So there has been an interview running around from Nintendo talking about how they look for designers who aren't that...

I think it's mainly because the skills needed to be a good game designer are very different than the skills needed to be a good player/gm. But a lot of GM/player (but mostly GM in my experience) likes to think they're very good game designer because they made some homebrew for their homegame.

How do you get from
>people who are only gamers make bad designers
to
>people who like playing games are bad at playing games
?

I see where the premise is coming from, but I strongly disagree with it. You want to be involving highly creative people and abstract thinkers. You don't want all game designers all the time and you definitely want a bit of thinking outside the box.

You also want someone remotely fucking competent, and that understands the point of the product and its material. So for example you don't need to hire a programmer for level design, but if they've never made a dungeon that's a problem.

You want raw creative engines whom you can harness and guide with other coworkers. You want forever dms and people who write 500 page rulebooks for fun. If they're not terrible to start you can refine them into something beautiful, and that thing under your own brand name.

The video game metaphor isn't perfect because they're essentially complaining about hiring PCs to be DMs. Hire DMs to be DMs and let them tell a story to the PCs like nature intended.

>You want forever dms and people who write 500 page rulebooks for fun
As seen by all those top quality fantasy heartbreakers that work for nobody other than that DM and their group?

Miyamoto's statement is triggering people but it's entirely sensible. What and and have said I think is completely true. Just being really devoted to games doesn't actually mean you'll make a good one - in fact, you would have probably have made one already if that was the case. Bringing in that wider pool of interests is more likely to result in a compelling experience for everyone.

>As seen by all those top quality fantasy heartbreakers that work for nobody other than that DM and their group?
Do you even know what fantasy heartbreaker means? It's the direct opposite of what the rest of your post says.

I really disagree with Miyamoto on this one. I think that you need to have at least a modicum of experience with the medium/genre you're working with, in order to understand what draws people to them in the first place. If you get people who are completely unfamiliar it's a real crapshoot between innovation brought from outside ideas and development that completely misses the things people like about games.
A much worse problem in both fields these days is games being made by people who seem to have actual contempt for the games and their audiences. It's not quite as bad in Veeky Forums fields but I've seen a lot of vidya made by people who don't play and don't like games, and hate people who play them

I think Veeky Forums has hit the crux of the issue on this one - it's not so much you want people who don't care about games as it is you want people who care about things other than games. Else you just get turboautists who are writing super derivative schlock.

Miyamoto can say that because he's the top dog. With many years of design experience under his belt, he can sanity-check any neophyte's idea. But without someone like Miyamoto at the top, and logical designers underneath, how would this idea ever be realized? The large number of fantasy heartbreakers testify to this, don't know why this is still a topic of controversy.

I think you're bringing a culture war into a place where it isn't totally needed. If a person knows enough about games to make them and apply for a job, they clearly don't hate video games conceptually. You don't want a full dev team making games for nobody but gamers, that just gets you the hardcore otaku sort of audience and content.

Miyamoto is one of the people he described though. Half the games he was so involved in he was bringing in his experience in hobbies outside of games, and his comments to newbies tends to be more about advice as an artist or a general player than a video game veteran.

Not knowing anything about video games or how to make them hasn't been an issue for plenty of people. Just go look at 90% of indie games on steam

'Top quality' was sarcastic senpai.

I don't take from Miyamoto's statement that the framework to actually produce a game is missing. But I can understand the importance for, in headhunting, looking for the exact right person over all the game knowledge they might ultimately develop. A lot of top companies operate like that, even - the person over the training (which they can give).

I mean Shigeru's statement is about the people driving their games, not taking non-game experienced people to the point of being unable to make games.

And to be fair this isn't bad if making that more niche product is all the makers want to do. Like CK2 isn't for everyone but it's an amazing games and it's for enough people that it is successful. But Nintendo wants huge audiences for their A+ titles - they want them to be cultural phenomenons and shared, universal experiences as well as being good games.

>Just go look at 90% of indie games on steam
You can cut off that last 10% if you include the tags Survival, Crafting, Open World, and Early Access.

>'Top quality' was sarcastic senpai.
I was talking specifically about 'fantasy heartbreaker'

Hey now. There's like a couple of good ones. Maybe even a dozen.

FTL is pretty much the best game of that bunch.

Does it matter? TTRPGs are carried by recognizable IPs, as long as rules are okay they are good to go.

