Great and Wasted Game Design Ideas

Posted in Features, Gaming by Aaron, November 3, 2010 at 11:27 am | 803 views, 17 comments

Gaming, like any other medium, is very genre focused. You have your RPGs, your sports games, your first-person shooters, etc. And by-and-large, we’ve been playing the same games for years, usually with only incremental improvements, such as improved AI or the ability to wield two weapons as once, or small changes to the control scheme.

Every once and a while, however, a developer will toss something new into their game, which will change the genre forever, create an entirely new type of video game or survive as a solid idea that’s implemented in other games as well.

Such as the concept that the joystick could be used to perform actions other than movement, like attacking or controlling a hockey stick.

Other ideas like context-sensitive commands or quick-time events have had far reaching effects.

But not every great idea gets picked up to become a gaming convention.

I present to you a few ideas that I would liked to have seen reach into other games. They may not be as huge as the ideas above, but they were pretty damn cool, and it would have been nice to see them implementing in more than just one or a small handful of games.

We’ve seen selective leveling in games before. Most action-adventure games have to gaining new abilities and power-ups as you progress further in the plot (Metroid immediately comes to mind).

But when you enter the genre of RPGs, most gamers steel themselves for the inevitable grind. It’s when the game essentially comes to a standstill. You grab your party and hunt monsters to gain experience and level up your characters. It pads out game length and is necessary to face to the challenges ahead, but man is it boring.

The developers at Square decided to do away with this by only having major level gains after a boss battle. Minor monster battles only offered incremental ability gains.

This system insured that you were always the appropriate level for the next part of the game, and it kept the plot moving at a good pace.

Chrono Cross had a number of innovative ideas (such as the ability to run away from any battle, even the final boss fight), but being an avid RPG gamer, I have to say I’m sick of the grind. The leveling system is one that should have become a standard in modern RPGs.

Now this was a cool idea. Every time you attacked an enemy with your sword, you would hear a musical note. As you strung together a combo, the notes built into a short melody.

The concept was to make battles more intense. It was a novel idea, but not exactly when comes immediately to mind when gamers think Wind Waker.

But think of how it could have grown if more developers tried their hand at it? Integration into actual game music and themes, rises and falls in the score as you battled, making even the most mundane enemies seem that much more exciting to fight.

Every now and then we do see ideas like this pop up, but most developers restrict it scripted events – which is great, but achieves a different effect.

Yes, another RPG. But it’s a genre that hasn’t strayed very far from its roots.

Bloodlines was like many open-ended games, such as Fable or Fallout. You’re presented with a number of choices to approach any situation. You can talk your way through, go the stealthy approach or burst in, guns blazing.

The trouble with most of the games is that you get a higher reward for just killing everything in sight. More experience points are giving for every body on the floor, in addition to your experience reward for completing the quest.

Bloodlines, like the Vampire board game, only gave experience points for completing a quest, no matter how many thugs you took down to finish it.

It allowed true roleplaying. All those points you spent in charisma didn’t feel like a waste down the road and it encouraged gamers to approach quests in new ways. I would have liked to see the system in new games, such as the recent Fallout: New Vegas.

To contact the author of this post: aaron.chatha@wildgunmen.com