by Kenneth Chen | Feb 16, 2017 | Kenneth on Games
Now that every single game has parkour, it’s hard to appreciate how innovative the original Mirror’s Edge was. The designers had to break the ingrained assumption that enemies are meant to be defeated, and instead incentivize players to run away while somehow making them feel badass and powerful for doing so. When you encounter hostile cops for the first time, the level uses several creative tricks that nudge players to play the game differently than they would play any other game.
by Kenneth Chen | Feb 9, 2017 | Kenneth on Games
Fire Emblem Heroes isn’t the first maliciously monetized mobile game to have rerolling, and it certainly won’t be the last. Like other “gacha” games, you spend in-game currency to get a random character for your team. Some characters are objectively better than others, and when you start the game for the first time you get a large chunk of these currencies. This results in the phenomenon of rerolling, where people will uninstall the game and constantly retry their first time until they get a very powerful hero. Why would a game designer ever want such a thing?
