#I've been poking around inside The Sims 4 and it's fascinating

[andmaybegayer]

I'm really interested by the design challenge of games like The Sims, Skyrim, Minecraft, anything where the game has to suit a wide variety of players who may all wish to do completely different things in a world with consistent rules. They all solve this differently.

The Sims is actually like a dozen minigames running simultaneously, piled on top of each other and carefully segmented from each other so that you could totally miss most of them as you pursue what you're interested in. The games are broadly similar in some ways so that you can transfer from one to another smoothly, which means your choices don't affect gameplay as much as they affect the game's supporting narrative. There are notable differences in playing The Sims as a cottagecore farmer versus a high powered city businessman but not actually as many as you might expect.

Skyrim builds a world where there are many ways to do the same tasks and they're all given relatively equal weight, which means your first run through always feels pretty good but if you try a different style of play it feels pretty samey, lots of breadth, very little depth. Skyrim dungeons actually have some very interesting design but the design is always so balanced that it never forces a thief to just go fucking ham nor forces a fighter to go away and look for a specific scroll or staff.

Minecraft has a very clear idea of what it wants players to do, but it knows it has to cater to a huge range of players from "literal toddler" to "twitch streamers building dropper farms that produce 100 000 gunpowder a minute" and so they gently try to corral new players up to more advanced play while simultaneously forcing experienced players to actually engage with their carefully crafted mechanics.

(And despite all this, these are all games people mod to hell because they want it to play the way they think is best.)