The last few days I’ve been playing a lot of God of War II and thoroughly enjoying every last moment of it. That is, up until now.
I’ve just gotten to some of the last levels I presume as the story arc is nearing its end (the Phoenix Champers) and the difficulty have just risen so steeply in the last few levels that the game is becoming more frustrating than fun to play.

Let me explain. In the last few years I’ve steadily gone from being a hard-core gamer to a somewhat ex-core gamer due to high level of time consuming elements of my life (such as university studies, wife and son). And that has some clear effects on my timing and aiming skills. These skills only stay good if honed continuously, and I simply don’t have the time for that.
And in the case of God of War II many of the later sequences of the game requires just these skills. As I’ve become an ex-core gamer I tend to play on the easy setting just so that I have time to complete the game without using too much time on it and still see the parts of the game that everyone is talking about. The problem is just that the geometry don’t scale. The difficulty of making a jump in a 3D environment is just as hard on extreme difficulty as it is on easy. And that’s no good.

When games moved into 3D, however, the jumping puzzle became a more difficult task. In addition to requiring the player to control their jumps in an extra dimension, the problem of viewpoint reared its ugly head. Games with fixed cameras sometimes made it quite difficult for the players to see where they were landing, while manual control added another control to juggle. #

I would really like to see that if I choose to play on easy setting that the jumping and timing puzzles gets scaled accordingly, else I’ll end up in the position I’m at with God of War II currently; I’ll just stop playing and all the hard work and godly greatness being purred into the levels to come will forever be lost on me.

Today I handed in a paper on design patterns for level design. It’s a paper I’ve been working on on the side in the last 12 weeks. As this is a side project the scope is rather small, but it might very well be a topic that I’ll explorer further in future projects or in my master thesis.

I have made an analysis of these multiplayer levels from popular first-person shooters (FPS):

From Day of Defeat: Source:

• Kalt
• Donner
• Anzio
• Flash
• Avalanche

From Unreal Tournament 2004:

• Maul
• Two Tombs
• Grassy Knoll
• Double Damage
• Absolute Zero
• Bridge of Faith
• Electric Field

From Battlefield 1942

• Tobruk
• El Alamein
• Iwo Jima

And have from that analysis compiled what I believe to be common practices of development and have formalized these in Level Design Patterns:

1. Multiple paths
2. Local fights
3. Collision points
4. Reference points
5. Defense areas
6. Risk Incentive

Read much more about these patterns in the paper itself.

Download the entire paper here (PDF ~ 2.01 MB)