Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Terraria, the
action-adventure sandbox game from Re-Logic games. With over 200 hours played
at this point, it’s obviously held my attention for quite a while. I was
discussing the game with my wife tonight, and I initially said that the game
was perfect. Or at least perfect for the game it was trying to be. But, to her
credit, my wife pushed me to keep thinking about what I would change. And I did
eventually find some (small) issues with the game.
My number one issue is inventory management. Terraria’s dev
team does an amazing job delivering free, content-rich updates, and those
updates have added some helpful features for managing all your stone blocks, countless
potions, and leftover furniture. The system of storing items in various chests
is still unwieldy, however, and I find myself irked when I spend an entire play
session reorganizing my chests simply because I needed to expand my home.
The much, much harder question is: what would I change? I’m
not sure there’s a great answer here. You could get rid of all chests and just
have a global inventory, but that would take some of the survival and resource
management mechanics out of the game. One big “home chest” that you can’t move
but holds everything? That would lead to a massive mess of an inventory and
creates a huge problem if you do have to move the chest for some reason. All of
the “fixes” I came up with in my own quick brainstorm had serious drawbacks as
well.
Not every conundrum in game design has a clean answer. For
example, in Alkanaur we’re always looking at ways to speed up combat for the
player, but no matter what there’s going to be some pauses in the game. When we
chose to make a turn-based strategy game, we simultaneously chose not to have
the responsiveness of a real-time action game. Of course, such thinking can
stifle creativity. If designers always left things the way they were, we’d miss
out on a lot of great innovations. I think the key is accepting that every
design has a drawback, while at the same time pushing ourselves, constantly
asking: what could we change?
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