FTL is good
Shovel Knight and Hollow Knight are good
A Hat in Time is nice
Risk of Rain was good.
I like Isaac but I'm not sure if Edmund is really "indie" anymore.
Point is, there are some gems, you just have to dig for them

>Do you even know what fantasy heartbreaker means?

Everyone that played D&D in their teens and decided that they could do better but simply ended up replicating D&D but a tiny bit different this time?

>Just go look at 90% of indie games on steam

How many open-world survival crafting rogue-like rogue-lite metroidvanias can the market support?

The point Miyamoto is making is that gamers as game creators tend to make charcoal rubbings of their last five triple-a game playing experiences; there is no originality, just endless revisions of established genres and classics.

>Everyone that played D&D in their teens and decided that they could do better but simply ended up replicating D&D but a tiny bit different this time?
No, it means one of the numerous D&D redesigns which actually have golden ideas inside. Hence they break the heart by wasting bright ideas and creativity.

But Nintendo has built their empire on rehashes.

They have at least one good idea in a horrible boring shell. That's the term as it was laid out:

indie-rpgs.com/articles/9/

>They have at least one good idea in a horrible boring shell.
Funny, that describes most SRS games.

I don't know what SRS means in this context.

Pretty much this. They're hyper focused and at their best might have some random things that other people might like but more often than not their shit isn't even going to be liked by similar "I live for the game" types. We've seen how much shit is raised over simple +1s on stats for the people wraped up in the games.

You play with the rules and idiots who only step outside to get a paycheck to spend on more rpg stuff is the problem. Those people are terrible in helping a game along besides showing up and thats arguable that there being a game with them involved is better than no game.

Yes, you don’t have to be a non-gamer but you certainly need to have SOME other inspirations than just other games. History, literature, art, music, nature, anything. Otherwise you’re just part of an incestuous human centipede.

Probably SJW.

"One good idea in a horrible broken shell" sounds a lot like "One needed improvement, tacked on to a framework that resembles the original inspiration."

Or in other words "one neglected designer who would have had something to add but wasn't given the opportunity and wasted time making a facsimile just to house their idea."

Get a team of nerds like that together, put them to work with a little guidance on the game that inspired them in the first place, and baby you got a stew going. I think there's a lot of oversimplification of the creative process, and passion can't be relied on alone but it can never be neglected either.

>Get a team of nerds like that together, put them to work with a little guidance on the game that inspired them in the first place, and baby you got a stew going.
That is exactly how a fantasy heartbreaker is born though.

>when you have no idea how to translate your other interests into worldbuilding

just keep trying. What are your interests user.

>How many open-world survival crafting rogue-like rogue-lite metroidvanias can the market support?
More than you want considering how cheap most of them are. If you can sink 6 hours to find out the 2 dollar game is bad you've done better than most forms of entertainment.

One issue I have in the indie scene from being a roguelike player is the insistence that the procedural generation makes everything better. It doesn't, it merely extends reputability and removes area designers from the equation. When your game is shallow and at best not offensive to play all the randomness in the world won't save your game and the time you spent doing it could have been better put to use adding content and mechanics to the game to make it actually fun. Honestly I think people making roguelikes should make the content first, have a hard coded run through the game that isn't randomized and if it isn't fun tweak the mechanics utnil it is, then they can start having dungeon layout and drops change. Will never happen as procedural generation attracts lazy people who don't' want the responsibility of making a game be good on their own.

No, that's stupid. If you're not passionate about it, if you're unwilling to sit down, crunch numbers, come up with ideas, weld those ideas together, scrap it, and try again and again - don't fucking do it. Or, in other words, if you're not gonna be passionate about it, don't do it.

On the other hand, I do agree with the fact that if you're JUST about game design, you're gonna be shit. Even to design a basic barebones system, you need to be good at probability theory and logic. If you want to world-build, you better be gud at science and/or writing. If you're designing an RPG about a niche (such as an RPG that has a strong focus on fishing), then you better be gud at that niche (fishing in our example).

On the third hand, Nintendo hasn't come out with a game that has an engaging story or one that isn't just random button-mashing, so what the fuck do they know?

How is that possible?

The guidance part is important. You need a head designer with vision and a LOT of different influences to herd all those cats.

They might create something heartbreakingly close to perfect. They might create something esoteric and unapproachable, but what they will not do is make something that is just another corporate cash grab product.

