Sketchnote: Game Architecture

 

An interesting game that I played a little while ago is Horizon Zero Dawn, a role-playing game where you venture out to a world inhabited by machines. The game does a good job of providing you with a lot flexibility and diversity as you fight your way throughout the game. One of the main loops the game employs is having you fight machines constantly as you progress. That’s, more or less, the essence of the game: you fight the machines.

The game removes the feeling of repetitiveness by having an incredibly wide variety of machines that you can fight. This makes encounters with machines not feel stale as you are tasked with figuring out how to take it down (by figuring out a week spot or the right combo that deals the most amount of damage). In addition to these encounters, the game involves multiple arcs where you end up fighting boss battles with unique machines that have backstories to them or some added history/context that adds the extra layer of depth to these machines. If that’s not enough, the game also throws special abilities that allow you to, instead of attacking said machines, to mount and use them to your advantage.

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