Super Mario Odyssey

pharmakos said:

its been a long time, so maybe i'm wrong, but you don't need to collect all the stars in Mario64 to beat the game, do you?

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Nope. But if you wanted to get them all, you could easily do almost all of it without ever having to go back to a level and backtrack. Which, to me, made it very well paced. I never did get them all, I just wanted to play through the game and see all the levels. And in the process I ended up getting quite a bit anyway without ever having to go back to a level I had already visited.

Utnayan said:

Nope. But if you wanted to get them all, you could easily do almost all of it without ever having to go back to a level and backtrack. Which, to me, made it very well paced.

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On what planet was getting 7 stars per level before moving on well paced? The game had specific doors with low star counts to promote you exploring different levels.

gshurik said:

On what planet was getting 7 stars per level before moving on well paced? The game had specific doors with low star counts to promote you exploring different levels.

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"The game had specific doors with low star counts to promote you exploring different levels"

Do you get what you just said and what my argument is yet?

And I loved Mario 64. There is no way they designed the pacing around you getting 7 stars per level before moving on. That would completely nullify the natural difficulty spikes by the time you reach Hazy Maze Cave or Tiny Huge Island.

Utnayan said:

.....

"The game had specific doors with low star counts to promote you exploring different levels"

Do you get what you just said and what my argument is yet?

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Yes, exactly how Mario Odyssey has you collect a handful of moons and move on. The games were designed in the same way and not for completing each map before moving on.

The only difference is that Mario Odyssey added the harder moons as post game content to have a smoother difficulty curve.

Your entire argument seems to be that backtracking is bad, and that's a retarded argument.

You have to be realistic though, development does eventually have to stop on a game and at the end of it you need to see whether it has well paced sizeable content.

I found that Mario Odyssey did. Would I love 5 new kingdoms with brand new moons and new unique ways to play? Sure. But then I'd prefer it to have 100 new kingdoms with new moons and new unique ways to play. Sadly time is something that exists and development does need to end. Mario Odyssey had a good amount of content throughout the primary "story" content as well as post game content. That's all that's important to me.

I mean feature creep is a massive problem with kickstarter titles because teams don't know how to create content and pace it properly. You have games that end up in development hell for years because an amateur dev wants to add one more piece of content over and over again.

You have a storyboard written up and you hit that target. If you're ahead of schedule then most devs will add some interesting extra content (or more likely start working on DLC) and then ship it on the targeted date.

It's impossible to say whether Mario Odyssey was ahead or behind on content (though I would guess behind) which probably put them in a position where they feasibly had to choose between adding another kingdom that would provide maybe 3 hours of content, or post game stuff that added 20 hours of content.

It's all about knowing your demographic, and they would have had many debates on that.

pharmakos said:

i mean, i suppose you could make the argument that if they had taken the time to design extra levels to go through instead of having to backtrack, that would be even better. but any good game would be better with extra levels, so that's kind of a silly argument.

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That's where I am going with it. Instead of creating 4 levels to go through to get to the final "optional" 2, they send you back to existing maps you already played though. It wouldn't have been that terribly hard to accomplish.

maybe 3 hours of content, or post game stuff that added 20 hours of content.

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Here is where we differ. I would take that 3 hours of true creative designed content over 20 hours of fluff. You call the 20 hours content. I don't. I call it cheap. Doesn't make you wrong if you like it or enjoy it. I would just rather have 3 hours of solid level design than however many hours of "Bleh".

pharmakos said:

yeah, that's understandable, but the game had to get out the door, so they could only do so much.

debate settled? i seem to have good success mediating gshurik vs.utnayan arguments

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Sure carry on

Utnayan said:

That's where I am going with it. Instead of creating 4 levels to go through to get to the final "optional" 2, they send you back to existing maps you already played though. It wouldn't have been that terribly hard to accomplish.



Here is where we differ. I would take that 3 hours of true creative designed content over 20 hours of fluff. You call the 20 hours content. I don't. I call it cheap. Doesn't make you wrong if you like it or enjoy it. I would just rather have 3 hours of solid level design than however many hours of "Bleh".

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Are you actually implying that it wouldn't be that hard to add 2 new kingdoms worth of art assets, music, level design and content?

Are you having a giggle?

gshurik said:

Are you actually implying that it wouldn't be that hard to add 2 new kingdoms worth of art assets, music, level design and content?

Are you having a giggle?

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Art assets were reused in various areas of the different maps and just hidden well (Not all mind you) and everyone does that so let's not get carried away with the "Effort" Schtick, which is where I think you are going with this. Would that be feasible for any other Dev team than Nintendo? Yes. Would that ever happen quickly under Miyamoto? No. So in a way, you are correct given the development circumstances of what that particular team has to put up with.

Utnayan said:

Art assets were reused in various areas of the different maps and just hidden well (Not all mind you) and everyone does that so let's not get carried away with the "Effort" Schtick, which is where I think you are going with this. Would that be feasible for any other Dev team than Nintendo? Yes. Would that ever happen quickly under Miyamoto? No. So in a way, you are correct given the development circumstances of what that particular team has to put up with.

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The pacing of the project wasn't really down to Miyamoto though, was it? Koizumi dictated the pacing of development, they only really consulted him on game concepts. They even stated that Miyamoto was a highly supporting executive producer that suggested changes over demanding changes.

Reusing art assets for generic parts is to be expected, thematically creating and designing a new kingdom that didn't feel like a copy of another kingdom is an entirely different story. We're talking about a game that already had 2 kingdoms thematically similar (lake and beach), wherein they hoped that players wouldn't pick up on it (they did).

The amount of effort needed to go into designing another kingdom probably would have been larger than the effort that went into the post game content, and then they would probably still want to add that post game content anyway due to the demographic they were shooting for.

Development is a game of push and pull and they obviously found that adding content in the way that they did would be better received than adding one more kingdom with limited thematic exclusivity.

gshurik said:

The pacing of the project wasn't really down to Miyamoto though, was it?

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From what I have read (And definitely sugarcoated in my opinion) Miyamoto was critical of certain game development ideas and "suggested" they be changed. Suggested being the operative word. Miyamoto rules game design at Nintendo, for better or worse, regardless of title. with an iron fist. People are legit afraid of him and their jobs when they have to interact with him. Given the track record though of quality 1st party titles, I am guessing he expects greatness.

But from everything I have heard/read, he has absolute 100% control over everything, and he is the go to sell to. And if you get a project green lit, it is expected one will keep him up to date weekly on all progress and game updates along with getting critical feedback from his play time, of which one WILL make changes to reflect his feedback or... bye bye. And when he wants something changed, it gets changed.