You can't guarantee you'll get high art every time. You can at least maintain quality in other places while they search for that diamond in the rough.

Really good procedural design is extremely lit though.

They include but are not limited to the Bronze Age, the Pleistocene, coral reefs, birds, deserts, creation myths, and cheese.

Mostly, not being good at describing how thing gets from point A to point B.

>The guidance part is important. You need a head designer with vision and a LOT of different influences to herd all those cats.
Right, these are the people Miyamoto is talking about hiring though. You don't need them to be that into games.

Trying to "figure out" the creative process is in of itself a pointless task. You can certainly attempt to do it, apply industry standards, or what have you - but almost every single good thing ever has always been the work of one or two talented/passionate individuals. Very rarely is it a team, though there are obviously exceptions.

Okay, but at the same time, those people aren't "creatives" or "game designers." They're managers. But the problem with managers is that they think that there's concrete solutions to the ephemeral problem of "how do we make this thing gud?"

Agreed, in my opinion it's a "by gamers for gamers" approach.

Fans of the Halo games have certain expectations, and there's no way that anyone not into Halo can meet those expectations. You need to know WHY people like Halo in order to please Halo fans, and the only way to know WHY people like Halo is to like Halo yourself.

On the other hand, I can see non-gamers designing an excellent original IP, un-hindrered by genre staples, cliches, or sacred cows.

In other words, yes non-gamers can be better at distancing themselves and thinking outside the box when it comes to games, but that's not always a good thing.

I wouldnt' say that. Kickstarter has shown us that these "passionate" individuals fold when they don't have someone holding their paycheck telling them to compromise and make the fucking game right.

I'm not saying that a passionate person will always come up with something good. I'm saying the opposite of that. Something good is usually done by one, maybe a small team of people.

And that, in and of itself, is true. Especially with video games which, lets face it, are more normie friendly.

The part that gets lost in translation moving back to tabletop is that there are such people around, who ALSO are into tabletop games. Maybe you can hire from entirely outside the industry, and maybe doing so is the right move, but you're also guaranteed to be looking past good people to do so.

m8 I think you've got a weird conception of corporate industry and the nature of management, so I don't see much point in going on with this back and forth. There's nothing wrong with good management or with trying to manage people to make a good thing.

But it isn't just managers either. The article specifically looks at freer game designers. Her'es a link:

nytimes.com/2017/12/29/technology/nintendo-switch.html

>This younger generation has been carefully chosen; Mr. Miyamoto says he wants people who are more likely to create new kinds of play, rather than merely aim to perfect current ones.

>“I always look for designers who aren’t super-passionate game fans,” Mr. Miyamoto said. “I make it a point to ensure they’re not just a gamer, but that they have a lot of different interests and skill sets.” Some of the company’s current stars had no experience playing video games when they were hired.

I don't honestly understand what people disputing this have, as their argument. Like this is true. They can skill you up. This is what they think makes good games. The reverse is that you think someone who is only obsessive about games makes the best games. And that's just not true from games all of us will have played.

>Something good is usually done by one, maybe a small team of people
Yup. You want something amazing? Go find that one autistic savant genius who makes a setting in the morning, rules for a penguins fishing rpg in the evening, and composes a symphony instead of sleeping. Give them all the resources and a team to refine what they shit out, and start raking in money.

But no one likes admitting that they're not helpful. Especially management.

There are def tabletop people who I could see being great in vidya design.

Standard Roleplaying System, Japan's equivalent of the D20 system.

They almost all invariably have one or two good ideas that at best end up not being used in any meaningful way or at worst undermine/are undermined by the rest of the blindly copied and thrown together system.

That sounds to me like type that needs management, otherwise they'll add features as they come up with them until the product is a bloated mess.

People who play games are losers, that's why Dungeon World sucks so much

Yeah, art would be great if everybody was just Mozart.

This isn't an uncommon phenomenon. The best people in a lot of fields have broad educations or cross training with different areas of expertise, so they have wildly different perspectives from which to view things.

Imagine how depressed Mozart would be if he was just average at writing music

So, I have worked with corporate management, and it's the epitome of ivory tower design. "We need to do thing A" while the people on the ground are saying "No we need to do thing C," but the managers who are listening to focus group and other managers, equally as disconnected still decide to do thing A, and everyone is unhappy, including the managers, when their stuff doesn't pan out.

