Thanks for your blog and the resources listed in your post. It’s interesting: today I was thinking “I wonder what professional game designers do in terms of reasoning about game mechanics, automatically validating mechanics vs. level designs, or enhancing level design tools to identify potential troubles spots, etc.”. If I’d thought that a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have found your blog, which seems to have some good answers for my questions.

Looking forward to more,
Steven

For me a good example for a well balanced weapon system and an awfull system is the difference between Dead Space and Resident Evil 5. In Resident Evil 5 most weapons are clearly dominated by other weapons. If you could you would use the grenade launcher all the time and the player is actually frustrated when he finds a new weapon of the same type which is clearly better than his old weapon because he already spend so much money to upgrade his old one that all this money would be wasted if he would go for the new weapon. In Dead Space is weapon is completely different and effective in different situations. If you decide to upgrade a weapon it will not be better than the other one, you just decide in which situations you want to be even more effective. All weapons surve their purpose and the game motivates you to upgrade them all to reach the highest grade of effectiveness. Other positive example are BioShock or Unreal Tournament, where each weapon is usefull and in Bioshock it makes even sense to combine them to reach best results. These are valuable decisions which enrich the gameplay.

Do you feel there’s weight in defning the good, the bad, and the ugly in the examples you’ve provided?