Snowmam melting tomorrow and there goes our entire town economy unless i can build another
ice series furniture isn’t GOOD but it selling for 8888 bells definitely is good
the thing with New Horizons is they were like “we will give the player superpowers so they can design their island exactly how they want, and use seasonal events to entice people to keep playing” and this simply isn’t as good of a game design as an actual player/town growth arc
@Lady Diorama maker disguised as a life sim
@coriander see the thing is i really enjoyed Happy Home Designer for the 3DS, i just think it was a mistake to try to combine them into the same game
@Lady Yeah
Yeah
I loved HHD and the NH DLC that was just HHD again but both are distinct enough that they felt like their own type thing
@coriander same issue as with pokémon and zelda imo; 2020s are all about maximizing “player agency” at the expense of actually good game design
@coriander sandbox games definitely opened some questions about how much structure games really need and whether the restrictions placed on players were really necessary, and i get that right now we are in a period of experimentation where they’re figuring out what happens if they just let players do whatever they want
but i hope they learn some lessons from it and realize that yeah actually game design has its place and not every idea they’ve tried recently has been a good one, even when press and initial impressions are awestruck “wow i can do so much now!”
@Lady Yeah it's like the classic thing about limitations breeding creativity
Sure you CAN do so much but WILL you? Or would you rather have narrowly-defined systems governing your play?
@coriander but this depends on publishers valuing games as art, and it’s a bit dicey given that games that let the player just do whatever are bigger hits with both casual gamers and streamers—and honestly there’s a place for that: game spaces as stages for players to enact their own stories for themselves or for viewers on a stream—but it’s very much in tension with games as intentionally crafted experiences and i don’t want it to be all that games become
@Lady @coriander i've been meaning to play the original deus ex sometime but i know enough about it to note that even as a very sandbox oriented game, it is extremely structured; the game is literally sectioned off into individual levels purrogressed through linearly, something current nintendo sandbox design would never do
@Lady God yeah you nailed it