Have you heard of the anime "BOFURI: I Don't Want to Get Hurt, so I'll Max Out My Defense?" It's about a young girl playing a MMO and end up breaking the game by putting everything in defense and the developpers are desperately trying to nerf her and fix the game. I would like to hear your opinion on it as a game developper.
Bofuri is pretty typical of a game-within-a-show that was designed for a particular narrative story and would actually be pretty awful played as a game (or, at the very least, players would play it in a completely different way). If the game were real, the first thing the players would do is theorycraft out the best skills and how to obtain them, share them online, and the result would be mostly cookie-cutter super strong builds in general. Furthermore, there would be massive complaints about granting super strong unique gear to the first player to defeat a boss, and the natural player response would be to try to gank or kill steal somebody else in order to steal the first boss kill for those rewards.
The whole idea of “unique skills” in any kind of MMOG with persistent characters is terrible because of how many players play a game and how many developers work on a game. It takes us time to create, build, and test each ability. Why would we give this ability to one single player among thousands? That’s a terrible waste of development resources spent! In order to make unique skills a thing, we’d have to build thousands of them - a nightmare to try to find any semblance of balance to. Unique skills are also a fantastic narrative device to tell a story - the only characters the audience cares about are this small group, not the theoretical thousands of players in the game, and the unique skills make those characters feel special. You don’t have to care about the faceless masses who get dunked on by OP behavior like Maple’s who would probably be quitting in droves because it isn’t real. New World Online doesn’t actually have to be fun for anybody but those watching the show.
Bofuri joins a list of similar games-within-a-story designed by people who probably play games but are not game designers themselves. Sword Art Online is probably the most famous of these, but Yu-Gi-Oh’s anime and manga game Duel Monsters is also terrible. For a non-anime example, you can look at Quidditch (Harry Potter) and the Oasis (Ready Player One) as terribly designed games. The purpose of these games isn’t to be a fun game to play, but to provide a narrative setting where tension rises and things get interesting for a select group of characters. The Dual Wielding skill randomly appearing on a small number of players would make a game like Sword Art Online absolutely awful for anybody who doesn’t have it because it’s a random permanent skill that doubles your DPS with no penalties. Quidditch is awful because catching the Golden Snitch is worth 15 times the points of a regular goal. There’s no incentive to spend any time scoring regular goals when you could have a team of five seekers all trying to catch the Golden Snitch from the start of the match. This is why most games-within-a-story that get brought to real life (like Yu-Gi-Oh and Quidditch) make major rules changes in order to turn them into playable games.
It’s actually ok for games-within-a-story to be awful games to play in reality, because these games don’t actually need to be fun. They just need to be fun for an audience to watch or read about once. The Golden Snitch being worth 150 points makes for some drama and obstacles that the hero we’re supposed to cheer for can overcome and win against a team with the odds stacked against them. That’s the difference here - a real game is a situation where players want to win and will spend their time optimizing their means of doing so. A game-within-a-show is a narrative vehicle for tension and storytelling, where winning is less important than watching the characters overcome the challenges presented to them. They serve different roles and have different purposes.
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