And that leads in to what you're saying.
>THEY can skill you up.
>This is what is THEY think makes good games.
And the problem with that is what I have stated. Most corporate entities are retarded and focus on short-term maximization of profits. Their idea of long term very rarely goes past 4-6 years. Combine that with the tunnel vision that corporate management generally has, and it's a recipe for a product that nobody would want (see 4E, CofD, to a lesser extent 5E or if we're looking at Nintendo, the new releases have either been lukewarm to hostile OR they were successful when they were re-releases/updates of old titles).

The main takeaway of my point is that corporate design suffers from poor leadership, not knowing their real market, and getting people who don't understand the subject matter to make decisions about the game design.

If you're identifying yourself by your hobby, traditionally you're not really into multiple interests.

Oh, all those things could definitely have games fit around them entirely, and most of them can easily slot into background noise for games about other things. Why not run a Bronze Age era game where competing creation myths are being researched by going to find the beings that supposedly made them? Or a game about a god/goddess coming to a town and creating a lush ecosystem? Or even a game about simply making cheeses? All those things are interesting to you for certain reasons: just try and expand on those reasons that brought you into the subject to make something of your own to show.

So the first part of what you say is true, but then I feel like "5e is a game nobody wants" and "Nintendo's new IPs have all been failures" are factually untrue statements, nor are they results of corporate entities focused entirely on short term profits. Nor are they even focused on management bringing in people with diverse hobbies and interests, then supplying the traditional skills and training themselves.

4e's issue lies mostly on some downright godawful advertising than anything, really.

Standard Role-playing System. It's the most commonly used rpg system in Japan. Imagine the dark days of d20 system up to 11.

> if we're looking at Nintendo, the new releases have either been lukewarm to hostile
I mean the switch has been extremely succesful compared to the wii u

4es main problem it was made by balanced at any cost autists who didn't care about anything else. It's like it proves the idea you shouldn't let your audience near your product in a design capacity.

Don't misinterpret what I'm saying. 5E is essentially being ignored by WoTC. Notice how there's a dearth of material when compared to 3E/3.5 and 4E. Which, if you're into 5e, means that your stuff is stagnating.

And I didn't say the new IPs by Nintendo have been failures, I'm saying that they've been met with a lukewarm reception. Now, granted, I follow video games much less than I used to, so perhaps I am unaware of something, but I don't think there was any game by Nintendo that had people unanimously praising it.

There are a lot of issues in 4e, advertising included, but the major thing was that since MMOs were the big thing back when 4E was being developed, WoTC/Hasbro decided to make it as MMO-like as possible, and as such, it failed.

>but I don't think there was any game by Nintendo that had people unanimously praising it.

The latest Zelda and Mario games have gotten a lot of praise actually, but they both also did something different for the franchises.

>new Mario and Zelda
>lukewarm to hostile
mate, come on

ARMS was a big success, over a million sales for a new franchise. Splatoon was a crazy super success, over 8 million on the failed experiment Wii U and Splatoon 2 being just as popular. Zelda and Mario were some of the best received games from any company in years, although they're not new IP's.

That is not a good measuring stick they botched that system on may levels. For one marketing was non existent to the point that a lot of people I knew thought it was just a gimmick controller for use with the Wii and not a system itself. The other part was Nintendo was continuing its terrible support of 3rd parties and wii-u develpment set ups were really expensive, required use of a painful screen/touch set up as decreed by nintendo (its like all game required waggle controles for wth ewii) or it doesn't get on, and was the weakest of systems. This is compounded by the fact that people thought it was just a fucking add on to the wii and not selling at all.

The switch has the opposite approach and is shitting out third party games on the store like its the fucking steam of consoles for good or worse.

Hasbro wanted to kill D&D table top after 4E and just use the licence for games. 5E is a skeleton crew that managed to keep their job alive and don't want to fuck it up by blowing their load early. Honestly the only way Hasbro would pour money into D&D now is if it made magic the gathering money.

Shh shh now. Don't confront him with facts thats considered inflicting mental anguish and thus harassment.

My thoughts exactly. I don't know what games released by Nintendo recently have had hostile reception...hell, excluding maybe ARMS, I can't think of any new releases that weren't met with almost universal praise.

