Basically this
There are popular and unpopular trends, or choices that work against their intended purpose or that the creator didn't consider optimal, but the idea of universally bad design tends to be a homogenising force. This is why boring, low-difficulty open world survival craft with RPG elements is so popular these days - it's an amalgamation of trends that frustrate the least amount of people and lend easily to parasociality and monetisation.
I think procedural levels are boring as hell but they work well for games based on highly variable "runs", basically a way to slide into having 1 life without making zoomers whine about lives and continues.
It all depends on the button presses. That's right. Nothing else matters. The rhythm of the button presses and the variety of them determines how fun the level is.
Hold right and press B and Y now and then? Boring. You have to perfectly time everything like you're playing a song on the piano you have never played before? Frustrating. There needs to be a feeling of jazz in it, allowing you to improvise the clicks and clacks. Unless it's a game like Super Meat boy, which are like little playing short 5-10 second advertising jingles on the piano.
No, anon. A small jump will fail to clear the jump. You need a medium jump. In order to do a medium jump, you have to release the button during a 4 frame window between "small jump" and "big jump" (about 1/10th of a second). It's not hard because of knowledge, but because the timing for the jump is so strict.
Black person, stop acting like it's some frame perfect speedrunning maneuver, hundreds of thousands of kids, maybe millions, learned to clear that jump.
Examples of legitimately bad level design.
These ones are objective:
-Invisible walls. If the game devs couldn't put the effort into putting up some kind of a fence, a wall, a mountain, any kind of visual indicator.
-Poor geometry. Where the avatar drops through the floor, walks through walls, get stuck on objects.
-Broken mechanisms. Doors that don't work as intended, ramps, levers, elevators.
-Texture glitches. That patch of grass is actually hot lava that kills the player. That pool of water is actually a platform. That button you are supposed to press doesn't stand out in any way. That coffee cup you need to progress isn't visible.
Some subjective ones:
-Dead ends. Hallways that lead to nowhere, no items, no enemies, nothing to do but backtrack. No reward for exploration.
-Monster closets. Unlimited enemies spawning behind a door the player can't access.
-Beginners traps. That wall emits spikes and there is no visual indicator that it does. No skeletons, no holes in the wall, the only way to know is to die to it once then remember not to step there the next time.
-Locked doors. No visual indicator that the door can't be opened. Doors are interactive by nature, this leads to wasting time just trying all the doors. The player has a pocket full of grenades and is stopped in their tracks by a wooden door with a broken knob.
-Walled off areas. Areas that look like they should be playable but aren't. A fully modeled theme park just beyond a fence that you have no way of reaching. A fully modeled cruise ship that you can't interact with.
-Mirrors that don't work. Breaks immersion.
-Poor infrastructure. The shop that is visited numerous times in the game is in a tedious to reach area. The quest giver is in a place that is annoying to get to.
-Unflushable toilets. If a game doesn't have flushable toilets it's a bad game.
>Invisible walls.
If they come across really arbitrary, sure, but if a map designer put an invisible wall somewhere which the player wasn't expected to be able to reach, I think that's fine.
It should mean a boring level, or maybe a confusing one when its intent wasn't meant to be confusing. But nowadays people only use it meaning "this game filtered me and I'm blaming external factors for it".
This, good post. There is objectivity in level design and there is subjectivity in perception of levels. It all depends on the person's attitude or willingness to be fair or to be moronic. Take the mgs2 thread from earlier. Its not that the level design is bad, it's actually extremely well done and detailed, but some people don't like the locale or aesthetic. This is where the subjectivity comes into play. Now a reasonable person would see that it is actually well designed, but they may not like it. Those type of people just say something like "yeah it's cool I guess, just not for me", but entitled, narcissistic homosexuals will whine about how "it's shit", "it sucks", "it's dumb", etc... no reasoning whatsoever, just negative Nancy behavior that should've been slapped out of their mouths by the father they never had.
Pretty much. Going back to Final Doom here, TNT has a fair few levels which are not very fun to play, in large part because of bad and muddy progression, while Final Doom's other half, Plutonia, is MUCH harder than TNT, but also way better designed and way more fun.
I think it's things like the infamous sewer jump in Ninja Turtles where you have to time the button press of your jump within a 4-frame window, or else you get taken back to an earlier area. It doesn't feel like it's intentionally difficult. It feels more like the level designer just didn't realize how precise the jump was and it was never altered during playtesting.
That jump is easy to do on NES. You just have to do a small jump and not a big jump. At max you should only have to repeat it once because you'll fail and go "oh my Turtle hit the ceiling and it killed his jump, better not do that again."
Yeah everytime I see people complain about that game I'm surprised. The dam level with the electric seaweed. Hard but not impossible.
Just lazy shitty dumb kids I think
No, anon. A small jump will fail to clear the jump. You need a medium jump. In order to do a medium jump, you have to release the button during a 4 frame window between "small jump" and "big jump" (about 1/10th of a second). It's not hard because of knowledge, but because the timing for the jump is so strict.
A small jump will clear it. A tiny hop won't. There's no such thing as a "medium jump."
It's simple and most people will clear the jump either their first try or their second.
Correct. I wouldn't necessarily call that excellent design, but it's hardly criminal, if you've gotten a feel for the movement and the jumping then the solution may even come intuitively to a first time player.
Yeah everytime I see people complain about that game I'm surprised. The dam level with the electric seaweed. Hard but not impossible.
Just lazy shitty dumb kids I think
I got stuck for a little while on that level as a little kid, but one day when trying, I decided to calm my toddler rage and try to approach it calmly, after all I had recently done half the level so I knew a lot of where I had to go already.
Not stressing and seething, I actually did it, and I felt like a champ.
I was a phenomenally stupid little kid, too, and a scrub of legend, so you frickers out there who say the dam dive in TMNT is unfair and poorly designed have no goddamn excuse. The game gets FAR more merciless later on.
Basically this
There are popular and unpopular trends, or choices that work against their intended purpose or that the creator didn't consider optimal, but the idea of universally bad design tends to be a homogenising force. This is why boring, low-difficulty open world survival craft with RPG elements is so popular these days - it's an amalgamation of trends that frustrate the least amount of people and lend easily to parasociality and monetisation.
