess around in the world and do side activities. The idea of all this freedom makes it easy for open-world games to generate excitement.

Linear games, by contrast, have long been associated with gameplay limitations, short runtimes, and overly scripted cinematic sequences.

In recent years, however, excitement at the news that a game will have an open world has tended to be more subdued. Excitement is still generated relatively easily, but are now met with more skepticism than ever before.

Many open-world games have been released in the past ten years, plenty enough for gamers to better understand the advantages and limitations of open-world level design. Now is as good a time as ever for game developers and consumers alike to take a step back and ask ourselves: What do we actually like about open worlds, and are they really necessary?

Continue reading →

The Bad Company spin-off series limited its battles to 24 players on consoles and 32 players on PC. This distinguished the Bad Company series from the mainline Battlefields (the ones with numbers and no subtitles), which focus on large-scale battles involving 64 (and now 128) players.

Bad Company’s smaller player cap was a necessary compromise for the consoles it was developed for back then. Contemporary console hardware couldn’t handle 64-player servers without serious sacrifices. Even Battlefield 3 and 4, both mainline Battlefields, were limited to 32 players on the PS3 and Xbox 360.

At the time, many PC gamers considered the Bad Company series inferior to the Battlefields that had come before for this very limitation. Even I, a console gamer then, thought 64-player servers would improve Bad Company. I was jealous of PC gamers with their beefy rigs, their flowing white hair, and the awesome chaos I imagined 64-player battles to be.

Since every Battlefield following Bad Company 2 has had at least 64 players, it’s possible to look back and ask if I was right. Would the Bad Company series have been better with 64-player servers?

Continue reading →

Bots could never replace actual players.

There’s something about the co-mingled intelligence and stupidity of human players, their skill and lack of skill, their unpredictability, and the awareness that they are real makes them the best multiplayer allies and enemies.

But while bots can never truly replace humans, that doesn’t mean they don’t have a lot to offer multiplayer games.

(I’m focusing mainly on the FPS genre here.)

Continue reading →

Souls Games Are Not As Hard As You Think

People calling for From Software games to have an easy mode are missing the point: Fromsoft games (which I’ll just call Souls games for convenience from now on) already offer the means to make playing them easier.

Souls games let you summon players and NPCs. If a boss is too hard, you don’t have to fight them alone. Beating a boss this way isn’t as satisfying as beating them yourself, but neither would be beating a boss on easy mode, so it’s a wash.

Continue reading →

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ map is roughly a third of the size of GTA 5’s Los Santos, yet it somehow feels much bigger.

How big a map feels is obviously subjective. Nevertheless, many people have expressed this view since the post-release hype surrounding GTA 5 began to wear off. Google comparisons between the maps of both games and the sentiment is everywhere.

It’s an interesting quirk of perception. How can a map that is significantly smaller feel larger than a map which is, in fact, nearly three times the size? Is it just nostalgia? Or is there some fundamental and learnable difference between the design of both maps?

Continue reading →

Quantity has a quality of its own, but, in the context of player caps in multiplayer first-person shooters, there are limits.

The announcement that Battlefield 2042 would have 128 player servers was met with excitement by many, but almost immediately after release, opinions soured.

This is not to say no one liked the vast increase in player count, nor that it couldn’t have been implemented better. But there are fundamental issues with player counts beyond 64 (the standard cap for ‘large’ multiplayer games) that are not easy for developers to mitigate.

Continue reading →