#also since the SSO designs are on there and SSO isn't using them it would seem like she retained full rights to her own art?

[jorvikzelda]

By the way... Equine Epics, the artist behind SSO's loading screens and book covers before SSE stopped working with independent contractors (which she was) and started using 3D renders for their loading screens, has a store where you can buy her designs on various physical items. Think t-shirts, mugs, posters, notebooks, mousepads, so on and so forth. Some of the old SSO loading screens are on there, plus some other designs in the same style.

[juni-ravenhall]

sso vs the concept of good gameplay. yeah its another fucking book length post >:3

thoughts from someone with a brain full of what good game design means and tons of years of studying and analysing that topic etc, bc of game design being one of my main interests.

basically the major thing i want to say about the hollow woods update aside from "yay forest kinda pretty :)" is that most of it doesn't really consist of what i would call gameplay. this is ofc something u can argue back and forth that im also open to, bc respectful analytical discussion is healthy.

the firefly stuff id personally call something more like "satisfaction play" than gameplay (idk if there's a widespread term that anyone else made up already). there is zero challenge to gathering fireflies - it's on the level of poking a glitter slime simulation app. it might feel satisfying to collect them, but there is no practised skill needed, no thinking or planning or anything. so i don't consider this "gameplay", but "satisfaction play" in itself isn't a bad thing, either. it's not that "gameplay" would be inherently better than "satisfaction play" in every case.

the puzzles are gameplay, i think - not very challenging gameplay (the answers are right there as soon as the puzzle is presented), but it *is* arguably gameplay, since we do call puzzle-solving "gameplay" in general. there is some argument there to be made about what a "puzzle" really means, and what is a simple "request and task" rather than a "puzzle", or what "knowing a real life fact" (what is 180 degrees?) versus "having to figure something out using information available inside the game" might mean for how we view what is or isn't a puzzle. but that's not specific to sso at all (a question for tons of various "puzzles" as seen in tons of various games).

there's nothing wrong in itself with satisfaction play, or with easy puzzles. sometimes that's exactly what an audience wants. but sso has a bigger issue, in that the main gameplay until now has been races (or courses, tracks, but let's say races) and that those races are not especially well designed. that there is very little of really challenging, fun, satisfying, rewarding gameplay in sso - in the terms of what people usually expect from videogames (of the gameplay-based type, not satisfaction play-based).

don't jump to conclusions here, but: i often make a comparison to mariokart, a game with a primary race mechanic. i used to play mariokart a lot because it was just really fun. it was fun alone or with friends or strangers, and it was fun to try to beat my best score, and it was fun to explore different ways of beating the same track. when you design a game, you have to think really heavily about: is the core gameplay loop fun? what makes people want to play this? to *re*play this? does it feel satisfying and exciting? is it better or at the same level as its competitors? what kind of things appeal to the target audience? and so on.

somehow sso has never felt like mariokart (except that one rainbow race, obvs), and i don't mean that sso could just "copy mariokart", this isnt the point. what i do mean is that there has to be a way to make your racing mechanic (if it is a primary mechanic of your game!) actually fun, engaging and challenging in the right way - the good game design way, not the clunky, frustrating and broken way. (yes, i know the engine is spaghetti garbage. no, i don't think that's a get-out-of-jail-free card for every problem that sse has.)

they made some progress with this when they added a completely out-of-place, more challenging race in one of the more recent story quests (i forget exactly when that was, but the race was in hollow woods). the problem then was that within the context of sso and what they have taught the players about their game, this race was thrown at us with no preparation for its challenges, which is bad game design. you want to introduce your player to different challenges and allow them to practice and learn, which didn't happen when we jump from "races with basically no skill needed to pass" to "a race with new things happening everywhere you need to react to while also successfully following a new path" out of nowhere. the intent was good - more challenging and exciting, dramatic races - the execution wasn't great.

they also made some progress with this when they revamped a few of the champs. the revamps aren't perfect, but they're good, and it was a good step towards improving core gameplay mechanics, that not only are genuinely enjoyable to many players but also *fit into the theme of the game* (as in, beating others at horse sports is a common theme within the equestrian theme). (i'm personally in shock that we don't have more champs across the map since all of these years, and that they aren't better already, since it's one of the most "regular videogame quality" content this game has and it shouldve been relatively easy to add more as well as maintaining and improving what was there).