I think procedural levels are boring as hell but they work well for games based on highly variable "runs", basically a way to slide into having 1 life without making zoomers whine about lives and continues.
I think procedural level design is a conditional thing. For something like Diablo it's fine, because it's a realtime isometric Roguelike where you go around hacking, slashing, and searching for treasure, and it's not all that big of a deal that things look samey because the levels aren't all that big, you have an overhead automap, and everything is on one plane at all times.
For first person shooter action ala Doom, Duke, Quake, Half-Life, etc, this doesn't work out the same way. You're down there in the level, and you see what your character sees, rather than seeing the surrounding area around him from above, so things need to be much more distinct to facilitate navigation, and there's also varied terrain and platforming to contend with. I have not seen any FPS with procedurally generated levels which I think looks any fun to play at all.
As opposed to what? Games where if you fail a jump you advance to later in the level? I mean frick dude most games you lose a life and have to start the entire stage or most the stage over if you fail a jump. That's pretty fricking common.
when talking about games from the retro era we must take into consideration that "bad", in the parlance of the day, meant "good". If we take a game like Mario Bros, we can see that the design is really bad. Some sections are especially bad. There are good sections too, and actually bad not good sections that aren't bad because they're not not good but instead, bad. Some might even say the bad parts are bad because they're bad, as in, the good kind of not bad. When you use the language of the day you can see how things become a lot clearer and working out what is bad level design is quite simple.
You can equip Hyper Dash or use charge shot + giga attack + charge shot late into the jump to cross it, same for unarmored X but Magma Blade/Ground Dash instead of charge shot/giga attack. It's easier to do as Shadow Armor without Hyper Dash if you have Quick Charge or Weapon Recover, as well.
Like this
I think this section's cool, even though I can see why most hate it. It's a bit annoying to have to go back through the stage if you want to use the Hyper Dash way of doing it/use a different armor, but I find the jump itself to be fun to pull off and the limited moveset is part of what makes playing as Shadow Armor interesting.
Examples of legitimately bad level design.
These ones are objective:
-Invisible walls. If the game devs couldn't put the effort into putting up some kind of a fence, a wall, a mountain, any kind of visual indicator.
-Poor geometry. Where the avatar drops through the floor, walks through walls, get stuck on objects.
-Broken mechanisms. Doors that don't work as intended, ramps, levers, elevators.
-Texture glitches. That patch of grass is actually hot lava that kills the player. That pool of water is actually a platform. That button you are supposed to press doesn't stand out in any way. That coffee cup you need to progress isn't visible.
Some subjective ones:
-Dead ends. Hallways that lead to nowhere, no items, no enemies, nothing to do but backtrack. No reward for exploration.
-Monster closets. Unlimited enemies spawning behind a door the player can't access.
-Beginners traps. That wall emits spikes and there is no visual indicator that it does. No skeletons, no holes in the wall, the only way to know is to die to it once then remember not to step there the next time.
-Locked doors. No visual indicator that the door can't be opened. Doors are interactive by nature, this leads to wasting time just trying all the doors. The player has a pocket full of grenades and is stopped in their tracks by a wooden door with a broken knob.
-Walled off areas. Areas that look like they should be playable but aren't. A fully modeled theme park just beyond a fence that you have no way of reaching. A fully modeled cruise ship that you can't interact with.
-Mirrors that don't work. Breaks immersion.
-Poor infrastructure. The shop that is visited numerous times in the game is in a tedious to reach area. The quest giver is in a place that is annoying to get to.
-Unflushable toilets. If a game doesn't have flushable toilets it's a bad game.
Addressing confusing and "trap" environments, it can be done well, for example Silent Hill is full of dead ends, broken doors, locked doors. The games, the good ones, are like mazes, and have almost all of subjective bad designs, but all weaved together to inform the game itself.
To me, bad design is:
- Games designed to be played with a guide
- Games that DON'T punish failure
- Random effects that are presented as determent effects and vice-versa
- Improvements that are tiny and useless on their own. for example, I hate getting .5% attack rating when fighting beasts type improvements.
- Games that drop off in quality after the 50% because it's considered a waste when player metrics indicate that only 10% of people play past the first area.
but anon, traps are gay
I was actually thinking of the silent hill series when I wrote that. Fantastic games, top tier. The doors all being locked ended up being frustrating by the time I got into the second game. It got tedious in environments like the apartment block and the resort where its mostly doors. Door checking simulator. >Games designed to be played with a guide
Yeah, this is objective. The game shouldn't need a paper peripheral in order to play it. I'm glad this trend died. Used to go into the game store and the game would be sold with the game guide as a bundle. It was likely intentionally obscure game design to boost sales of the game guides. Designed to stump. >Games that DON'T punish failure
This is subjective, the original Prey had an interesting death mechanic. The Prince of Persia remake had one to. Games don't have to be difficult in order to be good, well designed or enjoyed. Journey is a game I liked. Lack of difficulty. >Random effects that are presented as determent effects and vice-versa
I'm not sure I understand. Could you provide an example? >Improvements that are tiny and useless on their own. for example, I hate getting .5% attack rating when fighting beasts type improvements.
Yeah, I agree. I would call this subjective to though because certain games like Risk of Rain or ARPGS, roguelikes are dependent upon this mechanic. Constanly upgrading gear to get +1 more attack damage. Tedious minmaxing. >Games that drop off in quality after the 50% because it's considered a waste when player metrics indicate that only 10% of people play past the first area.
Yeah, this is another objective one. Overall quality decreasing in the second half. Inconsistent quality.
>Invisible walls
Invisible walls can be fine. Many early platformers have them (like Super Mario Bros. 1) and nobody serious b***hes there. It's a video game. A mature player, when encountering an invisible wall, will understand video games cannot go on forever and shrug it off as the non-issue they are.
Next three are examples of glitches. Not really design choices and thus not examples of "bad level design." >Dead ends
Exploration isn't meaningful if it's all reward no risk. Adding dead ends can make a game feel like a maze, and some people like mazes. >Monster closets
Prevent the game world from becoming empty. Nonproblem. >Beginner traps
Reward player knowledge. Not a bad thing. >Locked doors
Find a key. Nonissue. >Walled off areas
Okay now you're taking the piss. Invisible walls are bad but so are walled off areas? Does not compute. Most games can't be infinite. The map has to end somewhere. Get over it. >Mirrors that don't work
Yeah, in retro games it's often not technically possible to make working mirrors, or it's just not worth the time. Again, it's a video game, not real life. Suspend your disbelief. >Poor infrastructure
Again, video games aren't real life. >Unflushable toilets
This would be a funny joke but your entire list is full of invalid complaints.
