Osama Dorias: Reviewing the Top 10 Games of 2022

Osama Dorias is a Lead Content Designer at Blizzard Entertainment. In the past, he’s worked at Unity, Warner Brothers, Gameloft, GEE Media, Ubisoft, and Minority Media. He also teaches game design at Dawson College and loves to empower people in expressing themselves through game-making, especially marginalized people and causes.

Transcript

Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha. The show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now, here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim. 

Amy: Osama Dorias is a game designer at Blizzard Entertainment. And a person who enjoys inspiring others through his love of games.

Last year, we published Osama's top 10 games of 2021, and we're doing it again for 2022. This year, Osama and I spent some time reflecting on how games helped us cope with the pandemic and stay connected to our loved ones. 

Osama: Board games with the family help us have a thing to do that's not in front of a screen when we couldn't go anywhere.

Amy: Join us as we talk about the games that lifted our spirits and helped us get through a difficult year.[00:01:00] 

Welcome, Osama, to our annual Top 10 Games. 

Osama: Thank you so much for having me, Amy. 

Amy: I'm very excited to hear about your year in gaming. Before we launch into your top 10 in gaming, tell us a little bit about what this year was like for you. I know you had some big changes and lots going on. So what was 2022 like?

Osama: Absolutely. The long and the short of it is I left game design for a few months. I changed jobs. I took on a job as a senior partner relations manager at Unity. And then I left that to come back to game design at Blizzard. The reasons for that is that I actually suffered burnout last year. It was a creative burnout.

I could not create anymore. I could not design. It was very difficult for me to, and I could barely do. And I needed a distance from design to fall back in love with it. And that's what I did. And I did it, it worked, it worked better than I expected, faster than I [00:02:00] expected. I figured this might be a two or three year hiatus and then return because I always wanted to come back to being a designer.

And within a couple of months, the desire to design and the urge started coming for way back really hard. So, um, yeah, two job changes, two major job changes within one year. I've never done that before in my life. That was interesting. 

Amy: That is a lot. And here you are to tell the tale. You survived. 

Osama: I survived.

Exactly. That's my story for 2022. I survived 2022. 

Amy: I think a lot of us feel like that. I think there's a lot of accomplishment in surviving 2022. And as you and I both know, some people didn't like our mutual friend, Mike, who I'm mourning very deeply. I find myself looking back on 2022 and really feeling that loss.

Osama: Likewise, I had many moments where I just randomly, cause we used to have monthly calls. It was a friend and a mentor to me [00:03:00] and it took a while before I was able to remove the calendar invite from my calendar. And so I had constant reminders of his passing. And then finally, after a little bit of while, when I had the strength to remove it, I started digging deep into my emails, you know, this was a year of me catching up and replying to all the people that I left hanging since last year, since my burnout. 

And I kept encountering conversations with him, like threads that were mostly resolved, but a few that were open ended because we'd start the conversation in the email and then it would continue on our call or vice versa.

And that hurt because the beginning of that is always like, Oh yeah, I should reply to Mike. Oh no, I can't. Over and over our mind is, I don't know, I don't know how it works, but these connections are very odd. Like if you had asked me in the moment, if he passed, I would tell you yes. But when I saw that email more than once I'd click reply because that was just a thing that was so common.

So I'm sorry that you had similar feelings. Of course, he was a person who was really [00:04:00] important to so many people and touched so many lives. So I'm not special in that regard, but I love him very much. And I miss him a lot. 

Amy: Yeah, it does make you go, wow, you know, surviving, we're here. And in fact, by talking about him, we're keeping Mike alive in a way.

And recently I heard the phrase, grief is love with no place to go. And I really understand that now. And so even though grief is very painful, sharp like a knife, it also is love. So I keep consoling myself with that. And I think about all the people that Mike's touched, all the lives he touched, which were still on display at his memorial.

And then I try and take my own grief and transform it into love and transform it into telling stories like we just did and playing games because so much of the connection with Mike is around that love of playing and creating [00:05:00] games. So your own creative resurgence this year, how can you not think of Mike?

You know, because that was so much who Mike was. And when I think about how we got through the pandemic, all of us, cause it's still happening. Who would have thought we'd be here now? Year after last year, still staying inside, fearful about the pandemic, seeing cases on the rise. But a lot of how we got through the pandemic, I'm looking back through my photos, playing games.

Osama: Absolutely. 

Amy: Thank you games. 

Osama: Absolutely. Both the digital variety and also board games with the family. It helped us have a thing to do. That's not in front of a screen when we couldn't go anywhere. 

Amy: What board games did you play with your family?

Osama: Oh, I have a large collection. What board games didn't I play?

And this isn't even everything that we have. Actually, the most recent addition that we're loving is a board game called Just One. It was introduced to me by Michael Austin. [00:06:00] And it's incredible. It's a good game that you could play as a warmup game while you're waiting for other people to show up for the big game.

But it's also a game that you can play with anyone who doesn't normally play board games. Because it's so easy. There's like barely any rules. It's similar to social games like taboo and other games like that, but there's a good level of strategy there too. I loved it. So I highly recommend just one. 

Won an award. Don't ask me which, but it's an award winning board game. And it totally deserves it. 

Amy: I am grateful for that and totally going to check it out. We played a lot of set. Set is so easy. The card game. And my teenage daughter regularly creams us at it, which is very satisfying to her. And I like giving her the win.

And we also pulled out some sort of slower paced games, more like visual puzzle games, just like after dinner, right? Where I'll go off to our screens, wait, let's play a board game. And then over [00:07:00] the vacation, good old Scrabble got a big workout with the extended family, a lot of whom are word nerds. So board games for the win, like I'm going to have to check out just one.

