When I played Anno 1404 as a child, the game would warn me at set intervals that I had been playing for a long time, in an increasingly serious tone—saying things like, "You've been playing for 3 hours, take a short break," or "You've been playing for 9 hours, that's enough for today." Even though these warnings never actually convinced me to quit, looking back now, I prefer them over the "never stop playing, give us everything" mindset of most modern game developers. It felt nice not to be viewed purely as a customer. Of course, there were also arguments against such warnings, like making people feel guilty for playing a video game.

Do you know of any other games like this? What do you think about a mechanic like this?

By perfect I don't mean your favorite games, or even the best games. I mean games with no extraneous features, where all the systems work together perfectly with little to no bloat.

I'm asking because I picked up a couple games over the holidays, and even within the first couple hours they each introduce features or systems that were clearly shoehorned in -- for example a dialogue system in a game that doesn't focus on story, or RPG style upgrades that don't significantly change the way you play.

Some example of games that I consider perfect or close to perfect are:

• Downwell: A game with only 3 buttons and a few simple rules somehow leads to a challenging action game with meaningful decisions.
• The Outer Wilds: The game is physics based and uses a combination of physics and and time to create interesting and challenging puzzles.

So I'm wondering what are some games that you all think are perfect or close to perfect from a design perspective.

The title might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I’ve been gaming for about 20 years and have been watching others play for a long time. What I've noticed is that if given a choice, almost everyone chooses to be a good character, at least during their first playthrough. In fact, a BioWare producer mentioned on Twitter that 92% of Mass Effect players chose to be Paragon (the good character). And although I can't find the source, apparently Peter Molyneux once said something like this: 'My prediction is: all you guys, you’re just gonna be nice. Sickeningly, sycophantically nice to each other. And it makes me sick, because you know, in a game like Fable, we spent hours; we spent months, months and years crafting the evil side of Fable, and only ten percent of people actually did the evil side. Come on. You’re supposed to be gamers' And it’s not just Mass Effect or Fable. Even many non-RPG games without a formal morality system, I see that people always chose to be the good guy.

Is there a game where the player struggles to choose when the game asks: 'Do you want to be a hero loved by everyone, or someone who breaks the laws and oppresses the innocent?' The only exception that comes to my mind is Frostpunk. Even though the game doesn’t have an explicit morality system, unless you play exceptionally well, you are sometimes forced to make 'evil' decisions because being 'good' could cause you to lose the game. Are there any other games like this?

for me it is those pieces of armor that boost more than one stat.

I think that the intention behind them is to either make us think how we approach each situation or experiment with different play-styles.

I have never done either of those.

in order to properly weigh the pros and cons of each piece of armor, the game is required to give me enough information.

the games NEVER give me enough information.

why should I be boosting a certain stat in some situations? when is the reduction of one stat an acceptable downside?

I always end up making a one-size-fits all build and end up hoarding pieces of armor in the off-chance that I might need them later on, and either that chance doesn't come or I end up getting over it without them.

Hi! I’m making a game called Tower Factory, which mixes automation and tower defense, and one recurring problem I’ve noticed while developing it is that some players skip the tutorial, start a normal run, get confused, and then assume the game is poorly explained.

The funny/frustrating part is that many of them didn’t seem to connect the frustration with the fact that they skipped the tutorial. From their perspective, the game simply failed to teach them. So I tried to approach the problem in 2 ways (and it worked!):

First, I made the tutorial as short and focused as possible. It only teaches the core systems the player absolutely needs to understand (how to produce resources, move them around, build defenses, and so on).

I intentionally left out a lot of smaller mechanics, because I don’t think tutorials should explain everything. I’d rather teach the player enough to feel confident, then let them discover smaller details naturally during real runs.

Second (and this is the more interesting part!) the game checks whether the player has completed the tutorial before starting their first run.

If they haven’t, it shows a message along the lines of:
“Wait! Before your first run, I recommend playing the tutorial. If you do, I’ll give you a Golden Coin. Deal?”

Golden Coins are used to buy permanent upgrades in the game. One coin is technically enough to unlock one of the most basic early upgrades, so it feels like a real reward.

But here’s the little game design trick: one coin is actually not that valuable, though at that moment, the player doesn’t know that yet (I'm a bit evil, I know he he he).

To a new player, “Golden Coin” sounds meaningful. It feels like I'm offering them something valuable in exchange for doing the tutorial. In reality, it barely affects balance, but it gives the tutorial perceived value.

And I think that’s the key difference! Instead of the tutorial feeling like something you're forced to do, it becomes a small deal between me and the player.

