📐 Game Design is a Pyramid Scheme

Heya you,

So the sides of a pyramid are pretty big right?

Well if the pyramid is 4 sided, sure. But what if we made a 9 sided pyramid, a Nov-amid if you will. Each side would have to be rather thing to accommodate the rest. And if you wanted to make one side bigger, you might have to remove an entire side just to make room.

What am I getting at?

Video games, it is always gonna come back to video games.

Games have so many different sides to them (Narrative, Voice Acting, Music, Gameplay, VFX, Art style, graphical fidelity, SFX, animation, accessibility, difficulty, length, retention, etc.) and they all have to align somehow. The tricky part is when you try to add more weight on something, and cause everything else to be overshadowed, or worse, come crashing down.

Let's take Anthem for example, super gorgeous game, had genuinely good gameplay, but there was nothing there to keep players around. On top of that, the game was riddled with bugs, glitches and severe performance issues. (perhaps optimization is another side) This is an example of a game that pushed its graphical and gameplay sides, but left its optimization, difficulty and retention sides completely paper thin. Because of that, the game crumbled mere days after landing.

Now lets take another large scale game, but one that wasn't so tragic...like Assassin's Creed Odyssey. A game filled with a wealth of content, countryside and collectables galore. What most consider to be a good game...but why? I know people that have played it, but almost no one can tell me what actually makes it uniquely enjoyable. It's just...a fun thing to play.

This is an example of a well balanced pyramid, every aspect got a fair amount of love, and evenly distributed. Nothing is really overshadowing anything else...at the cost of nothing standing out.

For a final example, let's take one of the highest rated games in the last few years. Baldur's Gate 3. This game does not have the best graphics, a banger soundtrack, or incredible animation.

But what it does have, an insane amount of care put into its retention, voice acting and gameplay. The developers made these sides of the pyramid absolutely resplendent and left the rest to be supporting material, instead of trying to bring them up to the same level. While this may sound like a lazy move, it isn't. By focusing on something in particular, they achieved industry breaking excellence.