That's awesome. So speaking of games, do you have your top 10 list ready? 

Osama: I do. I have my top 10 list ready and I have a couple of extra runners up. 

Amy: Yeah. Okay. So we got four runners up and 10 top 10. So yeah, this was the great year for games. 

Osama: It was. 

Amy: Let's start off. with the four runners up and then let's leap into the top 10.

Osama: Absolutely. So just to start my criteria is any game that was released in 2022. I have played a total of 54 games that were released in 22 this year. To a certain degree, some games have only sampled for about an hour. Usually the hour is a minimum that I give a game. Others I've played to completion. In my number one game, I've actually finished it two and a half times.

So I didn't give all the games the same amount of [00:08:00] love. But that's fair, but I did give all of these games some love. My runner is up in no particular order. The first one I'm going to mention is called Rogue Legacy 2. It's a roguelike platformer, a sequel to Rogue Legacy, which was really one of my favorite roguelikes of all time.

Actually, it added more. So it has a lot of great new class choices. In my opinion, the only reason it didn't make it to the top that is because it stretched a little bit too long. Like there was a lot of content, but there's a lot of grinding to get to that content and I thought maybe the pacing could have been a little bit better.

Another runner up is Metal Helsinger. It's a first person shooter where you have to shoot to a rhythm. So you're actually penalized if you're not shooting to the rhythm. And it's an incredible game because eventually you start feeling the rhythm and you start headbanging to it because it just makes it easier to play that way.

Which is very engaging. After a while, like, even though that was a really cool [00:09:00] gimmick, it did start to feel a little bit gimmicky. Still a great game, but it overstayed its welcome a little bit. Then there's King of Fighters 15. I'm a huge fan of fighting games and this game has excellent combat.

Unfortunately, they moved away from the pixel art that I love to 3d. And in my opinion, the game didn't translate well to 3d. I love a lot of 3d fighters, but this one looked so good in pixel art and not great in 3d. So it's not visually appealing. And as a result, I don't see myself playing it as much as I normally would have.

And the last of the runners up is called Domekeeper. It's a roguelike exploration tower defense mashup that I've never seen before. So you play in two phases. The first phase is you're digging for resources. And while you're waiting for a timer to go down, the second phase is that you're building a tower defense type.

Base and they're getting attacked. What's interesting about it is it was [00:10:00] very engaging. It's an interesting world like building systems. So like, and usually with these tower defense, you have a build tech tree. This one, no, it's kind of random. Every time you finish the game, you have this building or that.

So like, there's a lot of variety there and it has good pacing because it goes from the exploration to the intense combat and then back to exploration again. The bad is the combat's a little bit shallow and there's not a lot of variety. So it's intensely fun at the beginning and then you start seeing the same.

Things over and over really quickly. So those are my runners up. No particular order. I love them all. All of them were in my top 10 list at some point and were dropped down by others. So all of them could have been in an alternate universe in my top 10 list. 

Amy: Cool. The Metal: Hellsinger sounds like a new twist on Rez.

Osama: Yeah, actually that's a good comparison. 

Amy: Rez is one of my absolute all time favorite games. 

Osama: Then you should definitely play Metal: Hellsinger. I think you'll love it. Yeah. 

Amy: Awesome. All right. So now it's time for your top 10. Let's start with [00:11:00] number 10. 

Osama: So my number 10 is Cult of the Lamb. It's a roguelike combat base builder game with really cute graphics.

It's based on. A cult leader who is a lamb and it's an excellent mix of really good humor and really good synergy between theme and systems. I guess some people call that ludonarrative harmony. It has an excellent art style choice because it's a good contrast between the cute graphics of the game and the vicious nature of the combat that you engage in and the different sacrifices and other things that you do as part of this cult leader persona that you embody. 

So I thought that was, it was a great game for those reasons, the criticism. Cause I only criticize the games that I love, by the way, I don't bother with games I don't love so much. So the criticism for this is some player actions don't make sense.

Like you come back to your base and you have to like clean up poop and you're the. So why are you doing this? It's kind of at odds. The combat is simplistic. There's not [00:12:00] enough there to keep it engaging for a long period of time. It's not bad. It's just very simple. There's not enough depth. And it did get repetitive after a little bit of time.

There wasn't enough that was introduced to it. Otherwise it's a great game at the very beginning and I would highly recommend it. 

Amy: Awesome. That really makes it clear how important. The mental model is and sticking to the mental model because once it's established or even it's hinted at, and people start to build it in their head.

When you break it, it feels weird. 

Osama: Absolutely. A hundred percent. Agreed. 

Amy: All right. And now number nine. 

Osama: So number nine, I have Horizon Forbidden West. It's a third person adventure game sequel to Horizon Zero Dawn, which was one of my favorite games of 2017. The good about the game is that it has gorgeous environment.

It's really pretty to look at an excellent narrative that falls with the story of the first horizon, which also had an excellent narrative and really exciting combat. So you fight these robot animals and all of them are [00:13:00] different with different strategies and you have all these weapons that you could send into place.

So you could approach most of them, depending on the combat sequence with stealth or with traps or like head on. And you have all the tools to be able to do that. So that's the good. So bad. I, well, there were too many combat options. I was actually often overwhelmed with all the choices and would just pick one or two strategies and would only shift strategies if it didn't work.

Because it was just an overwhelming choice of combat options. I felt the same way about the progression system. There was an improvement over the progression system of Horizon Zero Dawn, which had an issue that all of the tiers of rarity of the items or the weapons that you get were unlocked from the very beginning.

