Good article. Touches on a lot of design problems I wish more people (specially developers) were aware of.
However I disagree with you on the matter of the "leaked experience". For me, that's the best way to handle benched character growth. Without it, most games just become a matter of picking a main party and sticking with it, as trying to level all characters equally becomes both grindy/slow and ineffective (since you can only use X characters at once, is it not better to have X characters at level 30 instead of ALL characters at level 20?). It also means that the player only needs to take in account the situation they're facing to deciding who to use, instead of being coerced into bring characters ineffective characters just so they can catch up to the rest.
Ultimately if it's a matter of making sure players have to use everyone available, the best way to do it is by actually making the game require the player to swap around units to be able to overcome challenges. After all, why would I not just use my bread and butter team for the entire game if there's not a single battle which they can't beat?
On Games & Bad Design
in Hacking & Modding
Posted · Report reply
Good article. Touches on a lot of design problems I wish more people (specially developers) were aware of.
However I disagree with you on the matter of the "leaked experience". For me, that's the best way to handle benched character growth. Without it, most games just become a matter of picking a main party and sticking with it, as trying to level all characters equally becomes both grindy/slow and ineffective (since you can only use X characters at once, is it not better to have X characters at level 30 instead of ALL characters at level 20?). It also means that the player only needs to take in account the situation they're facing to deciding who to use, instead of being coerced into bring characters ineffective characters just so they can catch up to the rest.
Ultimately if it's a matter of making sure players have to use everyone available, the best way to do it is by actually making the game require the player to swap around units to be able to overcome challenges. After all, why would I not just use my bread and butter team for the entire game if there's not a single battle which they can't beat?