
Why Retro Rules - jsnell
http://www.explorminate.com/#!Why-Retro-Rules/c15kj/209B957C-CFA4-41C7-B83A-B3C81576750D
======
SwellJoe
Interesting that "imbalanced" and "unfair" have come up a couple of times in
the past couple of days in game discussions on HN. I'm thinking of this
article about Jeff Vogel: [http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/17/the-original-
indie-dev-how...](http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/17/the-original-indie-dev-
how-one-man-made-22-games-in-22-years-mostly-from-his-basement/2/) as well as
a recent discussion of NetHack and it's infamous YASD.

Sometimes, games being capricious is exactly the right thing. Though I find it
frustrating when I feel like a game is "cheating" (like other Civs science
advancing at a much higher rate than mine in Civilization games). There's some
kind of balance in doing imbalance right. It maybe needs to go both ways...bad
things and good things need to happen in surprising ways.

I haven't spent a _whole_ lot of time thinking about game design, and the only
games I've ever actually made were for the C64 and Apple II nearly 30 years
ago, but reading this, and the article about Jeff Vogel's games, and thinking
about the kinds of games I play forever...Nethack, Civ (including older Civs
now and then). They are games that can be vicious and shocking in their lack
of concern for the player. I dunno what that means about me or about game
design. But, I kinda want to play some Nethack now.

~~~
JetSetWilly
Many modern games are so meticulously balanced, that it makes decisions seem
pointless. Compare nethack, to dungeon crawl stone soup. In DCSS everything is
so carefully balanced, that you can choose A with caveats or choose B with
caveats and it amounts to the same. Choose heavy armour, and have less
agility? Or light armour and more agility? Who cares, your overall impact is
the same. By trying to get rid of "no-brainer" decisions, they have made the
decisions that you do make seem meaningless. Nethack by contrast, could be
completely imbalanced but so much more atmospheric and fun to play as a
result.

DCSS tried to be like chess, nethack feels more like an actual place that
might exist without the player.

This also applies to modern 4X games, like endless space. Perhaps that is one
reason for the success of Dwarf Fortress, you definitely get the feeling that
the player is an afterthought - right down to the very UI, the game hates you.

------
DevFactor
It's important to also note, that retro designs where quite frankly a lot more
simple than modern designs. One of our inspirations for
[http://rivalz.io/](http://rivalz.io/) was the Mac OS 1 (1984) because it
easily organized all of the features you wanted, without any extras or bloat.

Today's design is so superficial, that a large chunk of applications/games/ui
is just fluff and sometimes distracts from the main experience.

------
fredsanford
explorminate.com: This has to be the most poorly designed website I've ever
visited outside of some one off hobbyist crap and random AOL properties...