So the optimal way to play is not to purchase anything or engage in the economy at all until you had the resources to buy the highest tier. Which basically meant the best way to play is to bypass the progression system. And if that's the case and why have one to begin with here, it was improved a little bit, but the complexity was still there where we [00:14:00] didn't have enough time to sit with the game, to understand the sources and sinks, like what you're getting dropped from a, an enemy, what that could be used for, how valuable it was.

And because it was so much noise, there are so many tiers and categories of resources. At the day, you ignored everything and then until you got to a shop, so there's no feeling that you get one, Oh, something good dropped. You don't have that during it. So what's the point of having all these things? What you want is for the players to have a sense of the value of what's being dropped so that they get excited when these things drop.

So that was missing, still better, an improvement in that. The, and the last part is, even though technically this is an open world game, it didn't feel as such because the way it was designed, it felt like corridors. There were clear paths that you were meant to take. And so you were always going through these paths, even though you were able to cut through, there was no incentive.

You were never rewarded for exploration. And as a result, it really felt like a corridor shooter, even though it really [00:15:00] wasn't as a game, which is odd as a choice, so gorgeous environments, but you were not rewarded for exploring them as much as you should have been. 

Amy: That's fascinating. Wow. All right. And now, number eight.

Osama: So number eight is Stacklands, which is a really simple concept and it's cleverly executed. It's a card game. But it's also a city builder. So you're actually on opening packs of cards and these packs of cards, you're combining them together just by placing them one on top of each other and the build thing.

So if you put, for example, wood, brick, and some other resource, you're going to build a house. And if you have a house and you put two people in it, two cards, like the house is a card and the two people are card, then you're going to have a baby. And if you give the baby food, it's going to grow into another person.

Then you're, you have all these gold resources that are also cards that you're placing. On other packs so that you could open new packs. So this. Really clever way to get the mechanics of city builders mixed in with a card game. That's in a [00:16:00] very elegant way. That's very accessible. You just try a combination, put two things together.

You don't really need much tutorial or any explanation. Just try different things and it'll work. And it's very engaging as a result. The bad is the UI is. A little too minimalist and not very clear, and even sometimes not very functional could have really used a UI pass to make some things more intelligible.

Especially when you want to see what it takes to like, once you unlock a recipe for creating something with a set of cards, it's hard to find it again. It's a little cumbersome. That, that wasn't great. And the second is, it's a little too luck based, like you could be doing amazing. And then you open a pack and you have these monsters that are just way too powerful for you to defeat and you had no warning.

You couldn't like prepare for it. It almost felt like it was intentional. Like after a certain time or you were going to die. And that timer was extended for time. Which like, you need to ease into that. The player needs to feel like they had a chance and they, they, if they had done something [00:17:00] different, the difficulty spiked a little too sharply, especially after a recent update, actually, it made it even harder and I thought the game was already difficult enough from the beginning or more like based difficulty, but still, so hopefully they're going to fine tune that and find a balance that works better.

So Stacklands. 

Amy: Wow. Sounds like a really creative pairing, but listening to the pros and cons reminds me of how challenging it is to polish multiple aspects of your game. And if one falls short, like the UX, you're like, Oh, that's pretty good. And it looks pretty. And, but then it can really keep you from having that big, long lasting hit.

That needs everything really working together. 

Osama: Absolutely. 

Amy: So, but it sounds like a very fun game to play, especially for game designers who want to see what it's like to bring things together that aren't usually seen together.

Osama: I mean, I think that's where creativity lies in the future. [00:18:00] There's not going to be much that's going to be created out of thin air, but we have so much potential for combinations that we haven't seen before that could bring about new gameplay experiences that are pleasurable.

So absolutely. 

Amy: And that really goes along with remixing as a culture and remixing as something that. People do, and you see it on TikTok certainly, it's just so much part of the culture. It's not stealing. It's remixing, right? 

And seeing games have more and more of that is actually really exciting.

Osama: I agree. Could not agree more. 

Amy: And now we have number seven.

Osama: Number seven, I have Midnight Suns. If you're familiar with Firaxis and their brand of turn based strategy games, especially XCOM, XCOM took the world by storm years ago when it came out, XCOM 2 also came out, it was really good. Those are great games.

So Firaxis embarked on making a, an X COM game in the Marvel universe. And I'm a huge fan of the Marvel universe. Even [00:19:00] before I have like two shelves of comic books since I was a child. So that pairing of like a turn based strategy game that I love from a developer who makes a game that I love and the Marvel universe, I was super excited about it.

But when it came out and they made some changes, it was a little, change, change is a little scary when you love a thing already, but the changes actually turned out great. So they have. They changed the turn based combat system to a card based combat system. And I love card games, honestly. And he did such a good job.

It actually added a sense of randomness and removed a little bit of the strategy from approaching it with this combination of characters, but it added a level of tactics that made it more in the moment. Which I feel actually served the game really well. So the combat is very engaging, a lot of fun, really good options.

It uses the space, like, in a very good way. A lot of the attack, for example, they need to be chained together and you have to have certain placements or use another attack to get that placement. All of a sudden it opens up a lot of different options. You feel clever every time you use [00:20:00] these combinations of cards.

I thought that part was amazing. The other part is that I actually think the narrative is pretty good, but my favorite thing is it's also optional. If we don't want to engage with this so much, much of it is just skippable. And I love that combination of the two, the narratives there for those who want it and people who just want to jump in and play with their favorite heroes.

They have that as an option as well. So more of that, I think is important. The bad. The humor was hit and miss, and that says a lot coming from a person like me who loves dad jokes and puns. I found myself laughing at some jokes, like, like chuckling, and groaning at others. So I feel maybe most people will be more on the groaning side, since my tolerance usually for bad jokes is pretty high.

