In his spare time these days, Jester is always thinking about a problem.

This is a very acute question, and in the future, it is a question that both game enthusiasts, players, and game designers are considering.

Of course, it's more about the player's consideration.

That is, do you play a game that you find fun, or do you play a game that is called 'very hot'?

It seems that this question is a bit contradictory, could a 'very hot' game be a game that is not fun? If he's not fun, how can he be 'hot'? Since there are so many players playing, it means that he is really fun.

This question actually involves the question of what is meant by good fun.

It's a very personal thing.

Everyone has a different definition of fun, just like everyone has a different definition of good - Europeans like to eat stinky cheese, but they may not like to eat stinky tofu, and the reverse is true for domestic people, domestic people like to eat animal offal, and Europeans and Americans may find this thing very disgusting......

There are many such examples, that is, for the taste of this thing, people in each place are completely different, and even specific to each person, for example, Xiao Ming likes to eat spicy, and Xiao Wang hates spicy food - it is also different.

The evaluation of whether a game is fun or not is very similar to this kind of 'taste', and everyone's judgment criteria for 'taste' are also different.

This game and your taste, you think this game is really fun, but this game is not to your taste, then you will think this game is not fun? There is no game that can suit anyone's taste, and the gameplay of the "Superhorse" series beats other games around the world, but there are also quite a few people who don't think this bouncing mushroom game is any fun.

Diablo 2 pioneered a new way to play ARPG. And laid a model for the development of MMORPG, but this way of brushing the game can not be loved by everyone.

So even if the "Fallout" series is good, even if it is a masterpiece like "Fallout: New Vegas", many people don't think about him.

Not to mention GTA5, a game that Jester didn't really like at the time.

Some people won't like these popular games. Not to mention those niche games with fewer gamers? But these games also have their supporters, isn't it because they are not popular enough, so they are not fun?

"The goal of the game."

After thinking about it for a while, Jester still mentally added such a note to this question - because without such a note, the proposition of the so-called fun game or the very popular game is a false proposition with no discussion value.

Especially for designers.

When designers design games, they naturally want to make a game fun and whether it is fun or not is a personal experience. It's still a psychological feeling, which can be analyzed and discussed with psychological concepts and methods, which is why great game designers are masters of psychology.

A designer who doesn't know what the player is thinking about is not likely to succeed.

Moreover, taking Mars Entertainment as an example, the premise of being a designer is that you must be an avid game lover, which is not a reference condition. It's a must.

When they design a game, they will definitely use their own ideas as a reference, even sometimes. These references can also play a decisive role.

For example, if I want to develop an ACT game, then I need to consider the preferences of ACT game lovers, not the preferences of RPG game lovers. I'm going to design an FPS game, and I need to think about the preferences of FPS game lovers, not the preferences of A~VG game lovers.

This is analyzed from the perspective of the designer's approach to designing the game.

There are too many uncertainties in the gameplay to be prepared for the target group, and not to make the players, that is, your target group, like your gameplay. The risk is too high, in short, the odds of failure are too high.

When I think of this, Jester still can't help but think of the game "Heroes of the Storm", this game is simply a collection of failed games, and analyzing why this game failed can make many designers take a lot of detours when designing games, just like analyzing the original version of "Diablo 3" to the expansion "Scythe of the Soul" can make a game designer learn a lot.

However, the difference between the two games is significant.

"Diablo 3" is a game, no matter how bad the evaluation of the original version is, it is compared to "Diablo 2", in essence, this game is not so bad, at least the experience of a week is unparalleled, but in fact, this game only made a fatal mistake in two aspects, the first point is how to 'brush' on the mistake, in the final analysis, the reason for this mistake is that there was a major mistake in the design of the equipment.

The second point is that farming equipment is far less efficient than the auction house, so that the auction house completely destroys the game experience, players are here to play the game, not to play the auction house - the equipment that I have worked so hard to brush out, go to the auction to see, only need to spend a little money to buy better, so why do I continue to farm equipment?

And what is the core gameplay of Dark?

Isn't it just brushing up on equipment?

But when the design team was designing the game, the core of the gameplay was not changed, that is, this is a 'brush' game, and their changes in ROS only did two things in the final analysis, the first thing was to change how to let players brush, and the second thing was to abolish the auction house.

The biggest difference between Diablo 2 and the original Diablo 3 is that Diablo 2 can make players feel strong by brushing equipment, and then pursue the strongest, while the original Diablo 3 can't do this.

So. What they do in ROS is to re-enable players to become stronger by farming, and then pursue stronger.

However, this change is a bit overkill - because it makes players feel that they are too strong, so strong that they feel like they are wasting their time when they are farming. This is why a group of locusts always come to brush at the beginning of the season, and after a week to a month, they retreat like locusts, and the way to change it is very simple, that is, to restore the Rune Language system of Diablo 2.

It's just a variant of gear, but it's really a wonderful, incomparably attractive thing.

The current fast food farming method is equivalent to Diablo 2's KM, which allows players to get a work outfit, and then Rune Words is the kind of thing that can make players interested in brushing down and making themselves stronger.