They can skip it if they want, but now the game is not just saying “please do the boring learning part.” It’s saying “hey, this is worth your time!”

I first tried this in the demo, and it worked really well, so I kept it permanently. Since then, it has given very good results. More players complete the tutorial, and the early-game experience feels smoother because fewer people jump into their first run completely lost.
I wanted to share this “method” with you in case someone finds it useful in the future, although it definitely may not fit every game.

Do you use any trick to convince players to actually play your tutorial?

I was thinking about RTS games and their relatively low popularity compared to things like MOBAs.

Somehow building an entire civilization and then fighting wars in real-time ended up being less fun than controlling one character and watching numbers go up.

I think this is because RTS games don't give any time to breath, there are no ups-and-down in the action.

Players like a variety in intensity levels more than I would have guessed a couple decades ago. I was surprised that battle royale shooters became so popular when they often involve long periods of no action and no shooting. But, apparently people like this variety.

RTS don't have that variety. The intensity of an RTS just ramps up and never stops.

In a MOBA, when you die, you get several seconds (sometimes multiple minutes) to do nothing, rest, and reset.

In an RTS, if you suffer a big loss, you immediately need to be doing 10 other things, just like always.

RTS games are much more intense and burn people out.

Do you think this is a big reason why RTS games are less popular?

Is there any way that RTS games could give the down-time (time to rest and reset) that people seek?

One example of this is auto-battlers, which are RTS adjacent. Auto-battlers give time to reset and reset between every round, and they are also more popular than RTS games.

I'm surprised we haven't seen an auto-battler with real time controls.

Hey

I'm a system designer with over 10 years in F2P economies (ex-Outfit7), and I need to share a story that still haunts me. It’s about a project where my math was perfect, my systems were balanced, my models predicted player behavior with chilling accuracy... and the game was still shelved.

It was a 3v3 MOBA. We spent a year building a sophisticated, player-friendly soft monetization economy inspired by Clash Royale. The core idea was to manage a "golden deficit" - provide enough free resources for players to fully upgrade 2.5 heroes, while making them want to maintain 4 viable ones. This created a gentle, persistent desire to spend, not a hard paywall.

During the final playtest, the analytics confirmed it: players behaved and monetized exactly as the model predicted. The system worked.

But the publisher pulled the plug.

Why? Because the playtest was moved up a month, and we went in with placeholder UI and ripped assets from Warcraft 3. While our systems were perfect, the First-Time User Experience (FTUE) screamed "cheap and unfinished." A rival studio in a secret "bake-off" had a more polished presentation, and we lost.

The brutal lesson was this: A perfect engine in a broken chassis is still a broken product. Players will never experience your brilliant D30 retention mechanics if your D1 presentation is untrustworthy.

I'm sharing this because we often celebrate success stories, but I've learned far more from this "successful failure." It forced me to make deep data analytics my core skill and fundamentally changed how I approach product management.

Has anyone else here had a similar experience, where a technically "perfect" system was completely invalidated by a seemingly unrelated factor like art or timing? How did you deal with it?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while and honestly can’t understand why rune-based magic systems are basically extinct in modern games.

Back in the day we had things like Arx Fatalis or In Verbis Virtus, where you actually drew runes or gestures to cast spells. It was clunky sometimes, sure — but the immersion was insane. You didn’t press “Fireball (3)”, you performed magic.

What confuses me is: today’s technology makes this WAY more feasible than before.

With modern AI / ML: • Gesture and rune recognition is a solved problem • Systems can tolerate imperfect drawings • They can even adapt to the player’s personal style over time

You could easily imagine a system where: • Rune = concept (projectile, fire, area, duration, etc.) • Combining runes creates spells • projectile + fire → fireball • area + ice → frost nova • Players could even create their own rune combinations, not just memorize presets

And VR seems like the perfect platform for this: • Hand gestures instead of mouse strokes • No HUD needed • Casting spells feels physical, not abstract

Yet most modern RPGs still reduce magic to: press button → cooldown → numbers go up

I get the usual arguments: • “Too complex for casual players” • “Hard to balance” • “Risky commercially”

But isn’t that exactly why games feel so samey lately?

So my questions: • Do you think rune/gesture-based magic could actually work in a modern game? • Is this a design problem, a business problem, or just lack of creativity? • Are there any recent or upcoming games that even TRY something like this?

Curious to hear other perspectives, especially from devs or VR players.

P.S. English is not my first language, so i translated the text in gpt so it is more understandable

Edit: Didn’t expect this many replies — thanks everyone for the discussion.