And sadly, The art overall was unappealing. It didn't feel polished or AAA, like in a lot of ways, it maybe needed more time in the cooker or something, but some of the animations were a little bit stiff. Some of the models felt [00:21:00] uneven and even some of the art direction, some of the character designs. As someone who grew up with those characters, that's, that's not what the character looks like in any like version that I've seen before.

And it didn't really feel like the essence of who the character was. So overall, wasn't very visually appealing. Lots of fun, lots of fun. I still think it's worth playing. Art isn't everything. Definitely recommend the Midnight Suns. 

Amy: Wow. Again, when something's wonderful, you notice parts that aren't.

Osama: Exactly. 

Amy: Wow. So what do we have for number six? 

Osama: For number six, this is probably going to be the most controversial game on my list. So I'll say it right now. I have no Overwatch 2 and the reason it's controversial is because is because only the multiplayer version of Overwatch 2 was released. The single player campaign is set to come out next year.

And as a result, a lot of people don't feel like it was actually a full release. That said, I was a huge Overwatch fan. I downloaded [00:22:00] Overwatch 2 as a kid. I was going to say day one, day one that I was able to, because I was in Australia when I came out. So I had to actually get back home first. The, what I loved about it is it had massive improvements to so many characters, like Orisa as a tank was a character I didn't really care for before.

And now she's one of my favorite characters. They removed one of the tanks. So it moved from a six player, six on six fighter to a five on five fighters. And because of that, like there's, it's less tanky. There's more action, more things, more characters are being defeated or dying or what have you. It's a lot more exciting, a lot less of hiding behind shields.

All the shields were weakened. It. Those changes needed to happen. Some of the more annoying characters were modified to make them much less annoying, like annoying to play against. So all those balance changes made it a game that I already loved much better. A lot more fun. I'm still playing it practically daily.

Extremely polished, really fun gameplay. And the new characters were great. They offer really new strategies and new dynamics. So for me, [00:23:00] that's all I was really looking for. I love multiplayer games. I played this with my friends. We have different roles. It checked all those boxes already and it introduced new things and the new things were good and it introduced changes that were really good, that I really liked.

The bad, it's little details in the UI. Like when you're launching a game at the beginning, it tells you the name of the map that you're in. But if you don't remember then what map it is by name, then you have no way of knowing what you're going into. And it's so important to pick the right character for your map that really they should have a visual representation of what the map is.

So people can pick their character. Monetization is pretty rough if you like to buy vanity skins. They'll like, it's very pricey. It does feel like more like an update to a game than a game. So does it deserve the Overwatch 2? That's controversial. Still, they branded it as a new release. So it's good for me.

And some of the like features that I actually liked from Overwatch 1 were inexplicably cut. Like right now I can endorse players on my team, but not players on other teams. And I thought that was odd. I can't see a justification for it. So there are [00:24:00] little quibbles like that. Nothing too major. So that's my number six Overwatch 2.

And if I get hate for any game on this list, I'll probably view this one. 

Amy: So who's going to give you hate? The people that really are attached to single player campaign? 

Osama: I think so. I think the people who are hoping that the full game is released all at once are the people who are going to give me hate.

Or the people who agree with my bad points, but much, much less. More intensely than I do, that I feel about them, if that makes sense. Like the monetization part, for example, like people want to get new skins and not have to pay whatever 20 US for each one or whatever the equivalent is in gold, because that's obfuscated.

So I don't know exactly the value. 

Amy: Well, what are you going to do? What's fascinating about this though, is the whole idea of how you name something and what a release means in a more always on world. 

Osama: Absolutely. Absolutely. Like, did it count? Did it not count? So that's subjective. I'm counting it because the company, [00:25:00] the release that counted it, but I could completely understand someone saying that's just a half release or an update instead of a full game.

They're not wrong either. We don't have clear definitions for what that meant. I come from an era where the Street Fighter used to release two new characters. And it's a new game and you bought it as a new cartridge and you paid full price for two new characters, or you could play like hockey or NHL or FIFA.

And it's just a roster change with almost exactly the same features every year and you're paying full price for it. So for me, I'm a little less demanding for that, but I do understand now in the world of always online where updates are massive, where some people could be a little more allergic to this.

Amy: Yeah. Let's just say that things are not going to stay the same, but just cloud and always on and just the way that all that goes. It's fascinating to see. At the bottom line though, you got to have a business model that works. Game has to make money or it won't last. So figuring that out and that feeling smooth [00:26:00] or not feeling smooth is absolutely part of what it means to polish a game for release.

And you're highlighting so many of these great issues. So thank you. It's really, oh, 

Osama: thank you. I appreciate that. 

Amy: Oh my God. I think it's time. I think we're now into the top five. Are we not? 

Osama: We are at number five. I have Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shredders Revenge, which is a beat them up, an old school pixel art arcade beat them up.

We don't see many of these being released these days. It is incredibly nostalgic yet. Like this is what I loved the most about it. It had a nostalgic feel. It felt like a game I've played before, which I haven't, but it's adapted to current norms. Like it didn't have all of the rough spots that you, we would encounter in old beat them up game.

And I'm a huge. I'm a fan of retro gaming, so I play these old games all the time, and I love them for what they are, but, like, the rough spots, our memory does something to it, and we don't remember them until the moment, like, [00:27:00] that we're actually playing, they always, like, smooth them out. This game does that in an incredible way, it actually smooths them out for you, while still retaining all that nostalgia and the feel of what those games were before.

It's incredibly well done. The only other game I could think of that did a really good job of this as well is Shovel Knight, Shovel Knight. It feels like an 8 bit era game, but it's not 8 bit in any way. And it had a lot of tech like parallax scrolling and other things like that didn't exist in that era, but not so much that you notice it.

