/vr/ - Retro Games

Probably the least scariest thing in retrospect, but damn. He's a lot smaller than I remember.

Here's one of the reasons I think CK4 and 5 are poorly-designed.

First of all: in preperation of this mini-review I played through both games on hard, so my own suck is part of my lack of enjoyment. Regardless of my own personal incompetence, there was a significant amount of frustration generated by the games being outright unfair, and those are inexcusable.

Now, some may believe that, in game design, the developer should take an antagonistic attitude towards the player. However, as we've seen cunningly parodied in the likes of I Wanna Be The Guy and Kaizo Mario, this doesn't make for a good game. These were only successful because the difficulty was their gimmick. If they were made in earnest, they'd essentially be a golden tome proclaiming what to never do in vidya. Commander Keen was made at a time before vidya was heavily analysed, thus they provide an example of one of the deadly sins of game design: blind jumps. Blind jumps are the failures of level design when your character is expected to leap off a ledge without having any idea what's below. id packs these in as densely as possible. The viewpoint typically uses the player's feet as its bottom; only by deliberately looking up or down can the player change this. Unfortunately, there's a lot of platforming in the game. Examples of blind jumps are all over the place; it shouldn't be hard to find a ledge that you have to check before jumping down. Now, this wouldn't be such a problem if the camera were changed. The earlier games rarely suffered this issue, and when they did there was typically a safe platform below to break the poor player's fall. The biggest difference between CK3 and 4 was the perspective change; the camera was shrunk to oblivion, thus entirely changing the nature of platforming. However, the devs forgot this and kept designing much as they had before. As I've made clear, the results were disastrous.