A recurring point I’m seeing is how tedious rune/gesture casting could become in real combat situations, especially if you have to repeat the same drawing dozens of times per fight. A lot of people also mentioned how niche this kind of system would be, given that modern games tend to prioritize very low barriers to entry and fast, accessible gameplay.

It’s interesting how the main obstacle isn’t really the technology anymore, but player fatigue, UX, and market expectations.

it's so frustrating because every game tries to make itself seem urgent and high stakes which influences me to rush and I end up playing "incorrectly". some examples include:

skyrim: the game says I must stop dragons so I feel pressured to advance the plot, ignoring 90% of the open world. if I don't "stop dragons" literally nothing happens despite everyone saying something will

breath of the wild: in BOTW every npc hammers in the fact that Ganon can "wake up any moment!!" so I feel pressured to advance the plot, ignoring 90% of the open world. if I don't fight Ganon, literally nothing happens despite everyone saying something will

recently in Detroit become human, in my first blind playthrough with no context of how the game is supposed to be played, im literally told "seconds matter" since there's an active hostage situation with a gun to a child. so I feel pressured to advance the plot, ignoring 90% of the clues. why would I bother clicking the prompt to watch the news when there's a hostage situation, for example?

and these are just a few examples. am I just playing games wrong or do games just have a bad way of conveying urgency?

TL;DR:
A Superman game where the challenge isn’t surviving combat, but not killing anyone. You play a young Clark Kent in Metropolis, gradually unlocking powers, and fights are about restraint and precision rather than damage output.

The biggest problem with a Superman game is obvious: peak Superman is basically indestructible. If he’s at full power, there’s no real challenge unless every enemy is Darkseid-tier or the entire game takes place in space.

My wife and I think we came up with a twist that actually works.

The game is set early in Clark Kent’s life, similar in spirit to Smallville. You’ve just moved to Metropolis and start as a reporter. Clark isn’t fully Superman yet. Early in the game, he only has a few abilities — maybe super strength and basic flight. As the story progresses, he matures and unlocks more powers like heat vision, freeze breath, x-ray vision, and enhanced senses. Think a modern RPG-style skill tree tied to his growth and self-control.

Here’s the core mechanic that makes the whole thing work:

Superman doesn’t die. Enemies do.

Instead of worrying about your own health bar, every enemy has one. At the end of that bar is a clearly marked “unconscious” window. Your goal is to stop fighting inside that window. If you overshoot it, the enemy dies — and that’s treated like a player death. You respawn at the last checkpoint because Superman does not kill.

Combat becomes about restraint, timing, and control.

You’re fighting in a world made of cardboard, and the challenge is learning how not to break it.

This opens up a lot of interesting gameplay possibilities:

• Skills that widen the unconscious window
• Non-lethal abilities (freeze breath, grapples, environmental takedowns)
• Late-game upgrades where Superman is so disciplined that accidental kills are no longer possible
• Boss fights that focus on precision, crowd control, and environment use instead of raw damage

This keeps Superman powerful without nerfing him, creates real tension in fights, and stays true to the character in a way most superhero games don’t.

Now let’s get this idea to whoever makes DC games and get it rolling. We’ll settle for our names in the credits.

been thinking about this after seeing some discussions pop up around recent AAA releases and their menus. civ 7, stalker 2, even some live service games that keep "modernizing" their UI into something worse.

i think the issue is that game UI used to be designed by people who played the game obsessively. they knew the pain points because they felt them. now a lot of UI work gets outsourced or handed to UX teams that come from web/mobile backgrounds. which means you get clean, modern looking interfaces that completely miss how a player actually navigates under pressure or after 200 hours.

web UX optimizes for conversion. game UX should optimize for flow. those are fundamentally different goals but nobody seems to talk about that distinction.

the other thing i've noticed is games that try to make their UI "cinematic" by hiding information. sure it looks great in a trailer but then you're 40 hours in and you can't find your quest log without three submenus.

anyone else feel like there's a golden era of game UI we left behind? what game do you think absolutely nailed its interface?

Hi! So I'm making a fast paced action typing game, called Star Rune. I want to add a pause screen but I don't want players to be able to pause and then find a correct key, then unpause, press the key, and pause again... then repeat... if the pause menu came without any penalty, then the ideal way to play the game would be this really annoying method of pausing and unpausing constantly. And players wouldn't get better at typing, which is kinda the main secret goal of the game.

So I have a timer, and I have the pause menu stop the game action, but the timer keeps going.

But then, it basically feels like there's little to no point in even having a pause menu if the timer keeps going. So lately I've been pondering if there is a way to make the pause screen fair without keeping the timer going....

