How About We Stop Adding Gear Scores & Cosmetics to Every Game – Extra Punctuation

How About We Stop Adding Gear Scores and Cosmetics to Every Game Extra Punctuation Yahtzee Croshaw Gotham Knights
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This week on Extra Punctuation, Yahtzee’s taking a look at the gear scores and cosmetics that are being added to a seemingly endless amount of video games, like Gotham Knights.

Extra Punctuation Transcript

Somebody terribly clever once said that creativity is the art of hiding ones influences. And that’s definitely true in the world of video games. Since the art of game design is as much about function as form, often the best thing to do is take gameplay concepts that are already proven to work and tweak them to suit current tastes. But the other job of the game designer is occasionally to take deeply established systems and try to figure out if they still serve a purpose. Sometimes ideas get entrenched and hang around long after they become obsolete. For example, limited lives systems, a holdover from the arcade tradition of relentless quarter munching that stuck around in home console games way longer than it should’ve done.

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Author
Yahtzee Croshaw
Yahtzee is the Escapist’s longest standing talent, having been writing and producing its award winning flagship series, Zero Punctuation, since 2007. Before that he had a smattering of writing credits on various sites and print magazines, and has almost two decades of experience in game journalism as well as a lifelong interest in video games as an artistic medium, especially narrative-focused. He also has a foot in solo game development - he was a big figure in the indie adventure game scene in the early 2000s - and writes novels. He has six novels published at time of writing with a seventh on the way, all in the genres of comedic sci-fi and urban fantasy. He was born in the UK, emigrated to Australia in 2003, and emigrated again to California in 2016, where he lives with his wife and daughters. His hobbies include walking the dog and emigrating to places.