Game Design articles
Why is everything a live service?
I caught a streamer I follow playing Marauders recently and the game looks fantastic. For those who don’t know, it’s a sci-fi FPS that has players jumping between ships as space pirates in search of loot. Visually, it struck me as an interesting fusion of No Man’s Sky, Wolfenstein, and...
GTA VI leak: Beyond the videos
We saw one of the biggest leaks in video game history last Sunday as a hacker uploaded a huge number of videos and images from Rockstar’s upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI to the internet, and it’s safe to say online discussion around this unexpected sneak peek has been a complete...
GTA VI: First details leave plenty of room for scepticism
It was last week, nearly nine whole years after the release of Grand Theft Auto V, that an article by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier finally provided some concrete information on its sequel - at least if you believe his ex-Rockstar sources. The piece focused mainly on how progressive Rockstar is apparently...
GTA IV's immersive mechanics may be lost forever
Rockstar practically broke Twitter with its announcement of what will surely be Grand Theft Auto VI on 4th February. At the time of writing, the tweet is approaching 600,000 likes and fans are speculating over how the next iteration will build on the hyper-successful GTA V. But while the most...
Project Zomboid is a true sandbox game
Project Zomboid is yet another game that was sitting in my Steam library for a long time before I played it properly. Since the start of 2020, I’d clocked just ten hours (although granted a lot happened in the meantime). But when I saw its recent resurgence, I thought it...
In defence of scripting in football games
Spend any length of time reading online forums for football games and you’ll come across complaints about “scripting” - the alleged way games like FIFA and PES artificially infuence games to create drama. This quirk of games’ design and programming is always portrayed in a negative light, and often rightly...
You're in the zone until you're not
Flow is a weird thing, all inconsistent and unpredictable. When I go to play a video game, one of two things can happen - either I will bounce straight off it almost immediately, or I’ll become completely immersed and play for hours and hours over a period of weeks before...