Mario Party: Top 100 was received pretty badly, but what's new there

/v/ermin begone

It's even weirder than that, it's design around what D&D was being played. Which is why it fits so seamlessly with Eberron and why Keith Baker still uses 4e - because both emerge from the same point of view. It's also very much more focused on the game area than anything, really.
Funny you should say that, 4e is a case of drinking from a source that's drunk from your origin. MMORPG's notions were never unique to them, and have their origins in D&D. 4e took that back but explicitly said so. A big man who protected the weak man in the back who on the other hand could, say, make the fighter stronger or make his enemies weaker - it's one of the most basic concepts of D&D-esque party building, but it's just outlining a Defender+Leader/Controller combo in 4e because it explictly outlines the terminology. In any case, the comparison to vidya is nothing new or specific to 4e. 3e was known as Paper Diablo by 2e grogs for a good while.

The new Zelda is mostly held up by fanboyism. Its a good game, but there's a lot of flaws that hold it back. If it was anything other than Zelda, it would've gotten lukewarm reception.

The new Mario is great, though. I wouldn't say it was a departure from what other games did, it was just a good game that did benefit from the idea of diverse hiring that the interview was talking about.

...

How do you get that from Shigeru's statement, unless you just want to interpret it like that?

Because then he's a martyr, user.

The new zelda game really is held up by fanboys at this point. It tried to be as undirected as the first game but threw out any idea of progress like the first had. It even threw out the concept of dungeons. The only thing it has going for it is that it looks decent enough and scratches a lot of itches for people who aren't video game mind set.

You want to go to that mountain over there? You can, you aren't stopped by unsalable wall with a guard who won't let you through unless you talk to Zelda.

That place has a river? You have a glider go to high ground, knock down a log, use the weird statis mechnic, not find a 'ladder' item in a random and get across it.

About the only thing it doesn't help new people with is the difficulty spike of the castle and guardians which is honestly the only difficulty spike in the game.

The good thing for Nintendo is that it has a larger appeal to people who aren't trained to go into a dungeon/sub dungeon/npc fetch quest get an item and move into the next one like the past few Zelda managed to pull the last bit of joy from. Basicaly they killed zelda to make zelda appeal to a larger audience in a way that the fanboys aren't too bothered by unless they look hard enough to realized what was all dropped. Which is kinda what nintendo wanted, they wanted something new and appealing and they got it.

Worldbuilding doesn’t matter. Playability (or ”gameability”) matters.

Worldbuilding should always be the last step because only at the point where you have your themes, what the current campaign is trying to acomplish, and what highlights you want to have in your campaign. Sounds ass backwards because it is but its better to go "I need a giant magic tower for this fight with an arch mage what can I establish that would make that make sense?" rather than "I need a giant magic tower what established civilizations do I have that would make one and would have the population to do it?".

He said ”passionate game fans”, not ”passionate game designers”, idiot.

5e doesn’t have a ”dearth of material”, it has a stated intent of a slow release cycle. It’s trying to avoid exactly the clusterfuck of 3e.

>Basicaly they killed zelda to make zelda appeal to a larger audience in a way that the fanboys aren't too bothered by unless they look hard enough to realized what was all dropped
Jesus fucking Christ user

Stormfags have been directed at Veeky Forums for a while, if you haven’t noticed.

>Lets not follow the release cycle of our best selling game because we
Yep, totally makes sense.

Why yes, it does make total sense to actually playtest your material and take the time to make sure you're not just shitting out horribly broken and unusable content, while still giving players and DMs more content by releasing new UAs nearly every month.
Or are you one of those 3.PF retards who acts like anything less than 150 books is "stifling your options?"

Eh, different strokes for different creative folks. For the majority of creative endeavors I agree with you, but every once in a while a work can really click the other way around. It depends how the people working on the project deal with the creative process as much of anything.

user, I know you are dumb, but D&D literally died already because they just kept churning out supplements to make more money, no matter how shit the supplements were.

Nintendo games are weaksauce, though, lol. Their two biggest titles, with decades of history behind them, barely compared to PS4 regular titles.

We already have system wars, we don't need your shitty console wars here as well.

Any time spent writing things for a game is a waste (apart from as personal practice of course) if there is no game played by people. A game should always have design goals based on WHAT KIND OF EXPERIENCE DO I WANT PLAYERS TO HAVE. You have to know what you’re trying to do, and do it well. Otherwise you’re just aimlessly making up stuff for le ebin original setting without any deliberate goal of how do you want it to feel in action.