Seeing discourse on cohost design from people coming in from tumblr and a lot of it is like "Ah, but you see, cohost is designed this way on purpose! You gotta ask why you want those features to begin with!" and like that's great that's GENUINELY great I think cohost did a good job pushing things the other way with website design trends. There are some great decisions they've made to re...

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth released a demo and... there are yellow painted cliffs, reigniting a conversation that keeps coming up every few months. Now, I have no exact opinion on it's use in FF7R. It seems to be explained in universe (it's a temporary route, purposefully marked), and marking paths is hardly a sin. Hinting at the so called Golden Path is a fundamental aspect of level design. This isn't about FF7R.

... But oh god did it unfortunately choose that yellow paint that has come to symbolize a type of hand holding that has been wearing on players over the last decade. It has started to feel similar to the ancient Old Man Murray "Start to Crate" system, judging a game on "How long it took to see a crate", representing the point where "the developers ran out of ideas".

This standard wasn't exactly fair and neither is judging a game on using yellow paint. FF7R is probably fine, because again, this isn't about FF7R. It is, of course, not even about the yellow paint. It's about what the yellow paint represents.

I think about this video a lot. It probably pops into my mind at least once a week. It's hilarious, but also dystopian. Hell, it's hilarious because it's dystopian. Seeing this weird game that is technically kinda actually really cool have so little identity of its own, instead being some viscous Ready Player One gruel of pop culture. Endless slop to help the Battle Passes go down easier....

I'll be honest, this year I hadn't played much new I haven't already written about so this year is going to go a little different. I'm going to talk about a BUNCH of stuff.

I Guess I Didn't Talk about Elden Ring

It was great? What do you want from me? What could I possibly say? Like it was a Fromsoft Souls game not named Dark Souls II of course I loved it. I guess I could say it has some of my favorite lore? I feel like it and Bloodborne do the best having their lore feel more forward and vi...

Since everyone is doing their ... anti?? game design takes, let me do mine.

We'll start with the coldest take. Good Game Design accomplishes a Goal. I think that's... pretty universally uncontroversial? Like even if someone somehow disagreed, I don't think they'd say I was going out on much of a limb. But despite this, there is trouble!! Because not all goals are good goals and I feel like the majority of budding devs who go down the design rabbit hole start designing with two of the worst...