BombermanBoard

Azure · #468 Posted: Wed Feb 24, 2016 5:43 pm

Plasm, I think your criticism really shines light on what I think will be one of the biggest hurdles for this game going for. This game is very much designed with bomberman fanatics in mind. And honestly, if that's the project goal - to make the most robust bomberman for fans, than really Jaklub can just keep doing what he's doing. But I think if he wants to target new players, he might want to make some concessions.

I've brought this game to my game night a couple of times, which range from experienced bomberman players to newbies. Typically when somebody wins, they pick a new stage, and of course people want to pick the coolest looking stages. The thing is, each stage has an item preset. So when we play a new stage and new items show up, half the players don't know what the heck anything does. The first night we played, MOST of the matches had some level of confusion resulting from weird items. There's just SO much stuff in this game and a lot of it is not intuitive. (note: being able to trigger Item Help cutscenes from the item select page would be a huge help)

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that if the target audience is people that are already in love with the Bomberman series, than keep doing whatever you want because we obviously all love it. But if you want to develop a game that is accessible to everyone, I'd really suggest looking into trimming down the fat. For example, do we really need 3 gloves? I understand that they all have different functions, but couldn't you just put together the functions that offer the best general gameplay and call that THE glove item? And items like Merger... sure they're kind of cool here and there, but I don't want to see them every single time I play a stage that has that preset on. And I know there's an item switch (which I use liberally) but I don't think new players are going to know what to leave on and turn off the first time they go to battle mode.

Anyway, that's just my opinion on one of the design aspects of this game. I have a feeling that many people will disagree with me, and that's okay. I just hope they disagree because they think I am wrong in design principle; not because everyone on this site loves bomberman and wants MORE content. And Jaklub, if you are interested in more methods to "trim the fat", let me know. If not, that's okay, and I will continue to support this game either way.