this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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The issue from a design perspective is that many players have a tendency to optimise the fun out of the games they play. Meaning that if there is a fun thing to do that you carefully made for them to enjoy but there's an unfun thing to do that wasn't the point but is a slightly more effective strategy, many players will find themselves drawn to do the unfun thing and hate playing the game, whereas if they had only had the option to do the fun thing, they would have done, wouldn't have cared in the slightest about the lack of a hypothetical better strategy not existing and loved the time they spent with the game.
Good game design always has to meet people where they are and attempt to ensure they have a great experience with the game irrespective of how they might intuitively approach it.
So... Not having ways for players to optimise all the fun out of their own experience is an important thing to consider.
I'm this person and god do I wish I wasn't, sometimes. So many games have been way less interesting than they could've been for me because for me, fun is learning to play the game well. I'm not sure what frustrates me more, the way people who don't have that attitude say "I play games to have fun" as if I don't, or me looking at the recent LoZ games as failures design-wise because they're too easy to cheese.
I definitely lean this way too, though I've become better able to step away from that mindset in games I want to enjoy without it.
I think part of what has helped for me is, having an awareness of that tendency, I now try to actively feed or restrict it.
IE, I play a lot of games where that is the intended fun experience. Stuff like Magnum Opus (or any Zachtronic's title), Slay the Spire (or other roguelikes), Overwatch (or other competitive games) are all designed from the ground up for the fun to be in playing the game at the highest level of execution possible (some more mechanically others more intellectually.) I try to make sure I'm playing something like that if I feel like I'm at all likely to want to scratch that optimisation itch with that gaming session.
Otherwise, when playing games where that isn't really the point, I find it easier to engage with the intended experience knowing that if I want to do the optimisation thing I could switch to something that is much more satisfying for that, but I also try to optimise how well I do the thing the game wants. If it's a roleplaying game, I might try to challenge myself to most perfectly do as the character would actually do, rather than what I might do, or what the mechanics of the game might incentivise me to do. Often that can actually lead to more challenging gameplay too as you are restricting yourself to making the less mechanically optimal choices because you've challenged yourself to only do so where it aligns with the character.
Diablo 4 was a perfect example of this. People were optimising their run to the end then complaining about a lack of content within a week. Then there's people like me who spent a good 60 hours already with plenty of stuff still to do as I'm enjoying my journey.
One of the more important skills of good game design is to understand that whenever your players are complaining about something, there is something wrong that you need to identify and address whilst also recognising that it's rarely the thing the players think is what's wrong (as they just see the negative end result) and that they tend to express those complaints as demands for the solution they think is best to what they think the problem is.
In this case players are yelling at Blizzard "There's not enough content!" when in fact, as you've observed, there actually is plenty of content, it's just (seemingly, I've not actually played it myself to say for sure first hand) that Blizzard made it too easy to optimise your way past all of that content as a minor inconvenience on your way to, uh, nothing.
The answer to the problem is twofold. One you need to plug those holes in your balance so players are no longer incentivised to optimise their way past actually playing and enjoying your game (now I talk about it I think I vaguely remember reading an article that Blizzard are doing exactly that and having a hard time cleanly pitching the benefits of it to the player-base, which is why you also need to.) Two, try to put the horse back into the stable by now, sadly, actually having to create the end game content that players have bursted their way through to because your game design unintentionally promised it would be there (or just write those players off as a lost cause. Which seems like a dreadful idea as they are the ones who were the most passionate early buyers of your product...)
Alternatively... If they'd caught these issues before release (which is often, though not always, a matter of giving the developers and designers the resources to do so) they could simply have caught those issues of optimal builds being too powerful for the content and adjusted either or both to be a better match and ended up with a title that players liked more than they will like the harder to make version Blizzard now needs to turn Diablo 4 into (not to mention, that the work they need to do to introduce worthwhile end-game content could have just gone to a paid expansion for their more well regarded release instead.)
But then the Bobby Kotick's of the world are boastfully proud of their complete inability/unwillingness to think about the development of their games in that way so here we are...