I love Hell. I love the imagery over the last 2 thousand years, I especially love the imagery from artists like Barlowe who’s Inferno art book managed to provide a very detailed, surreal view of hell that acted almost like postcards of someone having visited the space. I’m a sucker for anything allegorical of the sulphuric side of things: Constantine was a winner just by the theme alone; I have fond memories of watching Hellraiser as a nerdy highschool kid. I had an entire period in my artistic life, where all my themes in photography and art were about hell, and it lasted almost 10 years. I. Love. Hell.
And I love God of War. I love the puzzles, love the combat, love the intensity and love the over the top gore.
But I hate careless game design. And while Dante’s Inferno doesn’t have a lot of that and I’ve been enjoying the fuck out of it for a while now, at one specific moment they got careless and pulled you out of the game; made you realize that you’re just playing a God of War knock-off, with almost no story or character progression. And you ask yourself as you sit there in your sweats, stuck in your house in a cold northern winter that won’t end: Why are you playing this again?
Take last night. I’m playing the Greed layer of Hell. I’ve just managed to skip over a jumping puzzle and fend off waves of enemies. I have no save at this point.
The idea is to pull a lever to pull a lever to pull that first lever so that you can run, jump twice, go on the lowering platform and get back up to the top doors before the doors close on you and you have to do it again. If you touch any of the blades that are lowering while you’re doing this, you die. Simple as that. I tried this 15 times with different variations, but always missed one part of the timing mechanic. After the 15th time I punched the controller and turned everything off.
Here are the underlying problems with this shit.
- No Save: I just killed waves upon waves of enemies and while I do get a ‘restart point’ if I turn it off in frustration, like I did, I’ll have to start at my previous save point.
NOTE TO FELLOW DEVELOPERS: Stop being lazy and using save points to make your game more “challenging”. - Redundant Redundant Redundant: I have to pull a lever to pull a lever to pull that first lever. And if I fail, WHICH I WILL, I do it again.
- One shot kill: after pulling these levers I have to try and make it under the blade that is slowly falling down. If I don’t, I die immediately.
- Time Mechanic: A time mechanic is fine, but a time mechanic that makes me have to do all of the above again is not. I managed to pull the lever to pull the lever to pull the lever, to double jump under the blade before it killed me, got on the platform, but by the time I got to the door, the door was closed and I had to do it all again!
- Cone of Error, how small it is: I need to be exact, and with a response system that isn’t I can’t be as exact as they want me to be.
Listen. I’m not saying make games uber easy, I’m saying design for your PLAYER, not for you. Too many times in games I’ve made and played I’ve seen designers make game levels for what they find fun. But listen bub, you’re playing the level 20 times a day. Your average player is going to play this once.
Remember Cel Damage? I worked on that game. We balanced that game for us, new game developers on a new platform with one QA guy. And to quote American McGee when I met him at GDC after we released that game “You made that game too fucking hard!”
And we did. Because we made the game for us: developers who played the game 20 times a day. And for that we got ridden hard in reviews. For that, we sucked.
When you make a level you have to say to yourself: besides what would be cool, and visually interesting, what would make this fun. And 9.99 times out of 10 that will not be to punish your player. And that’s what this mechanic is doing in Dante’s Inferno. It is punishing the player for not playing EXACTLY the way the developer did. The cone of error is so narrow that the player MUST play it exactly how the developer played it, and this only leads to the 10th ring of hell: frustration. And my controller thrown against the wall.