It feels like playing an old 8 bit game. This does that with 16 bit beat them up with pixel art. The pixel art is gorgeous. One of some of the best pixel art animations I've seen in any game period. And it doesn't overstay its welcome. The game is short and sweet. Not too short. It's just the right length.

So those are all the good things. Highly recommended in multiplayer. Still good single player. I played it with my kids. Really fun game. The bad, it doesn't have a lot of replayability. So if you're looking for that in this kind of game, go for [00:28:00] it. I finished the game. I was done with it. I was very happy and I moved on, but some people might care about that.

And it didn't have a lot of different game modes. It had a story mode and it had a arcade mode. And there was like one collection, like for people who like, who are completionists who like collecting things, there's another layer where you could go back, revisit some of the player, some of the levels and collect different things.

I don't, I'm not that type of gamer anymore. So I, unless there's absolute value in the collectible, other than having the number go up. Um, I don't engage in that as well. I don't see these as negatives myself. I am super happy that the game could just last, like, I think it was a five or six hour experience and it ended and I felt satisfied and it didn't overstay its welcome.

Others might think that's too short. So I'm mentioning it for that. 

Amy: That's fascinating. And it really sounds like doing some kind of magic mixing in this old school vibe. And playing a game and being satisfied with it, it not necessarily being replayable, that's kind of [00:29:00] old school, right? 

Osama: Yes, it is.

Absolutely. We just have a lot of games that just ended. We don't see that these days so often. 

Amy: Right. So just that kind of challenges the norms, which is really cool. 

Osama: Absolutely.

Amy: And that brings us to number four.

Osama: Number four. So my number four is likely to be many other people's number one game of the year It's an excellent game.

My number four is God of War Ragnarok It is world class, top of the line when it comes to writing and VO performance. Any kind of like acting, facial rigs, animations, like seeing this game in the cinematic moments is a work of art. The combat is also best in class in cinematic combat. You feel it's seamless.

It transitions from the cinematics to the combat, to the play in an incredible, seamless way. It's a joy to experience any of that. What a beautiful game. What a [00:30:00] beautiful story. Incredible music that sticks with you, humming it after playing all the time. Absolutely incredible for all these points. Bad, I felt there were many sections that had too many puzzles that just slow things down to a grind.

I'm not saying that the puzzles were bad. I just felt they were unsatisfying. Like I didn't feel clever when I solved them. I felt it slowed the game down to a point where I was many times frustrated because I just wanted to get to the next cinematic. I did artificially lengthen the game. And I don't think it added too much to it.

A couple of gating puzzles for pacing here and there would have been fine, but there were many sequences where there were literally five puzzles in a row with very little combat or anything else in between. I am not a fan of that. And the second thing is it's a smaller note. I felt the crafting system was completely superfluous.

Also didn't add anything to it. It was a slight weapon number goes up. It's not like the gameplay of the weapons changed anything. It was just their visual sometimes changed noticeably. And other times just The number was [00:31:00] higher. I don't find that a very fun or engaging and I don't think this game needed it.

There's a game you play for the story, the narrative and the combat experience. Like the rest felt like a chore to like, I think you could have absolutely cut out the entire crafting system and it would have made for a better game. It's my opinion. Maybe other people like that, the achiever type of player personality would appreciate it more.

I wish there was an option to bypass it. Similar as how you have difficulty settings at the beginning. I wish it was an option to just bypass the progression. Just let me play the story. I would have loved the game a lot more. And if there was another one to insta solve the puzzles for me, I would have probably picked that too.

Even though some of the puzzles were good, there were just too many for my liking. So, God of War Ragnarok, number four. 

Amy: Wow. That's really interesting, picking those things apart. And it really makes the point too, Osama, that there's different kinds of gamers motivated by different things. There's no one size fits all.

There are things like mental [00:32:00] model and polish, and getting those right really matters. But then within that certain collect completionists or people that particularly love puzzles might go, finally, the thing for me, but for you, now it just got in the way. And it really also speaks to pacing. And I just want to pull that out as a thread for a moment, because I believe we're about to go into our top three and want to delay it for a minute.

Cause it's so exciting, but you've brought it up a number of times. It's such an important thing. It's something that It takes a long time to get right as a designer because it involves a lot of interactive systems. And you've brought it up a lot, so tell us a little bit about how you think about pacing when you experience these games, but also as you go into your own design projects.

Osama: So the thing is, you're absolutely right. There are different player types and you have to always keep in mind who you're targeting. The trap that we fall into when it comes to AAA games is that it's too easy to say we're targeting [00:33:00] everyone. You cannot target everyone because whenever you target everyone, you add something to appeal to one player type.

Oftentimes you're pushing away another player type. So you have to be conscious of it to separate who you're targeting into two categories. Who are you targeting in the main through line of the story mostly? And who are you also adding other optional systems to appeal to on the side? That's why what I appreciated from Midnight Suns, for example, is that the narrative was good, but optional.

You could like, most you could skip all of it, like you, there are always a skip button. It wasn't like that important to the game. And so for people who are there just for the turn based strategy, and a lot of people who are for Access fans are there just for the turn based strategy, they could completely bypass that and still have an enjoyable experience, but the people who want the narrative, it was well crafted, like they really put in the effort and the work.

So I feel like this could be achieved in all games for [00:34:00] like, for Ragnarok. What I would have done is exactly what I had suggested is you want a mode where there's puzzles because people like that kind of thing, fine, have another mode and a slider where it says, Hey, after two seconds of me, not figuring out the puzzle, have someone just tell me what it is or point it out.

Because. So why do you want for people to sit there artificially or look it up on YouTube? So many people are not playing your game for that reason specifically, and it's going to be a hindrance. Why don't you make it easy for them? You're already doing it in so many other ways with difficulties. Some people are playing for the combat challenge and others are not.