That's why I put the second half of the list as subjective, it's just my personal preferences. All of those items can be interpreted as a positive depending on the type of player, As you've demonstrated.
For example, sometimes shooting or actions games have combat that is presented as hack and slash visually, but in reality, the game is rolling dice to determine attack results. Another example of this is where an item or enemy appears in the game, but it based on a sequence of unrelated events, but is presented as a random encounter.
Another item I thought of, this one being subjective, is collect-a-thons. I just hate them. I love hunting for gear and hidden items, but I hate hunting for golden banana bird #24.
I get that, It's the reason most people find Morrowind unplayable. Ineffective visual representation of the systems. Wiffle Bat Mechanics. It's the same reason I never enjoyed the fromsoft games, their enemy hitboxes are not represented visually. It becomes a game of guessing where you can hit, your sword visually connecting but doing no damage and memorizing where the enemy can hit you from, their sword not connecting visually but taking half your health. Add onto that repeating segments as a punishment for not winning the guessing game and I find those games unplayable. >Another item I thought of, this one being subjective, is collect-a-thons. I just hate them. I love hunting for gear and hidden items, but I hate hunting for golden banana bird #24.
We've veered away from the topic of bad level design but I can agree with this one to. This brings to mind collecting all the flags in Assassins Creed 2 and the reward was a 30s video. Useless trash collecting.
>Games that drop off in quality after the 50% because it's considered a waste when player metrics indicate that only 10% of people play past the first area.
Yeah I bet modern developers and their funders calculate it this way on purpose, but it was pretty common to do stuff that way in earlier days too. It sort of makes sense, games like Deus Ex and Max Payne 1 are known for the levels in the first 1/3-1/2 of the game and that's what they are marketed on, it makes sense to put them up front to keep people interested. Sometimes it's about running out of the development time so the last levels or the climax have to be constructed and tied quickly, I think Rockstar's Bully game had something like this happen and some other R* games.
>games like Deus Ex and Max Payne 1 are known for the levels in the first 1/3-1/2 of the game and that's what they are marketed on
I had a lot of fun in the later parts of both games. The only difference is that post a certain point, the levels in Deus Ex are a lot less hub like and a lot more about linea missions that can be performed in different ways.
What's true though with a lot of games in that era is that the demo/shareware levels are the most polished. SiN and Quake are the two that spring to mind.
>Invisible walls
Invisible walls can be fine. Many early platformers have them (like Super Mario Bros. 1) and nobody serious b***hes there. It's a video game. A mature player, when encountering an invisible wall, will understand video games cannot go on forever and shrug it off as the non-issue they are.
Next three are examples of glitches. Not really design choices and thus not examples of "bad level design." >Dead ends
Exploration isn't meaningful if it's all reward no risk. Adding dead ends can make a game feel like a maze, and some people like mazes. >Monster closets
Prevent the game world from becoming empty. Nonproblem. >Beginner traps
Reward player knowledge. Not a bad thing. >Locked doors
Find a key. Nonissue. >Walled off areas
Okay now you're taking the piss. Invisible walls are bad but so are walled off areas? Does not compute. Most games can't be infinite. The map has to end somewhere. Get over it. >Mirrors that don't work
Yeah, in retro games it's often not technically possible to make working mirrors, or it's just not worth the time. Again, it's a video game, not real life. Suspend your disbelief. >Poor infrastructure
Again, video games aren't real life. >Unflushable toilets
This would be a funny joke but your entire list is full of invalid complaints.
>-Beginners traps. That wall emits spikes and there is no visual indicator that it does. No skeletons, no holes in the wall, the only way to know is to die to it once then remember not to step there the next time.
This is basically the entirety of I Wanna Be The Guy and all of its spinoffs/clones. The entire fricking game is insta-death traps that cannot be avoided unless you know about them beforehand.
When I thought of a shitty level I thought of this from Spiderman 2 PS1, 1h39m mark in the video
It's not fun at all the try to climb up and if you fail you fall back to the floor level. That game has other similar levels where you climb up thru some challenging stuff, but this second to last level has no imagination or fun to it.
>Mirrors that don't work. Breaks immersion.
This seems to be interestingly common in some pretty new games even tho there are probably exceptions because I don't bother to play the new games that much. The devs either don't know how to code mirrors or if they do, the gaming platform or average pc can't process it because bad coding. Sometimes they hide it cleverly tho by making the mirror be shattered or broken if there's a toilet or some place where you expect to see a mirror.
>Dead ends. Hallways that lead to nowhere, no items, no enemies, nothing to do but backtrack. No reward for exploration.
don't you talk shit about Wizardry
>-Walled off areas. Areas that look like they should be playable but aren't. A fully modeled theme park just beyond a fence that you have no way of reaching. A fully modeled cruise ship that you can't interact with.
Those are kino though, many of my fondest daydreams as a kid were inspired by inaccessible areas in my favorite games
That one level in Marathon where you run back and forth hitting switches to line up a staircase is one of the worst things I've ever been through in any game.
But where does he rank it out of all Halo songs? There are Metallica fanboys who say ackshaully St Anger is pretty decent if you ignore the extreme repetition and trashcan snare and emo James and
Unironically being "too big" is a sign of bad level design. Banjo-Tooie is a masterclass in this aspect, the levels are so big they had to introduce warps inside them, even the overworld hub needed warp points. The bigger a level is higher are the chances of hurting the games pace.
Thoughtless level design is bad. Here's a comparison:
Okay level design:
Nothing level design:
The first example places enemies in rooms that compliment their behavior (0:50).
At 1:47 there's an attempt to have enemies support each other with jellyfish closing in on the player from behind while he fights the miniboss.
Bubble Man's stage is no masterpiece but it's a decent short stage and obvious there was some intent behind enemy and terrain placement.
