www.RamblingAboutGames.com is a place for me to share my in-depth analysis of the games I play. In particular, I want to focus on breaking down why specific parts of a game do or do not work, and try to generate productive takeaways from every game I talk about.
While some may call it a spin-off, Atlus’ 2024 JRPG Metaphor: Refantazio is a sequel to the Persona series in all but name. While the Social Link system seems unchanged on the surface, the way that the player interacts with it has actually evolved quite a lot - for the better, and perhaps also for the worse…
Read MoreSince WoW’s launch in 2004, players have been able to customize just about any part of their UI, and in the years since, the community support that has emerged has been incredible. Not many games face this kind of customization support, and it has come with a lot of ups and downs over the years. So let's talk about where we’ve come from, and where things are going.
Read MoreRPGs have had random battles for as long as any of us can remember, and while how we handle them has changed a lot as the industry grows, every system has their own strengths and weaknesses. In this post, I examine what some of those are, as well as looking at why Pokemon Sword & Shield’s system is just so great.
Read MoreMMos have been using the idea of level scaling for a while, to help make their content relevant to more people for longer. But Final Fantasy 14’s take on this system comes with a few issues that make things a bit of a pain for low level players.
Read MoreFF14’s UI is very customizable, but coming from a game like WoW which has a fully customizable UI, is a world of difference. So I thought it would be fun to look at the top 5 UI mods that I would install if FF14 let me.
Read MoreWe’ve talked about how Sekiro manages it’s difficulty, and found that in general, the game suffers a lot from a lack of options. Sekiro is a very specific kind of game, meant to be played a very specific way.
But what about those who want to experience the game, but need a little bit of help getting there? Let’s brainstorm some accessibility options Sekiro could have added.
Read MoreWhenever a high-profile, difficult game is released, we see the same arguments about difficulty and accessibility in games, and few titles have embodied this phenomenon as wholly as Sekiro, Many people feel they just can’t play the game, whether because it’s too hard, or because it’s lacking accessibility options.
So let’s look at why that feeling is valid, and how Sekiro could have done it better.
Read MoreOne phrase you will often hear if you hang out in gaming circles for a while, is that “there’s no wrong way to play a game”, but I don’t necessarily agree. I think one of the biggest successes in Devil May Cry 5 is that they did a good job of guiding the player down the path that is the most fun to play.
Here’s how they accomplished that…
Read MorePreviously, I posted talking about the UI/UX of Red Dead Redemption II, and came to the conclusion that, it wasn’t really worth trying to fix or analyse. But after thinking about it, and talking to friends and colleagues about it, I eventually came to the conclusion that perhaps the game’s pause menu was one area that actually was worth a look. So here is my attempt at redesigning that menu from the ground up.
Read MoreMobile games get a pretty bad rap these day. People tend to look at them as exploitative, and only designed around making money. In a lot of cases they aren’t even wrong. They aren’t entirely wrong either, but the truth is that in reality, there is a lot more than that that goes into making a successful mobile game. I’ve always felt that there are a lot of concepts that, if applied smartly, could add a lot of value to a game.. So let’s look at just how Smash Ultimate does exactly that.
Read MoreIn theory, a UX designer’s job is to solve the problem of “It wasn’t anybody’s job to think about this from the player’s point of view, and now we accidentally have an unintuitive game that’s hard to understand, and a chore to play”.
But what happens when that’s the point?
Read MoreIncremental games have always kind of fascinated me. Even before the genre really existed, I always thought it was really interesting whenever a game would allow you to continue making progress while offline, or not actively engaging with it. I’ve played a lot of games in this genre over the years, and they all have wildly varying designs and success levels, so I thought I would take a look at some of the titles that I know best, and try and pick out what sets the successful ones apart from the pack.
Read MoreAssassin’s Creed Odyssey sits in an interesting position wherein, it is so very similar to it’s older brother, Assassin’s Creed Origins. So many of the screens, systems, and mechanics are inherited nearly exactly, and so it serves as a fun comparison to look at what parts of it’s UI it decided to change, and why. So hey, let’s do that!
Read MoreThe concept of “the fundamentals” is present in probably any area of life that one can get good at. You can think of them as the core skills that fall into that “easy to learn, hard to master” area, and for the most part, they are skills that just kind of come with experience. In Bloodborne, “the fundamentals” are front and center, and as it turns out, that’s a really good thing…
Read MoreOctopath Traveler is a game that clearly takes a large amount of inspiration from JRPGs of yore, but the question is, when we’re dealing with a genre that historically has stuck to very menu-heavy, straightofrward interfaces, how does this translate into a modern game's UI/UX experience? Let’s take a look at Octopath Traveler, and see how it fares.
World of Warcraft and I go way back- all the way to 2006 in fact. And while it's been several years now since I actively played, Blizzard still manages to pull me back for every new expansion, and the upcoming Battle for Azeroth is no exception. A new expansion means setting up my UI again for the umpteenth time, so I wanted to use this as a chance to walk through how and why I make all the UI decisions I do.
What's impressive about Bloodborne’s health system is that, despite making just a few small changes from the previous souls games, they manage to have a pretty big impact on the way the player approaches the rest of the game.
So, lets take a look at just how From Software achieved this…
Read MoreWhen God of War (2018) came out it set the gaming community ablaze, and as it sat at a 98 on Metacritic, I was convinced that maybe there was something worth looking at here. As it turns out, God of War 2018 is really good video game. The thing that most impressed me was that, I felt pulled into the game world in a way that most games never achieve.
So, I thought I’d take a look at how they achieved this…
Read MoreIf there is one absolute truth about my taste in games, it's that I love a good skill tree. I've always felt like a properly implemented skill system just adds so much depth to a game, and this can manifest in a huge number of ways. So when I learned that Assassin's Creed Origins was going to have a skill tree, I was pretty interested to see where it was going to go. Unfortunately, it’s was a bit of a disappointment…
Read MoreGames like Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy 5, and Bravely Default share a very similar class system with Blue Dragon. What I found to be especially interesting though, is that Blue Dragon's version felt like a notable step up from the others - not because it did anything especially crazy to the formula, but simply because of some small tweaks to alleviate the pain points in said formula…
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