And you're already giving them those options for the combat. Why not do the same thing for the puzzle and identify what your players Are generally for, and my guess for it, like God of Ragnarok, the players are coming for the cinematic combat and the narrative, specifically cinematic combat. And I feel they identified that and then added other systems and didn't make them optional.

The crafting system, an easy fix for this would have been give me a button where it [00:35:00] just auto detects the most optimal way to craft things and use my resources accordingly. Maybe even not the optimal way, but just a good enough way. If I had that, I would have been so happy. I would have collected all the loot, ignored it.

I would have gotten to the shop, pressed that like hold down triangle, wherever it is. And everything would have magically been to a number that's reasonable. And I could have moved on and not have had to go through all the items with all the resources to see which number goes up, which is something that I don't play for.

And then again, other people play for. So my, in my humble opinion. The best way to approach this is to figure out who is your core audience and what they want out of the game, who else you would like to serve and make the offering for the main one, part of the main progression and for the second category optional, just give sliders, give toggles, give dip switches, whatever you have to do so that people can craft the experience they want.

For these big mainstream games that are trying to target a wide group of people. Indies don't [00:36:00] generally care about this as much because for an indie to be profitable, they have to sell way fewer copies and therefore they can have more niche groups who just play the game that crafted for them. But I understand that's different for AAA.

And as a result, you can craft a more malleable experience. 

Amy: Yeah, that is great stuff. That's great advice too. 

Osama: Thank you. 

Amy: And now, top three games of 2022. Osama, what is number three? 

Osama: So number three, I have Vampire Survivor. I don't know if you've heard of this game. It's an incredibly simple concept. You have a movement and that's it.

You're like top down little character in the middle of the screen and you get to move left, right, up and down. And you, all of your attacks fire off. Automatically, uh, the preset rate and you're picking up power ups and then that way you get more attacks that fire or the do more damage and you constantly have waves of [00:37:00] enemies coming at you.

So the control scheme is the most simple of any game. That I'm mentioning here, all there is, is movement and the progression system is super addictive because you unlock more characters that have different starting points, you unlock new levels that have different enemies. Very simple, but very engaging.

It really, you're in the moment. They're just dodging all these characters and maneuvering so that you start to get the feel like the rhythm of your attacks and you're positioning yourself in the right situation so that you could clear the most enemies possible and pick up more collectibles. Very simple.

A deceptively simple and incredibly addictive. It is hard to not do one more run of this game. Once you start and it took the world by storm. It's also incredibly affordable. I think it was 5 or something or 3. I don't remember something very low in price that works really well on the Steam Deck and other portable devices, just as well as it works on a PC.

Incredible game, very good experience. The bad. The art is [00:38:00] rough and actually look kind of stolen, but the game is still there. Didn't get pulled down. So maybe it's not stolen, but it feels like rights from other games were used in this. So maybe they have the rights to them or not, but the art is very rough.

Well, all the arts, like across the board, the art for the levels, for the characters, for the UI, the characters themselves that are unlocked are not well balanced, some are clearly much better than others. I guess that's okay. But still like you might. Unlock a new character, try them out, or find out that they're much worse than every character that you've had so far.

And the soundtrack was not to my liking. I would often play. With the music turned off with my own soundtrack, but in the background, but still, this is a game that must be experienced. Those who love it will love it a lot. It is a really good way to wind down from a work day, but it's also a really good way to just warm up for another game session or what have you.

Excellent game. 

Amy: If you can pull yourself away from it. 

Osama: Right, right, right. Yeah. That's the hard part. It's very addictive as well. Have you played [00:39:00] it? 

Amy: No, but you should. I'm fine. Good. 

Osama: Yeah. 

Amy: I get really addicted. I have to take stuff off my phone, off my devices. 

Osama: But maybe don't play Vampire Survivors. Maybe skip this one.

Amy: Or maybe somehow I can play it somewhere, not on my own devices, but literally I believe I would get addicted to it. I believe it. 

Osama: It is so good. 

Amy: And what could even be better? I think it's time for number two. 

Osama: Number two. This is possibly the game that I've sunk in the most hours in, in the last few months.

Number two is Marvel Snap. It's a card game that you play on mobile. It does have a PC version, but I play primarily on mobile. It is made by the creators of Hearthstone who started their own company, took the Marvel license and made the most elegant mobile card game I have ever seen. And possibly that will ever exist.

It is that good, incredibly elegant, very few moving parts, all of them are meaningful, [00:40:00] all of them synergize and play well with other cards, incredibly low barrier to entry, really good progression where the geek introduces you to those very simple cards at the beginning that still have good synergies.

And introduce more complex cards with better strategies as time progresses. The combos, the synergies are some of the funnest I've experienced in any digital or physical card game that I've seen. You clearly see that they learned a lot from working on Hearthstone for years, which was an excellent game in its own right.

The rounds are super short. You can finish a game between two and six minutes. And so you could chain a bunch of games together. You don't feel bad when you lose one, you feel really good when you win one. And that's a really good combination. It's amazing. If you have not played it, it's a Marvel game. And I said, I'm already a Marvel fan.

So that helps a lot. I love how many of the characters were interpreted in card form. Highly recommend it, unless again, you have an addictive personality and then stay away because I cannot stop myself from playing that. Every time I have two minutes, I'm. Boiling water for tea, my phone is in my hands [00:41:00] and I'm playing Marvel snap.

I like, it is hard to stop. Too bad point that I would mention. It does have a few UX issues with understanding what can be like some menu navigation things. Like some toggles are not very clear. It takes you a while before you, I've played the, I had, At that point, I played the game for 12 hours and I didn't understand that I could sort things by what's upgradable, for example.