The 2nd example, though? It's fricking nothing. Huge stretches where you hold forward across empty space, enemy choices seem completely random and are never a threat, no theme or escalation, it's someone trying to make a Megaman level with none of what makes Megaman levels work.
The crabs at the end have nothing to do with the rest of the level, they should have been paired with another enemy after the first couple.
Uses falling platforms at the beginning of the level like a tutorial for a later section, but doesn't give it a proper payoff. Maybe they could have paired it with the crabs in the last section.
Reprisal of the frogs in the underwater spiked ceiling room is actually easier than the first encounter since underwater gravity makes the tiny frogs easier to dodge. The ceiling should be lowered by a couple tiles and the "arena" should be narrowed.
The jellyfish are a good idea but too easy to skip or plow through to change your strategy against the 2nd miniboss as much as they could have. Their spawn rate should be increased without being too annoying.
"Okay" was a little harsh but it could have done more to force the player to engage with it.
on topic - Level design is almost entirely subjective as long as it's in a finished and generally beatable state. Mario Maker is a good example here. You have to be able to complete the level to upload it. The only real measurable aspect of game design is difficulty. Some games hold your hand, others don't. It's a boring answer, sure and I personally have opinions on what constitutes a well designed level in a video game but really, it all boils down to difficulty and target audience.
Unlike the art, I'd say level design is almost entirely objective. Some people might find laying on a bed of nails a good idea, we can confidently say it's a bad bed design. Same goes for rollercoasters.
It means >Oh, a branching path, well THAT way must lead to the end of the level, I guess I'll take the other path first so I make sure I accomplished everything in this stage. >Well frick, turns out this was the way to the end so now I have to backtrack all the way back there to see what I missed then go through all this area again to finish.
Depends on the context and the goals of the designer. What's bad in one situation might not be bad in another. So it's essentially an unanswerable question.
If a level in a game was just a completely straight hallway, we would agree that that's bad design because it's too simple.
On the other hand, a level that was an endless empty sprawling maze with no indication of whether you're making progress or heading the right way or if there even is an exit at all would also be bad design, even though it isn't simple.
Really the problem with both is that they aren't interesting to play.
In the first example the player has no choices to make. In the second, the player can and must make choices, but they don't have any information to base those choices on or any feedback on how well they're doing.
Good level design means giving the player choices to make, giving them information to make those choices, and giving them feedback so they can adjust their decision making. This makes the player feel like they're in control and are progressing and getting better at the game as they play.
The choices could be big ones that affect the whole rest of the playthrough, like catching a Pokemon, or really simple small ones like how fast you jump over a pit in Mario. Anything that gives the player a sense of agency.
Taking that agency away, or not having it in the first place, is what bad level design is. That's why there isn't a section in Pokemon where you're forced to use a set team instead of the Pokemon you trained, and why there isn't an enemy in Mario that can take away his ability to run. Those might seem like interesting ideas to a game designer but they're boring and frustrating for the player.
>no teaching elements that clearly show you how something works without killing you or interrupting the game's flow >monotonous enemy/hazard placements that don't require you to think differently >unclear visual elements in interactivity >doesn't take advantage or test the gameplay mechanics >gotcha traps with no visual cues to pay attention to
Bad level design is that segment in Neon Tiger's stage from Mega Man X3 where you have to blow up 3 wall enemies who take like 5 shots to down and don't shoot back or do anything in particular. Just a pointless roadblock that happens 3 times while nothing else is going on to extend the stage.
In Xtreme 2, they tried to improve on those by making them already extended, while the moving part is quicker and shoots at you while dodging your shots. It's a bit boring there too, but they tried.
>design 2 or 3 areas >right click, "Copy", right click, "Paste" >repeat a couple times, maybe throw in a "Flip Horizontal/Vertical" here and there, too
It's hard to define objectively. Here's my attempt:
- Levels which misunderstand core gameplay mechanics and engine limitations. (so in Doom 2, there are many levels where enemies are below you, both damaging you and blocking your path. You can't see them since you can't look down, but they are tearing through your health. Another example might be something like the original expansions for Quake 2, where they peppered the levels with hitscan turrets. Another example might be the narrow platforming sections in Turok 1. It's a really fast-paced shooter. Slowing down and doing precision jumps is not really fun, and doesn't play to the strengths of the game they built.)
- Levels are far too long for a play session. eg: a 60-minute Turok 2 level with no mid-level saves. It's not actually fun to play Turok 2 for 1-2 hours straight, so this represents a poor understanding of gameplay.
- Levels with unusual spikes in difficulty.
- Levels where everything looks the same.
- Levels designed by Sandy Peterson.
Those 16bit one screen maze games where you have to frick around the big room to figure out where to go (or collect some nonesense). There were a lot of those and they were pretty identical and completely pointless. And ugly.
bad level design is when the flow of the map does not match the mechanics. It's very subjective though because the mechanics may have been designed one way and players will always figure out something different to use them for.
>Quake rocket jumping allows you to skip entire sections of the map
>bad level design is when the flow of the map does not match the mechanics
Simpsons Skateboarding is a really good example of this. The levels are terrible because you have these really awkward rails that don't fit the environment whatsoever.
Hate when people claim it's good/bad and don't elaborate at all to why. It just comes across like you have no idea at all you just wanted to make your opinion feel genuine.
It's anything with too sudden difficulty spikes that doesn't follow a proper difficulty curve, I think any part where the player has too high a chance of taking damage by force and/or if its got sections that don't properly fit the control the player's given to work with... and that's all.
>too sudden difficulty spikes that doesn't follow a proper difficulty curve, I think any part where the player has too high a chance of taking damage by force
That's exactly Doom 64. Fun game, but because of gameplay and setting. The level design itself is mostly poor, often with "lol prank'd u bro" moments, obtuse secrets (well, it's Doom) and following stages being much easier or harder than the previous one. I really like the game, but you do need patience.
Fundamentally it's about expression of a game's systems. A good level utilizes gameplay systems in rich ways, be that facilitating twitch reaction, lateral thinking, longer-term planning, etc. Often this happens through combat but it's all about the gameplay systems on offer. What's on display needs to be well paced and function well on a technical level.