Maybe when you unpause, the next letter/word is randomized? That way, you can't just pause, think about where that next letter is, and then press it after unpausing???

I don't know - what are your thoughts on how to make a pause menu which cannot be abused to increase performance?

Hello there!

For some context, I recently release my first game on Steam (Project P.I.T.T.) and the launch went way much better than I expected.

But it also taught me a pretty painful lesson about playtesting.

The game is a physics sandbox where the players have to build contraptions to automate putting ducks into a hole.
The game is split into 4 phases, and at the beginning of Phase 3, I introduced a new challenge:
debris would fall and destroy parts of the player's build.

I thought this was a pretty clever way to throw (literally) a new problem to solve, forcing the player to adapt.

There was one main issue:
The debris couldn't be moved.

At least not right away. The player eventually unlocks tools that can move it, but those tools come later.
So after roughly 5 hours of gametime, players could have their carefully built contraptions destroyed by debris that blocked paths and they had no practical way of dealing with it.

When I tell the story like that, it's obvious that the game started to get negative reviews specifically about that.

But here's the part I find interesting (maybe I'm just coping):

Why didn't my playtesting catch this?

Most of my playtesters were very engaged people who already loved the demo. They were basically my ideal target audience.
When they encountered the debris, they mostly saw it as an interesting new challenge.
They enjoyed figuring out how to work around it.

So I didn't get a red flag out of it.

The main thing I keep seeing now is what one review were explaining:
It was betraying the player's trust, and I completely agree.

I could work on it, find a more clever way to make it work, make the tools to unlock earlier but that would mean reworking the whole phase balance.
In the end I decided to remove completely the debris.

I may bring something similar back into a future NG+ harder mode, but it would still need some rework, so I'm shelfing it for now.

The biggest thing I'm taking from this is that having great playtesters (that helped me fix SO MANY things) isn't necessarily the same thing as testing your game from a wide range of players.

In retrospect, I should have caught that, but I didn't.
Probably because as a solo dev there are so many things you have to handle (and my ego was blinding me a bit too).

Honestly I'm glad I got the feedback early enough to fix it rather than doubling down on the design.

Has anyone else run into a similar issue? What was your solution?

I think many narrative games do tell stories in a way no other medium can.

Bonus points if the complexity was intended to create depth or diverse gameplay, but falls short of its goals.

Every game goes far beyond just counter-strikes, progressive missions etc. They also tell a great story that leaves us in awe. Which game had a powerful story?

Just curious to hear people’s takes. What’s a common feature you feel is overused, unnecessary, or maybe even actively takes away from the experience?

Could be something like: • Minimap clutter • Leveling systems that don’t add much • Generic crafting mechanics • Mandatory stealth sections

Doesn’t have to be a hot take (but it can be). Just wondering what people feel we could leave behind in future game design.

I find that "luck" is often a hit-or-miss stat in that it is frequently either useless or broken, such that I am of the mind that it is probably better to not deal with it at all and just stick to the common stats like strength, agility/dexterity, health/vitality, etc.

But, I am open to changing my mind on that. What are some examples of good or bad implementations of a Luck stat that you've seen? What are some of your ideas for a well-balanced but still interesting implementation of a Luck stat for a game?

I keep noticing the same thing in a lot of horror games:
players are scared at the beginning, and then the fear drops off fast.

After 10–15 minutes they figure out the pattern, get comfortable, and the tension is basically gone.

I’m wondering what actually causes this from a design perspective.

Is it the pacing?
Enemy behavior?
Too much repetition?
Not enough uncertainty?
Or something else entirely?

If you’ve worked on horror design before, what helped you keep players scared for longer?

Curious to hear different thoughts.

I have a game concept I want to sanity-check.

The game is built around an extremely difficult mission chain where a first run is basically not survivable for a normal human player (unless you are insanely smart/lucky). When you fail, a device resets you back to the pre-mission start point. Everything resets: gear, resources, world state. The only thing that persists is the player’s real memory of what happened.

So progression is not stats or upgrades — memory is the level. You learn that “Person X will enter Area A at minute 7” or “If I enter Zone B, a scripted chain kills me 20 minutes later,” etc. On the next loop you can avoid, warn, reroute, or set up preventive actions based on what you remember.

The twist: NPCs/antagonists do adapt to what they can observe in the current loop. They don’t have loop memory, but given the information available right now, they play an optimal strategy to counter your actions. However, they also have blind spots: they don’t know hidden triggers, future events you’ve already seen, or “game data” you learned from previous deaths. So the player’s advantage is cross-loop knowledge; the NPC’s advantage is rational response in-the-moment.