It's there, everything's in front of you, but it's not necessarily in the right place or there's no emphasis on it. So their icon for telling you that a thing is upgradable is not complete. It only tells you if you have one resource and not the other, you kind of have to know. It's like things like that, that I'm like, okay, this could have been fixed easily.

And the other is depending on who you ask, they might think the monetization is a little harsh. Some of the bundles, I absolutely agree. They just, I just have not purchased. I think I purchased one bundle because there's just. No way, there's no, the, the, the cards don't bring back the value of how much they cost.

Overall, I feel it's a good drip of enough cards that you get just from playing the game normally [00:42:00] that I don't think it's that bad, but it could have been improved. If they just lowered their prices across the board, I feel they would convert more people. But what do I know? I don't have the metrics, so maybe they have a good reason for this.

The perception, which is very important, the found perception is that it's a, it's over monetized or a little too expensive. And that has value in and of itself, but maybe their numbers would prove us all wrong. 

Amy: That's always such a delicate dance to, uh, navigate in figuring out the right monetization. So is it single player?

Osama: It is, you can't play with friends yet. You play online with other people. So it is a multiplayer game, but they are going to have an update where you could add friends and play with them and as a very, in a separate mode. So it is not a single player. You are playing with real people most of the time, because I know that they employ bots to, so that people don't wait too long for games, but still, yeah.

So it's an Asterix multiplayer only game. 

Amy: Okay. So that one sounds amazing. [00:43:00] And I love the story about the history of the team. And that's often where really good games come from is that kind of iteration. And it also, for you, this tickles so many of your favorite things, card game, multiplayer. 

Osama: Yes. Marvel.

Absolutely. Absolutely. This is a game made for me. Everyone else gets to enjoy it, but it was made for me. 

Amy: Right. And that's the thing, like for me, Rez and Rock Band were karaoke revolution were those games. We all have our like niche. Absolutely. And that's another good thing just to know about yourself.

And it's fun to be broad like you are. But then sometimes ding, ding, ding. 

Osama: Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. 

Amy: So what could possibly top that? 

Osama: So I don't think my number one at this point, if you heard all of these, if you've been following video games for this year, I don't think my number one will shock anyone.

It is probably many other people's number ones. My number one game of the year is Elden [00:44:00] Ring. If you had told me that it was going to be at the beginning of this year, I would not have believed you. And the reason for this is Elden Ring is made by FromSoft, a software, basically a company that makes Dark Souls, Demon Souls, and other Souls like game.

Games are very atmospheric and incredibly difficult. Like they're designed to be frustrating so that players feel a sense of achievement when they get through them. The kind of game I would have loved when I was a kid. In fact, when Demon Souls first came out and it did not have a North American release, I imported it 'cause it was region unlocked.

So I got a Japanese version to play because I heard it was in translated before a North American version was released. 'cause I was convinced this was gonna be my kind of game. But 13 hours in, I decided it wasn't. It was too frustrating for me and I did not enjoy the experience. And I got every other, I kept trying because it's the atmosphere, [00:45:00] the story, the world is, the building is so good in those games that I kept trying.

I literally purchased every single game that company made, tried to get into it, failed and gave up. That's how stubborn I was trying to get into them. I bought Dark Souls 1, 2, 3, Bloodborne, Sekiro. And could not play them for more than five to 10 hours each. And so when Elden Ring came out, uh, I had hope that this was going to be the exception, didn't have a lot of hope, very little hope I expected to fall off of it.

I got the game. It's an open world, it's the first of the, of the games that's an open world and it did sell things very differently. The narrative or the lore is written by Bill Dorman, who I'm a huge fan of, regardless of how the TV show ended up. I was a fan of the books. So you see them on my shelves in the back from a long time.

So like this, if there's going to be one Souls like game that was going to get me, it was going to be this one. And I [00:46:00] started playing this game and I quit it five times. And when I say I quit it, I mean, for real, I did not expect to go back. I was frustrated by certain parts of it, but certain mechanics allowed me to come back where in other Souls games, there were more linear, like you hit a wall.

This is a boss. You have to get good enough to beat this boss. If you cannot, even if it takes you five or 10 hours, if you cannot, you, you have very little recourse, you have to just keep trying here. You have a horse, you could run by it. Sometimes you could just go explore a different part of the world because it's open world.

You could level up and then come back and try to beat it later. So many times I would get frustrated at a boss, take two, three days off, really have the urge to come back because the world building and the storytelling is so good. Come back, decide not to fight the boss, go fight someone else, come back and meet the boss and progress again.

And I did that five times. It is a masterclass in exploration. The only other game I could think of that had a similar feel [00:47:00] of exploration and in a similar genre is Breath of the Wild. So. A very similar feeling exploration where you're just rewarded like you are surprised constantly when you're exploring Nook's there's no formula that you look that you internalize like a lot of other open world games.

The lore is rich. It's very deep. There's a lot of player agency, all the weapons play differently, all the different strategies and approaches that you could have to the bosses. A lot of times you try a thing and it just works and you're shocked. All those good things make it really, in my eyes, a masterpiece of a game.

It's not just a game from all of the games that I played this year. It, this is the one that I would consider a masterpiece, a really best in class. That said, there are many rough spots. It's uneven. It's not a great UX experience. A lot of the menu options are just poorly designed in my opinion. And for no good reason, the button that opens up the map is not the button that closes the map, as an example, [00:48:00] you never get used to it.

Like I could be, I played the game for almost 300 hours. And at the end, I still make the mistake sometimes of opening the map with one button. And because that's such a convention that we learn, it's so hard to. Especially if you start playing other games and then come back to it, it's so hard to learn that new thing.