Beyond that there are other inherent pleasures to games that level design can express, like presenting space in interesting ways, be that 3D exploration (Tomb Raider, Dark Souls) or just exploring beautiful art assets (Uncharted, Okami)
>HERRR DURRRRHHHH URGH HAYE GUISE WAT DOSE "BAD" MEEN? I THINK IT MEENS "GUD" HURRF RRRHHG
What a fantastic, beautiful thread. It sure is a great time to be a channer!!
It's a rudimentary subjective term.
Basically this
There are popular and unpopular trends, or choices that work against their intended purpose or that the creator didn't consider optimal, but the idea of universally bad design tends to be a homogenising force. This is why boring, low-difficulty open world survival craft with RPG elements is so popular these days - it's an amalgamation of trends that frustrate the least amount of people and lend easily to parasociality and monetisation.
I think procedural levels are boring as hell but they work well for games based on highly variable "runs", basically a way to slide into having 1 life without making zoomers whine about lives and continues.
It all depends on the button presses. That's right. Nothing else matters. The rhythm of the button presses and the variety of them determines how fun the level is.
Hold right and press B and Y now and then? Boring. You have to perfectly time everything like you're playing a song on the piano you have never played before? Frustrating. There needs to be a feeling of jazz in it, allowing you to improvise the clicks and clacks. Unless it's a game like Super Meat boy, which are like little playing short 5-10 second advertising jingles on the piano.
I disagree, resource management and risk-reward are factors
Risk-reward keeps what is there interesting in the long term, true. It’s important.
Correct.
Black person, stop acting like it's some frame perfect speedrunning maneuver, hundreds of thousands of kids, maybe millions, learned to clear that jump.
>Invisible walls.
If they come across really arbitrary, sure, but if a map designer put an invisible wall somewhere which the player wasn't expected to be able to reach, I think that's fine.
good post
If I die it's bad and unfair and trial and error
If you die it's actually good and you have a skill issue
Too linear.
I'm the Juggernaut, b***h
wait until you see arcade level """"""""""""design""""""""""
It means I died in it, therefor it sucks rather than me
It should mean a boring level, or maybe a confusing one when its intent wasn't meant to be confusing. But nowadays people only use it meaning "this game filtered me and I'm blaming external factors for it".
This, good post. There is objectivity in level design and there is subjectivity in perception of levels. It all depends on the person's attitude or willingness to be fair or to be moronic. Take the mgs2 thread from earlier. Its not that the level design is bad, it's actually extremely well done and detailed, but some people don't like the locale or aesthetic. This is where the subjectivity comes into play. Now a reasonable person would see that it is actually well designed, but they may not like it. Those type of people just say something like "yeah it's cool I guess, just not for me", but entitled, narcissistic homosexuals will whine about how "it's shit", "it sucks", "it's dumb", etc... no reasoning whatsoever, just negative Nancy behavior that should've been slapped out of their mouths by the father they never had.
TNT Evilution, Map 22, Map 25.
Pretty much. Going back to Final Doom here, TNT has a fair few levels which are not very fun to play, in large part because of bad and muddy progression, while Final Doom's other half, Plutonia, is MUCH harder than TNT, but also way better designed and way more fun.
What does this have to do with retro games? Wrong board
implying levels are relevant to modern games
bad ones are
I think it's things like the infamous sewer jump in Ninja Turtles where you have to time the button press of your jump within a 4-frame window, or else you get taken back to an earlier area. It doesn't feel like it's intentionally difficult. It feels more like the level designer just didn't realize how precise the jump was and it was never altered during playtesting.
That jump is easy to do on NES. You just have to do a small jump and not a big jump. At max you should only have to repeat it once because you'll fail and go "oh my Turtle hit the ceiling and it killed his jump, better not do that again."
Yeah everytime I see people complain about that game I'm surprised. The dam level with the electric seaweed. Hard but not impossible.
Just lazy shitty dumb kids I think
No, anon. A small jump will fail to clear the jump. You need a medium jump. In order to do a medium jump, you have to release the button during a 4 frame window between "small jump" and "big jump" (about 1/10th of a second). It's not hard because of knowledge, but because the timing for the jump is so strict.
A small jump will clear it. A tiny hop won't. There's no such thing as a "medium jump."
It's simple and most people will clear the jump either their first try or their second.
Correct. I wouldn't necessarily call that excellent design, but it's hardly criminal, if you've gotten a feel for the movement and the jumping then the solution may even come intuitively to a first time player.
I got stuck for a little while on that level as a little kid, but one day when trying, I decided to calm my toddler rage and try to approach it calmly, after all I had recently done half the level so I knew a lot of where I had to go already.
Not stressing and seething, I actually did it, and I felt like a champ.
I was a phenomenally stupid little kid, too, and a scrub of legend, so you frickers out there who say the dam dive in TMNT is unfair and poorly designed have no goddamn excuse. The game gets FAR more merciless later on.
I think procedural level design is a conditional thing. For something like Diablo it's fine, because it's a realtime isometric Roguelike where you go around hacking, slashing, and searching for treasure, and it's not all that big of a deal that things look samey because the levels aren't all that big, you have an overhead automap, and everything is on one plane at all times.
For first person shooter action ala Doom, Duke, Quake, Half-Life, etc, this doesn't work out the same way. You're down there in the level, and you see what your character sees, rather than seeing the surrounding area around him from above, so things need to be much more distinct to facilitate navigation, and there's also varied terrain and platforming to contend with. I have not seen any FPS with procedurally generated levels which I think looks any fun to play at all.
As opposed to what? Games where if you fail a jump you advance to later in the level? I mean frick dude most games you lose a life and have to start the entire stage or most the stage over if you fail a jump. That's pretty fricking common.
levels i dont like
bump
when talking about games from the retro era we must take into consideration that "bad", in the parlance of the day, meant "good". If we take a game like Mario Bros, we can see that the design is really bad. Some sections are especially bad. There are good sections too, and actually bad not good sections that aren't bad because they're not not good but instead, bad. Some might even say the bad parts are bad because they're bad, as in, the good kind of not bad. When you use the language of the day you can see how things become a lot clearer and working out what is bad level design is quite simple.
When you have to jump from lower platform to upper one but the upper one is solid, so you have to do a curve jump precisely.
Like this
Is there really no way around that?
