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I basically spent this entire weekend playing "Into the Breach" so I feel qualified to comment on that game being identified as "visually well-designed". Here's one great thing about ItB that was not discussed in the article (probably for brevity!). When you're deciding what moves to take, the game will show you the effect of the move you're about to do. This is really handy because often your moves have knockback, o…
You might like this article on RockPaperShotgun that does a bit more of a deep dive on the interface design challenges during ITB: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/03/05/into-the-breach-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't about game design (rules, mechanics, balance, etc.), it's about design of GUIs for games.
The interface is very much part of the design of a game!
As a counter point here, there are an immense number of articles on "good" game design. But the problem is that you'll have a million exceptions in games that do phenomenally well breaking all these notions, and a million games that flop abiding all of them. Really I think the point is that games are more of an art than a science. The regular inability of companies to replicate their own past successes should itself…
The article is about the area of UI design, which is part of a game's design but not the entire thing. It's entirely possible for a game to do well despite having a bad UI, but it would be foolish to assume that it did well because of the bad UI. If you're arguing that no UI can be better or worse than any other because it's all "art", that is absurd.
So for instance consider crafting in Diablo 2 vs Diablo 3. In Diablo 2 crafting was ostensibly horrible. There was no clear way displayed of how to do it, or what the result might be, and actually putting things in your cube was tedious at best. Diablo 3 refined this. And suddenly all relevant information was immediately displayed, items would be automatically taken from your inventory and the entire system was substantially cleaned up.
In a vacuum it's obvious which would be preferable. But somehow in game, the clean crafting system felt boring and tedious whereas the 'dated' crafting system, which really did feel like an anachronism, somehow managed to avoid this in ways that are really difficult to pin down. Those unnecessary obstacles often defy description yet are really what create the 'feel' of a game.
Gameplay and presentation are both intrinsically tied together and I think trying to formulate a cookie cutter definition of good versus bad is something that's unlikely to be productive.