The Game Designs That Just Work

Ever heard the expression “good bones”? It's said of houses undergoing renovations, of classic cars that need a bit of a spruce up. It's even said of unfinished creative masterpieces. It's a nod to rock-solid foundations, or a certain lineage that observers can safely bet will produce excellent results. It's a saying born out of knowing a thing or two about a particular market. Often it's relied upon as a harbinger of success.
In gaming, good bones could mean a lot of things. It could be a reference to the titles in a series that have gone before, laying down a game design foundation, or to a development team that’s established and talented, who know what they're about. It could also refer to the tried and true tropes of a tried and true genre.
Regardless of its interpretation, many games today – successful games – rely on their good bones to get at least some of the work done, whether that's in-game (using a familiar world, set of characters or structure) or for marketing.
The fairly recent release of two games bears this out nicely: Borderlands 2 and Pokemon Black/White 2. Both reviewed extremely well, and enjoyed their time in the warm and soapy hype machine because of their good bones. Fans of the games that went before knew something special was this way coming. They'd found a structure they liked, and they wanted to see what the developers were going to do with it next because they had an evidence base that suggested they'd be good.
The Borderlands and Pokemon franchises make a good comparison because of the vast difference in age. Pokemon enjoys more than 15 years on shelves, while the first Borderlands game appeared in 2009 and is followed only by this most recent release, if you exclude the DLC.

Pokemasters of their domain

The Pokemon series, at what for a human would be a sullen and awkward mid-teen, is a veritable grandpappy in the video games market. It shows little evidence of slowing down, either. The base series (for now, let us mentally attach the spin-off titles to boomerangs and fling them merrily into the sea*) continues to be bought in the millions of units. Why?

Because it struck a winning formula, that's why. Developer Game Freak has had the good sense and creative nous to innovate within a set of criteria it got more or less spot on from the outset. This enabled the studio to offer new game elements and items, without compromising the core experience.

For every game in the core line since 1996, you've played as a plucky young thing who gets out from underneath his overbearing, money-grubbing mother and goes out to become the best Pokemon trainer ever. The dedication shown to the series by fans goes beyond love. The emotions exists in the same dimension as how you feel when you eat really awesome ice cream, or try to explain to your friends how you liked Bieber when he was still underground. Pokemon addictions are maintained and grown anew every couple of years because Game Freak created a sound, sustainable framework for its games. Good on them.

The question is, what makes that framework... work? Consistency, is one thing. Seemingly at odds with that, creativity is another.

When Game Freak started work with an army of made up creatures with myriad abilities – one of the most important of which was the hardwired impulse to drop the needle on some Muskrat Love and make little Pokemon – it surely must have known the possibilities were endless. The world itself also allowed for huge scope and creativity as the landscape was matched with Pokemon of varying abilities. That's why we see a certain evolution in each game that gets released.

So, the consistency? That's in the structure, man. Dem bones. Battles are the same. HMs and TMs work the same way. Gyms are titanic rites of passage and Charmander burns the bells and sprouts off of Bellsprout.

Borderland of opportunity

Within the highly successful shooter/RPG structure Gearbox has built for Borderlands, the franchise's good bones are all about guns and loot (although the sound first-person-shooter format has a significant role to play too).

The incentive to explore Pandora is incredibly rich, with the promise of so many varying weapon types, each with their different attributes. Where this gets more complex is in the skill trees of the characters and how those weapons are best utilised. This worked incredibly well in Borderlands, and has carried over into Borderlands 2. Fans are already wondering – where to next? Those good bones excite them.

RPGs actually make for interesting case studies when considering the concept of good bones: lots of them have internal structures based on turn-based combat and loot-based adventuring. They hark back to the days of pencil and paper, dungeon masters and many-sided die. There is a real history there – an agreed form and function. You might argue, in fact, that Dungeons and Dragons has the good-est bones of all: we owe most of the modern role playing market to its success.

Additions to a franchise's core structure are sometimes delightfully accepted by the fan base, and sometimes hurled at the walls of the internet like so many Friday night Big Mac pickles. But those that hope to enjoy a long life and intensive production usually trust their bones to hold them nice and strong. What makes the comparison of Borderlands to Pokemon so interesting is the question about Borderlands' projected success. Rumours about brainstorming sessions for Borderlands 3 hit the web last month – let's assume that another game in the series will definitely appear: how strong are the foundations? Does it have Pokemon-esque potential?

There's always the chance that a fledgling series will flounder; one creative cast too many, or ideas that simply don't work. While we've seen enough build up for BioShock Infinite that the possibility seems an impossibility, the fact is that a series that strays a long way from its roots in terms of major game elements (in the case of this example, environment) take a huge risk.

Tell us what you think about consistency vs creativity, and the modern gamer's ability to absorb change. What series do you consider to have the best bones? How important is solid game structure to you? Which series might have already lost its way?

*Boomerangs never come back: don't believe the hype.