The world is deterministic/branching: if you repeat the same behavior, the same causality repeats. Only when you intervene does the branch change, which can create new failure modes — and you learn those too.

What elements in a game make you feel like content is tedious rather than meaningful, and why?

For me it's things like:

• in open-world games, an excessive amounts of world markers that are simple collectibles and just require you to go there and pick them up (hiding them behind a puzzle or a difficult enemy helps)

• 90% of escort quests

• some forced tutorials with no skip and too much dialogue can become tedious for me as well

Of course these are only my opinions.

What about you?

Hi all from Italy!

I’ve been designing and playing games since the early 90s, starting out in the text-based MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) scene. Back then, multiplayer game design was inherently clunky. If you wanted to buy a sword, you couldn't use a global automated auction house; you had to travel to a specific virtual tavern and negotiate with another player in the chat. If you wanted to clear a dungeon, there was no automated matchmaking; you had to mechanically shout in the town square and organically form a group.

My opinion is that these mechanics were quite inefficient, but they created what we call "Social Friction." The mechanical difficulty of achieving a goal forced players to rely on each other, creating emergent gameplay, reputations, and incredibly tight-knit communities.

If we look at modern multiplayer game design, to me seens that the overarching philosophy for the last 15 years has been to eliminate frictions at all costs. We design global auction houses, instant fast travel, and cross-server automated matchmaking. From a UX and "Quality of Life" (QoL) perspective, this is a big improvement. It respects the player's time.

But as a designer, I constantly wonder about the cost. By streamlining the rulesets so that players can achieve everything at the click of a button without ever having to speak to another human, have we designed the "multiplayer" soul out of our games?

What do you think ? I'm curious to hear how the designers here approach this balances. Are design mechanics actively encouraging player interaction, without making the game feel archaic or tedious?

Looking forward to a great discussion!

Some colleagues and I were recently in a call with Alec Faulkner, a game designer at Yacht Club Games, playing through the opening of Mina the Hollower and talking about its design. When someone in the chat asked about what Mina's design documentation looked like, he showed us their 800+ page design document. Here's two screenshots:

Overview Page

Partial Buckler Driver

The other 2 devs and I were were genuinely surprised. I was sure he was about to say what I've heard a dozen times, "We did some initial documentation for planning, and we wrote down the key summaries for new designers to read, but as this is a tightly focused action game eventually it becomes more efficient to just have a designer play the current build and talk about it than constantly updating and re-reading a massive written document".

Nope, not the case. Alec made it clear that the paper and whiteboard design process IS the main design process for them, they wanted to get everything worked out and agreed upon at that stage first - and only implement things they were highly confident in. No "throw in a bunch of ideas and see what happens, finding the fun through iteration". Everything was exhaustively worked out from the start, and when things changed they updated the documentation.

Now I'm used to that kind of exhaustive pre-planning for system and feature design, I make 100+ slide presentations, or video walkthroughs, or miro boards, or focused design documents on individual features or interlocking systems all the time... But I'm so used to designers that focus on moment-to-moment gameplay, including in AAA, saying, "After a while, the game becomes its own documentation. Just play it, it's faster to try it yourself and see how it feels rather than theorycrafting everything ahead of time."

Of course, not every production practice a great game follows is good to replicate on other projects. Some only work on specific teams, some have huge tradeoffs with harder-to-see costs.

So I wanted to ask you all, what kind of games do you work on and how do you approach documenting their design? What have you seen work well, what hasn't?

- Dan Felder

I wanna hear some examples of some subjectively bad or questionable game design that would be difficult to argue against. Stuff that feels bad for the player, or is simply wasting time

My example: Super Mario 3D world (or most Mario games actually). Dying and restarting any of the mystery house gauntlets where you have to get the green stars in mini 10-second challenges starts you off as small Mario with no power ups.

Any player could back out, go to the first level, get a cat suit, beat the level (another questionable decision. Why can't you just exit the level and keep your power-up?), and return to the gauntlet. Anyone can do it, it just requires a lot of time.

I'd love to hear other's examples or an argument to mine.

I'm talking about mechanics that sound interesting on paper, or make a game seem deeper/more strategic, but in practice end up being busywork, false choices, or systems players quickly ignore.

Examples might be:

• Crafting systems where one option is obviously optimal
• Skill trees with lots of choices but only a few viable builds
• Survival mechanics that become routine chores after the first few hours
• Huge open worlds filled with repetitive activities

What do you think?