Could I request that you do their video on powercreep? I always felt that it was pretty good but I'm a layman when it comes to game design so I would love to hear the other side.
Sure, but even with the princess Bowsette staring down at you with the hunger of cock in her eyes, no need to treat me like royalty.
Ah, 2012. Fine vintage. As a general rule, their very early stuff from what i remember is not all that bad, my memory may deceive me, but i for a while suspected they had someone ghost writing for them.
Up to ~50 second mark, i have nothing to gripe about. Perfectly functional explanation of power creep and the state of gaming at that point in time.
Then they start about World of Warcraft. That's not... powercreep. It's raising the level cap. Of course higher level items have considerably higher stats in their itemization, you get to stumble onto this fact time and time again when leveling in the game, and literally anyone playing it would've understood it as the norm.
1:07 Yes, it's a natural part of the design 1:09 No, you don't have to separate them. This ain't the drinking fountain.
He continues to waffle on about how people get better at making the levels for the game, and this is absolutely true... only it has nothing at all to do with power creep.
Around 1:30 mark he says that there is never enough time in gaming to do their job, and that's true for basically anyone who isn't an artist for vidya games. Artists have loads of time, and they use that time often to iterate on their own designs and stylistic choices. That's why vidya industry in general is such an attractive job for artists, well that and avoiding the starving artist trope.
Then he says about the stupidest fucking thing in their videos for a long time. "Sometimes it's very easy as a designer to say, if i gave the players better loot or more exp for generally the same experience, they'll be happy". Literally no fucking self-repsecting game designer on the planet would stoop down to this, maybe Portnow would, but he has never worked on a game in his life, so...
Surprisingly, after a borderline retarded statement, it's followed by a perfectly sapient explanation on the problems of power creep. This is a rollercoaster of emotions. Fuck me.
Literally don't know anything about mobile games other than that for the most part they're cancer, usually double the cancer if Zynga gets anywhere near them, so i'll skip their example, other than for the point that this continues with a perfectly reasonable explanation of TCG/CCG playerbase and what they want.
Then back to the jolly old idiocy. World of Warcraft has no power creep. No player of world of warcraft, no matter how decked in high level dungeon gear is going to throw in the towel for the sole reason that their equipment is now outdated. They understand that a new expansion means new levels and new content. Okay. It has been a long-ass time since i played WoW, my last raids were somewhere around Wrath of the Lich King where basically the entire old guard of the playerbase quit because the raid content was inexcusably shit for the majority of the time, but at least back then, heroic just meant a more difficult variant of the dungeon or raid.
3:43 Wildly accusational statement made with no examples and no reasoning behind it. Should we just take it at face value? Gladly, claims made with no evidence can be thrown out the same way.
Their example of their made up term of "incomparables" is... pretty retarded. Both are clearly combat abilities and have an effect on movement, positioning, or lack of thereof. You can easily determine which ability is better, you don't need to debate with anyone. I'll toss an example, let's put these in Super Mario Bros. Would you rather be able to teleport forward a short distance, or stun an enemy for 1 second? Every fucking person ever would take the teleport, and for good reason.
LoL with "over 90 champions" ahh, the good days of S1-S2, and my beloved AP asshole Master Yi. "Some of the most powerful champions in the game were the first they ever built", cut to rammus, which was generally a really, really weak champ before his rework, but i still have to give the point, since Singed is a fucking beast. As for the power creep, it's in the items, masteries and sometimes new champions on release, which are then often toned down. If you put in items from nowadays into 2012's LoL it would break the game much like it has today.
They keep referencing WoW as if it was some sort of golden goose example... Yeah, you can "create a lot more of this made-up term", but when you do, you're left with a game that's no longer the game we started with. Imagine giving Mario a fucking gun. It's incomparable to jumping, but that doesn't mean it's not power creep so it's OK! How about throw Exodia into Magic: The Gathering, why the fuck not?
5:32 Oh shit no, scripting, the bane of video game developers anywhere. It's so hard to do, we must just adjust the numbers! "A very complex web of interacting numbers and flags", okay, i laughed. I laughed real fucking hard. Do they have any idea what a flag is in programming terms? Jesus H christ. "Always more skill based, which is what you want when designing" Well, we have confirmation, walking simulators and gone home are shit games with shit designers. 10/10 video.
5:45 Oh no. Nonono. You don't want to get me started with MTG. Surprisingly, they avoid the first kneejerk triggering by making a relatively accurate show of the issues in the design process of MTG and games like it. Though i wouldn't call Type 2 or blocks any sort of power creep prevention. They're rolling around with 30,000 cards. It's humanly impossible to balance all that shit with the Type 1, Legacy being the luck based mess that it is. In fact, in MTG you'll find the most powerful cards by far are in the early sets, so if they refer to MTG in any way, they should refer to backwards power creep. "1 mana for decent creature with no abilities" what the shit? Did they play the basic entry level sets or something? This is a card from 2007.
Yeah, the legacy servers of EQ were a great idea, but it has... little to nothing to do with power creep. Are you gonna say that WoW has poor design because you shouldn't take a level 60 raid group into Deadmines or something?
That was moderately painful, and about as fast and loose with everything as i expected from them. About a minute to two of sapient views with the rest being absolute trash.
And now to try and get rid of this wonderful sensation.
Hella late edit: I can give my counterpoints for this one, but i can't go for full on rebuttal or refutation since a lot of what they say is just tossed in without evidence or as an opinion. At least they were stupid enough with the MT:G example and "incomparable" mechanics examples where i can give very easy examples showing their incompetence and ignorance.