But it's a pity. Blizzard is unlikely to reload Runeword.

Even though players all over the world don't understand why Runewords is so perfect, so wonderful, and so recognizable to a system that players identify with, they don't adopt it—and not only do they don't adopt it, but they can't design anything that is stronger than this, not to mention something that is stronger than this, or even something that they don't even have. It's really intriguing, is it so difficult to admit that you are not as good as your predecessors?

Isn't the shift in ROS proof of this? You are indeed not as much as your predecessors.

Of course. By analyzing the improvement process of Diablo 3, we can analyze the gains and losses of many design teams in the process of designing the game, which is really like a classic change like a textbook, and the design team of Diablo 3 is really excellent.

However, there is a key point in this, and that is that there is no difference in the gameplay of Diablo 3 and Diablo 2 in nature.

But Heroes of the Storm is a completely different game. HE'S DIFFERENT, AS JESTER HAS ALREADY THOUGHT ABOUT BEFORE, THAT IS, HIS TARGET GROUP IS EXTREMELY MISMATCHED WITH THE GAMEPLAY HE DESIGNED - DIABLO 3 DOESN'T HAVE THAT CONCERN, BECAUSE THEY MAKE A DIABLOLIKE GAME WITH A VERY CLEAR PLAYER BASE.

And what about the game Heroes of the Storm?

What is his goal? It is the players of the push tower game, and these players have spent ten years to complete the design and gameplay of this type of game. These gameplay methods are not done by any one game company or designer alone, although he uses many of the settings in WAR3, although he has the spark of personal wisdom of Ice Frog and many other designers.

But at the end of the day, it's a full-fledged game system that comes together from the ideas of countless players.

Heroes of the Storm is a game aimed at these players, players who are used to this mature game system, but Heroes of the Storm has been designed without considering what kind of game mode these players prefer. Instead, he came up with something that he thought was C0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000L in the hope that players would accept their set of things.

The results speak for themselves.

If you don't care about what players like, then players will also be dismissive of what you think.

BUT IT NEEDS TO BE NOTED HERE THAT IT'S NOT THAT BLIZZARD ITSELF CAME UP WITH SOMETHING VERY COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

If this game came out five years, or even three years ago.

None of the situation will be so embarrassing.

What's the fundamental drawback of this game? That is, the design team forcibly thinks that this is a game that can only be played by five people, and all their designs are designed around this one idea, and completely ignore that although the game is carried out in teams of five people, but the participation in the game is based on one player, this game infinitely weakens the role of the individual, and infinitely improves the role of the team.

Is this kind of revolutionizing this kind of tower pushing game a game, if you don't think about other things, will it succeed?

There is no doubt that it was a success, and it was fun to play the game according to the designer's gameplay, and if you look at the Heroes of the Storm competition, you can see that the game is very intense and very nice to watch when played by two excellent and unified teams, but the problem is that players don't recognize this game mode.

Compared with this drawback, the so-called matching and disconnection of the above problems is simply not worth mentioning.

THAT'S WHY JESTER THINKS THAT THIS GAME IS A COLLECTION OF FAILED GAMES, BECAUSE FROM THE VERY BEGINNING, THE DESIGN TEAM WAS RIGID AND INSISTENT ON GOING THEIR OWN WAY, AND DIDN'T WANT TO LISTEN TO WHAT THEY THOUGHT THE TARGET GROUP WANTED TO PLAY, WHETHER IT WAS THE KIND OF GAME THEY WANTED TO PLAY - ESPECIALLY AFTER THE BETA TEST, AND THE DISGUSTING FACE OF 'THINKING I'M RIGHT' AFTER SO MUCH DISGRUNTLED FEEDBACK.

This is simply a typical example that all design teams should be wary of.

After the initial bad reviews of "Diablo 3", how did the team deal with it? First of all, as the director of "Diablo 3", Blizzard legend Rob. Pardo resigned suddenly, after which Jaylengo, who was the main designer of Diablo 3, was transferred out of the development team.

And what about Heroes of the Storm?

The bald guy is still the director of the game, still promoting his philosophy at the carnival press conference, still making some minor changes, and not willing to look directly at the core problem of the game - either make the game a single player think he is great, or completely abandon the individual player and completely turn to the team.

The first is to completely deny their own design philosophy, which is of course impossible, and the second is to make the design team unwilling, because it means that they have irreconcilable mistakes in the design from the beginning, and they will not do it.

Predictably, the game is not likely to be reborn for at least a short period of time.

Because he doesn't have the courage to start over again like the Diablo 3 design team at the beginning, to be honest, if it was Blizzard more than ten years ago, "Heroes of the Storm" would have been redone a long time ago.

This kind of game is enough to teach many, many designers not to repeat the mistakes of the past like a textbook of mistakes.

But again, Heroes of the Storm is just an anachronistic game, not a bad game, if you have a good team, this game will play very orderly and very refreshing, and his mistake is only in the fact that the target group does not coincide with the height of the gameplay, not in the game itself. (To be continued......)