Here's a short topic to come to my attention lately... Aren't games that let you create within a fun rule set amazing? Boomblox, LBP, and Timesplitters just to name a few are some of my favorites, and its kind of a shame nobody talks about modnation as much because that was awesome as well. Truth is we all love community creations, just like any sane person loves trying out mods to their favorite PC game. However I always find it kind of funny that we always neglect one of its biggest faults... fact is we as every day people are not only questionable designers, but even if we make an incredible masterpiece the question next is a matter of how fun can it really be for ourselves? How do we know when we've created a masterpiece? And how the heck do we balance it right!
Let me give you this fine example of what I'm talking about. I was playing TimeSplitters 2 once again in a very long time, and I used to make stuff like crazy on there. However back then I never totally enjoyed it. I always pushed hard to make it just right, but it never was unless I got carried away with cheap stuff. I knew every weapon placement, every enemy spawn, how many times they spawned, I knew where the health packs were, I knew where my objectives were and how to do them, I knew if something could be cheated because of a loophole in the code, and I knew every room. It gave me an experience that was hard to make hard, and even if it could be done there were no surprises about it. Now I have another problem where going back to this stuff with a very foggy memory, I see some of these levels as borderline impossible without my super knowledge. Rooms were spammed with 7 different enemy spawns, health packs were thrown into obvious places to compensate for the enemy spam, and everything is based around trial and error rather than a natural learning curve. Now naturally in this day and age I would be making these maps in mind with balance for other folks and await their feedback, but the point is its still absurdly weird trying to balance something all by yourself and you can't exactly enjoy it like that. This isn't something I just see in myself either, it explains why every Duke Nukem custom level on steam's workshop is ridiculous while the more well made company released mods like the beach scene are so much better balanced. One was made by a team and tested like a release, and sold out there on shelves. The other is something a guy made and sent online calling it done, at best they had a friend test it. Most of the big successful mods have testers in their credit to thank, most of the slapped together levels are trial and error tests. Heck some of them don't even hide it, its quite common to see tracks and levels named after a hard or intentionally impossible difficulty wall. Now in their defense of course some community level should be harder because that's the after content stuff that you play once you've beaten and won everything the core experience through at you.
Of course this logic does not apply to every single game out there. The beauty in a game like Trials or LBP is that you have half the challenge presented on a basis of reflex and timing, and while I usually condemn that over actual learning curves I've got to say it means that your average level is designed to be more fair to everyone. That wont stop a few masters from making a modest torture platformer level, but for the most part you can open up a list in LBP and expect most levels there to be decent creations of some kind. Besides, any online sharing station worth its time now has a system to help you get the better levels out of the community. I guess that's why Duke Nukem is mostly tough as nails, it also just has a completely non-organized method of download via the workshop and no other methods to it. I'm not at all demonizing content creation in general either. On the whole its a great thing, and I envy the better creators and often wonder why I don't spend more time with this stuff. Its just... I have to stop and wonder, do these guys ever get to enjoy their own work, and also note how tough it is to balance some of these games when making your very own stuff. Its also just kind of weird nobody talks about this side of things, at least that I know of. However in modern times, I guess its the act of sharing that counts more. Some of my favorite levels in LBP come from those that actually make a story and adventure out of their work, and I think they enjoyed writing and making that for people equally as much as I enjoyed playing it.
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