Opinions.

No I am, of course, not complaining or claiming life is that bad. However, here are some tips to the technically skilled video game creators out there who maybe need some help with building the actual game content.

  1. Proper player creation. Take role playing games as an example. A majority of players take a "lot" of care in their character creation. You have to care about your character and the role / skillset / etc in order to enjoy the game. If you hate your character how can you be enthusiastic about doing those crucial side-quests that are going to be important later in the thing? Yeah there are games were you just have to play a certain character, I mostly don't play those games if I don't like the character, unless the game itself has exceptionally redeeming other traits / mechanics. Sometimes one can hack some mid-game mods together, but probably not a great idea to depend on those as a game creator.

1.5. Related to character creation are skills trees. In most decent games, you start off with sort of an idea of what the skills trees might lead to at higher levels. You can pick your skills trees and use those throughout lower level quests to build up what you need for higher level quests. Under no circumstances should you be forced to do excessive things in areas which aren't in your end game desired skills trees. (Especially if it's grinding related, it should definitely be in your skillset, or at least interesting).

  1. Ah. This is really, Really important. A proper guide at the low levels. For example, in the Zelda games you have the little fairy thing. Most games have at least a tutorial level. If your guide is 1. nonexistent, or if for some strange reason you have a guide, but it's crazily enough teaching you the wrong things, this is really, really going to worsen the game experience (I guess there is the case that one could make a game where part of the fun is to figure that out, but then one would expect some sort of cartoonish in-game mini-game to hint at that, since it would be fairly atypical)

  2. Proper quests. If a quest starts out saying - this will 1. save these people, 2. get you this item, 3. this skill is useful for a. and b. which will both help save peoples lives (and not in a, because they are so useless, but it gave us 5 years to grow your organs so we can harvest them a bit better), or whatever and in fact you just end up getting a little receipt saying "quest completed, now go back to low-level grinding" that is not a good quest.

3.5 An overarching goal to the game. If the game just sort of fizzles out and says, well, you've completed 500 weeks of game time, good job! You win! You can either, resume low level grinding, or turn the game off now, maybe you need to rethink the conclusion.

  1. A large number of NPC's to interact with. The more the better. For example, in Skyrim the NPC's are a bit more developed, but it's lacking something vs morrowind, since you sort of meet them all and you figure out which ones are dicks / which ones are cool, and then the world just sort of gets old. In Morrowind, relative to, I would say average game time, at least there are a vast number of NPC's to meet, even if they aren't as in depth. A reasonable game would have an ever expanding pool of NPC's who are all distinct other NPC's, and a decent amount of them should be, I guess, reasonable to interact with. A 'really' lazy game-maker would just take copies of the same NPC's you find in your beginning of the game tutorial grinds and, like minorly change their personalities, but with basically the same AI, an 'extremely' (gloatingly) lazy game maker would give them basically derivatives of the same name.

  2. The game should teach you something useful. If the game is teaching you the wrong lessons, e.g. a large number of the NPC's continuously point you towards the wrong thing, then, while it may be fun, it has probably lost most of it's value as a game.

  3. The game shouldn't be fixed / rigged towards a certain result. I'm trying to think of an video game example here, but the best I can do is think of like some kind of rigged claw game at the mall, which you can aim up precisely, and it will jig at the last minute to make you miss.

6.5. (Never attribute to malice what could equally well be attributed to bad coding). If you are standing in square A, and an enemy arrow hits square B, it shouldn't kill you. Maybe this is some kind of jesus lesson though, judge others as you would be judged - the point being that if you can make an error in coding, so can the game makers? Idk. Seems a bit abstract. Otoh, if there are all kinds of bugs like this, maybe that is a sign that you need some help coding the thing (don't ask me, hire someone experienced please).

  1. The game should be fun. If you basically spend 30 game weeks crying because it is so poorly put together, then, I think that is maybe some kind of basic litmus test that it has failed on some level.

  2. I will add more tips if I can think of them. TBH probably spent too muc =h time on that post, but, think of it as an attempt to do some free help if some random person reads this which I'm sure no one will.

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