You can equip Hyper Dash or use charge shot + giga attack + charge shot late into the jump to cross it, same for unarmored X but Magma Blade/Ground Dash instead of charge shot/giga attack. It's easier to do as Shadow Armor without Hyper Dash if you have Quick Charge or Weapon Recover, as well.
I think this section's cool, even though I can see why most hate it. It's a bit annoying to have to go back through the stage if you want to use the Hyper Dash way of doing it/use a different armor, but I find the jump itself to be fun to pull off and the limited moveset is part of what makes playing as Shadow Armor interesting.
Holy frick. X6 deniers eternally btfo once again
I don't think anyone denied anything, the anon just didn't know if it's possible or not.
Fricking nice, thanks bro
I don't think
is referring to me, but that there are people that shit on X6 because they think it was impossible.
X6 is my fav
It means levels that are not fun to play.
It's bad if it's unfair in some way or if it wastes your time in some other way
on the internet is "i dont like it but i cant properly explain why in reasonable terms so i'll just be reductive and pedantic about it"
Examples of legitimately bad level design.
These ones are objective:
-Invisible walls. If the game devs couldn't put the effort into putting up some kind of a fence, a wall, a mountain, any kind of visual indicator.
-Poor geometry. Where the avatar drops through the floor, walks through walls, get stuck on objects.
-Broken mechanisms. Doors that don't work as intended, ramps, levers, elevators.
-Texture glitches. That patch of grass is actually hot lava that kills the player. That pool of water is actually a platform. That button you are supposed to press doesn't stand out in any way. That coffee cup you need to progress isn't visible.
Some subjective ones:
-Dead ends. Hallways that lead to nowhere, no items, no enemies, nothing to do but backtrack. No reward for exploration.
-Monster closets. Unlimited enemies spawning behind a door the player can't access.
-Beginners traps. That wall emits spikes and there is no visual indicator that it does. No skeletons, no holes in the wall, the only way to know is to die to it once then remember not to step there the next time.
-Locked doors. No visual indicator that the door can't be opened. Doors are interactive by nature, this leads to wasting time just trying all the doors. The player has a pocket full of grenades and is stopped in their tracks by a wooden door with a broken knob.
-Walled off areas. Areas that look like they should be playable but aren't. A fully modeled theme park just beyond a fence that you have no way of reaching. A fully modeled cruise ship that you can't interact with.
-Mirrors that don't work. Breaks immersion.
-Poor infrastructure. The shop that is visited numerous times in the game is in a tedious to reach area. The quest giver is in a place that is annoying to get to.
-Unflushable toilets. If a game doesn't have flushable toilets it's a bad game.
Good list here.
Addressing confusing and "trap" environments, it can be done well, for example Silent Hill is full of dead ends, broken doors, locked doors. The games, the good ones, are like mazes, and have almost all of subjective bad designs, but all weaved together to inform the game itself.
To me, bad design is:
- Games designed to be played with a guide
- Games that DON'T punish failure
- Random effects that are presented as determent effects and vice-versa
- Improvements that are tiny and useless on their own. for example, I hate getting .5% attack rating when fighting beasts type improvements.
- Games that drop off in quality after the 50% because it's considered a waste when player metrics indicate that only 10% of people play past the first area.
but anon, traps are gay
I was actually thinking of the silent hill series when I wrote that. Fantastic games, top tier. The doors all being locked ended up being frustrating by the time I got into the second game. It got tedious in environments like the apartment block and the resort where its mostly doors. Door checking simulator.
>Games designed to be played with a guide
Yeah, this is objective. The game shouldn't need a paper peripheral in order to play it. I'm glad this trend died. Used to go into the game store and the game would be sold with the game guide as a bundle. It was likely intentionally obscure game design to boost sales of the game guides. Designed to stump.
>Games that DON'T punish failure
This is subjective, the original Prey had an interesting death mechanic. The Prince of Persia remake had one to. Games don't have to be difficult in order to be good, well designed or enjoyed. Journey is a game I liked. Lack of difficulty.
>Random effects that are presented as determent effects and vice-versa
I'm not sure I understand. Could you provide an example?
>Improvements that are tiny and useless on their own. for example, I hate getting .5% attack rating when fighting beasts type improvements.
Yeah, I agree. I would call this subjective to though because certain games like Risk of Rain or ARPGS, roguelikes are dependent upon this mechanic. Constanly upgrading gear to get +1 more attack damage. Tedious minmaxing.
>Games that drop off in quality after the 50% because it's considered a waste when player metrics indicate that only 10% of people play past the first area.
Yeah, this is another objective one. Overall quality decreasing in the second half. Inconsistent quality.
That's why I put the second half of the list as subjective, it's just my personal preferences. All of those items can be interpreted as a positive depending on the type of player, As you've demonstrated.
For example, sometimes shooting or actions games have combat that is presented as hack and slash visually, but in reality, the game is rolling dice to determine attack results. Another example of this is where an item or enemy appears in the game, but it based on a sequence of unrelated events, but is presented as a random encounter.
Another item I thought of, this one being subjective, is collect-a-thons. I just hate them. I love hunting for gear and hidden items, but I hate hunting for golden banana bird #24.
I get that, It's the reason most people find Morrowind unplayable. Ineffective visual representation of the systems. Wiffle Bat Mechanics. It's the same reason I never enjoyed the fromsoft games, their enemy hitboxes are not represented visually. It becomes a game of guessing where you can hit, your sword visually connecting but doing no damage and memorizing where the enemy can hit you from, their sword not connecting visually but taking half your health. Add onto that repeating segments as a punishment for not winning the guessing game and I find those games unplayable.
>Another item I thought of, this one being subjective, is collect-a-thons. I just hate them. I love hunting for gear and hidden items, but I hate hunting for golden banana bird #24.
We've veered away from the topic of bad level design but I can agree with this one to. This brings to mind collecting all the flags in Assassins Creed 2 and the reward was a 30s video. Useless trash collecting.
>Games that drop off in quality after the 50% because it's considered a waste when player metrics indicate that only 10% of people play past the first area.
Yeah I bet modern developers and their funders calculate it this way on purpose, but it was pretty common to do stuff that way in earlier days too. It sort of makes sense, games like Deus Ex and Max Payne 1 are known for the levels in the first 1/3-1/2 of the game and that's what they are marketed on, it makes sense to put them up front to keep people interested. Sometimes it's about running out of the development time so the last levels or the climax have to be constructed and tied quickly, I think Rockstar's Bully game had something like this happen and some other R* games.
