Brevity is the soul of wit.
To elaborate: A story is only as good as the best parts the audience remembers. The more extraneous crap is added on top, the less enjoyable that experience might be. Past a certain threshold, new details convey less information rather than more. Thus it is often the case that the most interesting iteration of a concept is the slenderest, the most stripped to its essentials. Unfortunately, broadly speaking, game design seems to be moving in the exact opposite direction. Unlocks, cosmetics, tiny statistical bonuses, secondary and tertiary currencies, experience points, crafting systems, battle passes, weekly balance and content updates – whatever a particular game design starts out as, by the end it has so much garbage appended to it that it might be difficult to recognize.
An example of this dynamic that recently frustrated me was the beta for Turtle Rock’s Back 4 Blood, the long-anticipated spiritual successor to the Left 4 Dead series developed by the same studio (though in Left 4 Dead’s case the studio was integrated into Valve). Left 4 Dead is one of my favorite games, a careful gem of design where each element has its place and plays precisely against the others. That being said, it surely left room for innovation and improvement, and much interesting that could be done by iterating on and extrapolating from its design. Unfortunately, rather than doing any of that, Back 4 Blood just plasters the game with a bunch of random stuff – randomly drawn cards which give little fiddly statistical bonuses, hidden piles of currency used to buy guns and healing, supply points used to unlock more cards with more bonuses, and so forth. What’s worse, what were core design tenets of Left 4 Dead – such as special units being fragile but powerful, with their attacks instantly rendering one player helpless and necessitating rescue to enforce team work – have been completely discarded, possibly just to make these new systems more appealing. Sure, to some degree it’s just a matter of taste… but so many games now just seem to me like hollowed-out versions of themselves with a rote RPG grafted on top. Many would credit or blame this design trend to the emergence of micro-transaction business models – and, while I think the prevalence of these approaches to profit certainly drives a lot of how these meta-games manifest, I’ve seen aspects which extend beyond that model, both in where the ideas originated and how they are deployed. Rogue-lites are another genre that is frequently guilty of this style of design, and for reasons largely divorced from the profit model that manifests it in big-budget free-to-play games.
Okay though – now that we’ve established that I’m the grouchiest old man in gaming, let’s talk about how to do maximalist design in a way that’s fun and interesting. While a game like Nioh might make my eyes cross with its multiple intersecting skill and item systems (I liked Nioh, I just wish about half of the game wasn’t there), I still believe it’s possible to achieve interesting and elegant complexity as well.
First, make every system matter: If I can ignore a system in a game I will usually try to do so. Many games let you ignore a system until the one part of the game where they fuck you over for doing so: Don’t do this. If you do, you’ll end up with a bunch of frustrated players who have completely forgotten the hitherto pointless system even existed. If you can completely remove a system from a game and have the game still be almost entirely the same experience, you should probably just go ahead and remove that system.
Second, every system introduced should stem from and connect back to the core mechanics of the game. A classic RPG leveling system, no matter how it’s dressed, is a way to play the main game loop in order to get better at playing the main game loop. The further away and more abstract and complex this becomes, the less satisfying it is. If you’re doing side-quests to get currency to buy clothes to get a set bonus that lets you get more currency (& etc.) then it’s hard not to feel like you’re being misled about the nature of this entertainment transaction.
Third, try to clutter the interface as little as possible, both in terms of gamepad/keyboard buttons and in in-game menus. If I need to open an extra menu to cast a spell I probably won’t bother. If I need to use a skill from a menu to prepare an item which I select from a list of items to use in combat, I definitely won’t bother.
In brief, I believe that you ought to excise everything from your game that is extraneous and unimportant to the core experience of the game you are trying to impart. Whether you wish to do that by removing systems and killing darlings or by reconstructing them to make them more central to the design and control schema, I don’t know or care. Just stop wasting your audience’s time with a bunch of hastily cobbled together systems that add up to nothing in particular.