Some systems are never clearly presented or explained to the player. If you blink and you don't pay attention, you completely miss out on it. Like I played for a bunch of the game on hard mode, because I didn't realize that the summons that you unlock are upgradable because nobody told me at any point that they were, and I missed the one NPC that tells you that they could upgrade it.

And so I went through. Uh, the game at a much more difficult setting than I needed to, because my summons were dying instantly. And still, one of the bad things, I still think they needed a difficulty setting. And like, I think a lot of people would enjoy this game just exploring it without the needlessly difficult [00:49:00] combat.

I get that a lot of people feel strongly against this and feel that the game, Experience will be very different without that, but they have to understand that there are different player types. There are people who are not playing the game for a sense of achievement or challenge, are only playing it for the exploration and the lore.

And if you want to have a big mainstream game that you're just going to get more people, if you have these options, that's my opinion, I still feel it's based on sound design principles, but like you're free to have your, And I know the fans of this game, I am a fan of this game, I just called it a masterpiece.

But I know many of the fans of this games are rabid defenders of the difficulty because that's what they enjoy about it. They just need to understand that's not what everybody enjoys. No two gamers are built equal. 

Amy: Is it single player or multiplayer or both? How does it work? 

Osama: Single player in the sense that you can invite other players to play with you.

But it's not a seamless co op experience. You invite them, they come help you with a boss and then like they get [00:50:00] disconnected. Or if you leave a zone and go to another zone, they get disconnected. You could also be invaded by other players. So you could jump into someone else's world and make their life miserable.

So there, yeah, you could disable that or you could play offline and not have that at all, or just not invite party members to your game and therefore you won't be invaded. I actually like a lot of the multiplayer, but I wish they had a seamless co op mode. Where you can just play the game from start to finish with your friends.

And the way that you call friends into your world is cumbersome and convoluted. And again, it's another rough spot. I understand it's a stylistic choice. It's just not one that I would have made. A lot of fans of the series are completely used to it. Then that's okay because you literally have to. Use an item and perform an incantation to open up your world.

Like it's that kind of thing where it fits the lore is just another pain point, another rough spot in terms of the UX through all of those. It is a game that I would recommend for any [00:51:00] one who likes exploration. It is a masterclass in exploration. It is, there are very, very few games that come even close.

Breath of the Wild is one of them. I can't even think of another that had that level of exploration. 

Amy: So if somebody loved Breath of the Wild. 

Osama: Yeah. 

Amy: But wasn't a Souls player. Is this acceptable to them? 

Osama: I think they should play it with a friend because I think that will make the experience better. As much as possible play with a friend, you're going to love it because it has the same, Breath of the Wild also had a lot of rough spots and pain points and like.

The weapons, the, the gradation system was, or the, the weapon breaking was just painful as well. But the exploration is so good that if you're a fan of exploration, that is going to be your game of the year 2017. And if you're a fan of exploration, this is going to be your game of the year 2022. In my humble opinion, like different people look for different things in games.

You can still identify other things that you don't like about it. But if your exploration is your thing, this is going to [00:52:00] be your game. Absolutely. 

Amy: Awesome. So, is it something when you say play with a friend, like, could I play with my kid? 

Osama: You would need two consoles with two TVs. There's no little couch co op, but assuming that's okay with you.

And I don't even think there's cross play. So you can't even do one person on a console, one person on a PC. I believe you have to be on the same platform to play together, but that's it.

Amy: But is there like a big reason to play together? Like the other way I could play with my kid is she plays and I watch.

Osama: You can do that. Like there are two reasons to play together. The main reason is to be honest, it's just a more pleasurable experience. Cause there's so many different character classes that you could have different roles. We could have one person who's more tanky, one person who's off in the distance, shooting projectiles and what have you.

And that's just more fun. Like the game is. Works really well for with that in mind. And the second is really, there are bosses that are so difficult. You're going to need the help. And I am pretty good at video games. I play hard video games and I do well in them. [00:53:00] I play video games sometimes on hard mode.

And I was frustrated to the point that I wanted to throw my controller at the wall. Cause you know, the, this is, it was designed that way. It was designed to make me frustrated. I'm not a souls veteran. I've seen people who are so amazing at this game. They walked up to the most difficult bosses on the first try and beat them.

That's not me. And if you're asking the question, should I play multiplayer? That's probably not you either. I didn't mean you specifically, but if someone is asking, should I play multiplayer? Then they're probably not going to be able to beat those bosses without the help. 

Amy: Can you have more than two people?

Osama: I believe three is the limit, but so far that was the, I played with two other people I've in one instance, I don't know if you can go higher than that. 

Amy: Got it. Really interesting. Wow. We're so lucky that we get to have these amazing games that with beautiful explorable worlds and all that stuff that we get to hang out in and play in with our friends.

Osama: Absolutely. 

Amy: What a time to be alive. 

Osama: Right? I remember my first [00:54:00] online gaming session. It was in doom. In 96, 95, I don't remember what year anymore in 93, maybe, but I do remember it vividly. I was in disbelief. I could not believe that my friend was at their house and I was dialing up to, to them, to their computer and playing a game together.

And now this is like taken so for granted by everybody, including myself. But what a time to be alive, to share these experiences with our friends. 

Amy: It really is. And it's real life. These things we do in games and online. It's as real. It doesn't include hugging, but it's very emotionally real. And I really appreciate you sharing.

All these games, a lot of them are new to me. I'm definitely going to go check some out under supervision because of the addiction issue. 

But, it's really fabulous. And I wish you and everyone that you love and whose lives you touch a really wonderful [00:55:00] 2023. 

Osama: Thank you. And same to you. Thank you very much for having me.

This has been a lot of fun, both years, looking forward to next year. I'm always at your service, Amy. 

Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster. faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.