>games like Deus Ex and Max Payne 1 are known for the levels in the first 1/3-1/2 of the game and that's what they are marketed on
I had a lot of fun in the later parts of both games. The only difference is that post a certain point, the levels in Deus Ex are a lot less hub like and a lot more about linea missions that can be performed in different ways.
What's true though with a lot of games in that era is that the demo/shareware levels are the most polished. SiN and Quake are the two that spring to mind.
>Invisible walls
Invisible walls can be fine. Many early platformers have them (like Super Mario Bros. 1) and nobody serious b***hes there. It's a video game. A mature player, when encountering an invisible wall, will understand video games cannot go on forever and shrug it off as the non-issue they are.
Next three are examples of glitches. Not really design choices and thus not examples of "bad level design."
>Dead ends
Exploration isn't meaningful if it's all reward no risk. Adding dead ends can make a game feel like a maze, and some people like mazes.
>Monster closets
Prevent the game world from becoming empty. Nonproblem.
>Beginner traps
Reward player knowledge. Not a bad thing.
>Locked doors
Find a key. Nonissue.
>Walled off areas
Okay now you're taking the piss. Invisible walls are bad but so are walled off areas? Does not compute. Most games can't be infinite. The map has to end somewhere. Get over it.
>Mirrors that don't work
Yeah, in retro games it's often not technically possible to make working mirrors, or it's just not worth the time. Again, it's a video game, not real life. Suspend your disbelief.
>Poor infrastructure
Again, video games aren't real life.
>Unflushable toilets
This would be a funny joke but your entire list is full of invalid complaints.
>One-way bullshit
>Two-gear diarrhea
>Jump frickness
>Topside aquatic ass
>Air suspension shitlift
>Inviso-bitch
>Free-falling frickballs
>-Beginners traps. That wall emits spikes and there is no visual indicator that it does. No skeletons, no holes in the wall, the only way to know is to die to it once then remember not to step there the next time.
This is basically the entirety of I Wanna Be The Guy and all of its spinoffs/clones. The entire fricking game is insta-death traps that cannot be avoided unless you know about them beforehand.
When I thought of a shitty level I thought of this from Spiderman 2 PS1, 1h39m mark in the video
It's not fun at all the try to climb up and if you fail you fall back to the floor level. That game has other similar levels where you climb up thru some challenging stuff, but this second to last level has no imagination or fun to it.
>Mirrors that don't work. Breaks immersion.
This seems to be interestingly common in some pretty new games even tho there are probably exceptions because I don't bother to play the new games that much. The devs either don't know how to code mirrors or if they do, the gaming platform or average pc can't process it because bad coding. Sometimes they hide it cleverly tho by making the mirror be shattered or broken if there's a toilet or some place where you expect to see a mirror.
>Dead ends. Hallways that lead to nowhere, no items, no enemies, nothing to do but backtrack. No reward for exploration.
don't you talk shit about Wizardry
>-Walled off areas. Areas that look like they should be playable but aren't. A fully modeled theme park just beyond a fence that you have no way of reaching. A fully modeled cruise ship that you can't interact with.
Those are kino though, many of my fondest daydreams as a kid were inspired by inaccessible areas in my favorite games
That one level in Marathon where you run back and forth hitting switches to line up a staircase is one of the worst things I've ever been through in any game.
everyones favourite level is someones most hated level and vice versa
so yall sayin "i dont like it so its bad" are dumb. simple as
That's not true
Nobody hates the Silent Cartographer and calls it the worst map
Nobody enjoys the Library and calls it Halos best map.
>Nobody enjoys the Library and calls it Halos best map.
i know someone who likes the library and says its reputation is really undeserved
But where does he rank it out of all Halo songs? There are Metallica fanboys who say ackshaully St Anger is pretty decent if you ignore the extreme repetition and trashcan snare and emo James and
Unironically being "too big" is a sign of bad level design. Banjo-Tooie is a masterclass in this aspect, the levels are so big they had to introduce warps inside them, even the overworld hub needed warp points. The bigger a level is higher are the chances of hurting the games pace.
Good point. Poor use of scale.
Good level design is anything not designed by Sandy Petersen.
>Sandy Peter
qrd?
It means it's repetitive.
There are very few interesting gameplay scenarios, and the ones that exist are repeated without iteration.
Here you go OP:
Thoughtless level design is bad. Here's a comparison:
Okay level design:
Nothing level design:
The first example places enemies in rooms that compliment their behavior (0:50).
At 1:47 there's an attempt to have enemies support each other with jellyfish closing in on the player from behind while he fights the miniboss.
Bubble Man's stage is no masterpiece but it's a decent short stage and obvious there was some intent behind enemy and terrain placement.
The 2nd example, though? It's fricking nothing. Huge stretches where you hold forward across empty space, enemy choices seem completely random and are never a threat, no theme or escalation, it's someone trying to make a Megaman level with none of what makes Megaman levels work.
Why is Bubble Man's level just okay, in your opinion? How would you improve it (without new assets/enemies)
The crabs at the end have nothing to do with the rest of the level, they should have been paired with another enemy after the first couple.
Uses falling platforms at the beginning of the level like a tutorial for a later section, but doesn't give it a proper payoff. Maybe they could have paired it with the crabs in the last section.
Reprisal of the frogs in the underwater spiked ceiling room is actually easier than the first encounter since underwater gravity makes the tiny frogs easier to dodge. The ceiling should be lowered by a couple tiles and the "arena" should be narrowed.
The jellyfish are a good idea but too easy to skip or plow through to change your strategy against the 2nd miniboss as much as they could have. Their spawn rate should be increased without being too annoying.
"Okay" was a little harsh but it could have done more to force the player to engage with it.
Insightful analysis on level design and I agree with your points. All makes sense. Thank you for elaborating.
Bubble Man theme is fricking incredible
on topic - Level design is almost entirely subjective as long as it's in a finished and generally beatable state. Mario Maker is a good example here. You have to be able to complete the level to upload it. The only real measurable aspect of game design is difficulty. Some games hold your hand, others don't. It's a boring answer, sure and I personally have opinions on what constitutes a well designed level in a video game but really, it all boils down to difficulty and target audience.