so, back to the new valedale stuff.... sort of. there have been some puzzles in sso before, and some random gameplay (the click timing of searching for gold). the stuff we've had before: it's usually very basic puzzles and random gameplay, partially on behalf of that - for a long time - there doesn't seem to have been that much resources put into fighting with the engine to create new things that weren't in the code before, and partially because of a view held by some people at the company that games for young girls don't need to have any actual well-designed challenging gameplay, and that it's better to make it ridiculously easy so that nobody ever really loses or gets stuck on anything. you don't have to practice to beat any of the races - you might have to practice to get a top score or win a champ, but none of those are required for progress. similarly, there wasn't any real challenge that i remember to the absolute majority of non-racing quests, either. you might have to hit a thing with the right timing once in a while, but it's always easy (other games do this too - see QTE in certain AAA games!), or you might have to remember a number or a word for a minute and answer a question or type in a code correctly.

more or less everytime that there were puzzles in sso, they held your hand through it - whether you wanted to or not. the same is true for the rune puzzles, which have their solution blatantly in front of you as soon as they load. there is no changing actual difficulty level to make it more fitting to the player (which doesn't necessarily have to be a literal level setting - it can come organically, such as giving extra explanations, or slowing a timer down, after a player has failed a task 3 times, etc). yes, you can make the rune puzzles more complex in some sense - a bigger grid, or choosing the type of moves you are worse at - but the solution is always right in front of you, regardless. they hold your hand whether you like it or not, by the type of puzzle that they introduced.

races in sso have a "gold, silver or bronze" system, but we don't actually see that the races have been correctly playtested to properly reflect what a time worthy of each medal should be, and we also don't really gain anything from reaching any medal. i never feel a thing about getting this or that medal, because they mean nothing. it might be a good thing that we're never asked in a quest to "complete this race with a gold medal" or "complete this race under a certain time" or "complete this jumping course with no faults", since that could lock some players out of completing quests (while this is the case for most other games, there is also an important discussion happening around accessibility in game completion).

there are ways to make the medals in races matter, feel accurate, and feel rewarding. there are ways to make races more challenging or more interesting without just being more clunky or frustrating. there are ways to do that while keeping them more or less grounded in reality, and ways to do that while incorporating non-realistic elements that are fun and feel fitting (remembering that this is a game with magic and fantasy from the start). they could have added faults to jumping courses forever ago, they could have added dressage forever ago, and improved on gameplay like pole bending and barrel racing, and so on, and all while allowing players at all skill levels to still complete tasks and complete races, but also allowing players to challenge themselves for rewards.

if the core gameplay - around races and championships, around horse care, horse bonding and horse training - or around magic and protecting what's dear, or around rescue missions with the rangers, or tons of other stuff i can think up that would fit this game - if that stuff felt like actually well designed gameplay, something fun, not frustrating and buggy, challenging in the right ways and rewarding. if all that was done well, then adding some "satisfaction play" with fireflies or some simple puzzles with blatant solutions wouldn't be as easy to criticise.

the closest thing we got to challenging gameplay that you can really clearly *lose* at - that there is a risk and a skill involved - were some of the druid training missions. they still suffered from some clunky frustrations and non-ideal design decisions, but it was an attempt at more regular gameplay (among the non-racing gameplay). comparing the new gameplay in valedale to the druid training, you can see that the risk of failure has gone down a lot or been removed completely, rather than being built upon any more. they also didn't continue to update druid training in any way afaik or to build upon that foundation for other gameplay. (i'm open to that druid training may have been too difficult for a small subset of players, and that's a valid discussion. but i also think it was optional?)

i don't have a really nice tidy thought to end this with, and im really sleepy rn and going to bed. but the overall point is that if sso had other, well-designed and well-functioning gameplay that felt satisfying and rewarding for players, the flaws of the new valedale stuff would be less glaring. as things are, the lack of challenge and the lack of fun gameplay are really glaring problems with it, as well as the lack of reasonable rewards. (it makes very little sense that you have to purchase the items you unlock, but this is the same company that charged whatever x starcoins it was for those recoloured balloon pets, so.)