Unlike the art, I'd say level design is almost entirely objective. Some people might find laying on a bed of nails a good idea, we can confidently say it's a bad bed design. Same goes for rollercoasters.
If I like it it's good
If I dislike it it's bad
If you like it it's bad
If you dislike it it's good
Play Mario Maker for a bit and you'll figure it out pretty quickly.
>What does "bad level design" mean?
sewer level in redneck rampage
that fricking level in turok 2
moustache puzzle in gabriel knight 3
It means
>Oh, a branching path, well THAT way must lead to the end of the level, I guess I'll take the other path first so I make sure I accomplished everything in this stage.
>Well frick, turns out this was the way to the end so now I have to backtrack all the way back there to see what I missed then go through all this area again to finish.
Depends on the context and the goals of the designer. What's bad in one situation might not be bad in another. So it's essentially an unanswerable question.
Nothing, it's a buzzword (technically phrase) that means little and is defined differently depending on who uses it
It's one of those things where subjectively you know it when you see it, but can't properly define it
If a level in a game was just a completely straight hallway, we would agree that that's bad design because it's too simple.
On the other hand, a level that was an endless empty sprawling maze with no indication of whether you're making progress or heading the right way or if there even is an exit at all would also be bad design, even though it isn't simple.
Really the problem with both is that they aren't interesting to play.
In the first example the player has no choices to make. In the second, the player can and must make choices, but they don't have any information to base those choices on or any feedback on how well they're doing.
Good level design means giving the player choices to make, giving them information to make those choices, and giving them feedback so they can adjust their decision making. This makes the player feel like they're in control and are progressing and getting better at the game as they play.
The choices could be big ones that affect the whole rest of the playthrough, like catching a Pokemon, or really simple small ones like how fast you jump over a pit in Mario. Anything that gives the player a sense of agency.
Taking that agency away, or not having it in the first place, is what bad level design is. That's why there isn't a section in Pokemon where you're forced to use a set team instead of the Pokemon you trained, and why there isn't an enemy in Mario that can take away his ability to run. Those might seem like interesting ideas to a game designer but they're boring and frustrating for the player.
considering people think NES Metroid needed a minimap, the average gamer does not know what actual bad level design is
>no teaching elements that clearly show you how something works without killing you or interrupting the game's flow
>monotonous enemy/hazard placements that don't require you to think differently
>unclear visual elements in interactivity
>doesn't take advantage or test the gameplay mechanics
>gotcha traps with no visual cues to pay attention to
Bad level design is that segment in Neon Tiger's stage from Mega Man X3 where you have to blow up 3 wall enemies who take like 5 shots to down and don't shoot back or do anything in particular. Just a pointless roadblock that happens 3 times while nothing else is going on to extend the stage.
At least, if you have Frozen Shield, you can 1-hit those frickers.
In Xtreme 2, they tried to improve on those by making them already extended, while the moving part is quicker and shoots at you while dodging your shots. It's a bit boring there too, but they tried.
>design 2 or 3 areas
>right click, "Copy", right click, "Paste"
>repeat a couple times, maybe throw in a "Flip Horizontal/Vertical" here and there, too
You act as if there isn't some differing scenario in each room though.
Bad level design is neither interesting to the player or conducive to creating a variety of playstyles or strategies.
It's hard to define objectively. Here's my attempt:
- Levels which misunderstand core gameplay mechanics and engine limitations. (so in Doom 2, there are many levels where enemies are below you, both damaging you and blocking your path. You can't see them since you can't look down, but they are tearing through your health. Another example might be something like the original expansions for Quake 2, where they peppered the levels with hitscan turrets. Another example might be the narrow platforming sections in Turok 1. It's a really fast-paced shooter. Slowing down and doing precision jumps is not really fun, and doesn't play to the strengths of the game they built.)
- Levels are far too long for a play session. eg: a 60-minute Turok 2 level with no mid-level saves. It's not actually fun to play Turok 2 for 1-2 hours straight, so this represents a poor understanding of gameplay.
- Levels with unusual spikes in difficulty.
- Levels where everything looks the same.
- Levels designed by Sandy Peterson.
It's self-explanatory.
Those 16bit one screen maze games where you have to frick around the big room to figure out where to go (or collect some nonesense). There were a lot of those and they were pretty identical and completely pointless. And ugly.
bad level design is when the flow of the map does not match the mechanics. It's very subjective though because the mechanics may have been designed one way and players will always figure out something different to use them for.
>Quake rocket jumping allows you to skip entire sections of the map
>bad level design is when the flow of the map does not match the mechanics
Simpsons Skateboarding is a really good example of this. The levels are terrible because you have these really awkward rails that don't fit the environment whatsoever.
Hate when people claim it's good/bad and don't elaborate at all to why. It just comes across like you have no idea at all you just wanted to make your opinion feel genuine.
It's anything with too sudden difficulty spikes that doesn't follow a proper difficulty curve, I think any part where the player has too high a chance of taking damage by force and/or if its got sections that don't properly fit the control the player's given to work with... and that's all.
>too sudden difficulty spikes that doesn't follow a proper difficulty curve, I think any part where the player has too high a chance of taking damage by force
That's exactly Doom 64. Fun game, but because of gameplay and setting. The level design itself is mostly poor, often with "lol prank'd u bro" moments, obtuse secrets (well, it's Doom) and following stages being much easier or harder than the previous one. I really like the game, but you do need patience.
>with too sudden difficulty spikes
That's good design
Fundamentally it's about expression of a game's systems. A good level utilizes gameplay systems in rich ways, be that facilitating twitch reaction, lateral thinking, longer-term planning, etc. Often this happens through combat but it's all about the gameplay systems on offer. What's on display needs to be well paced and function well on a technical level.
Beyond that there are other inherent pleasures to games that level design can express, like presenting space in interesting ways, be that 3D exploration (Tomb Raider, Dark Souls) or just exploring beautiful art assets (Uncharted, Okami)
>HERRR DURRRRHHHH URGH HAYE GUISE WAT DOSE "BAD" MEEN? I THINK IT MEENS "GUD" HURRF RRRHHG
What a fantastic, beautiful thread. It sure is a great time to be a channer!!
Are you alright, friend?