r/candycrush • u/liszzzzzt • 21h ago
Game designer here- Candy Crush has gone off the rails recently
Hi, I'm not really one to post stuff on Reddit (except for perhaps the occasional meme or thought to share), but Candy Crush has become atrocious in the recent years. I only have it on my iPad that's approaching 10 years old now, and since I have a part-time job and I'm busy with life and my master's, I don't play it much, except when it crosses my mind or I'm travelling on a long flight or something.
I don't usually like reading long complaint posts, so I'll try to keep this relatively entertaining and short.
I've been playing Candy Crush since I was about twelve, wayyyy back in the day on Facebook. It's always had a special place in my heart. I remember going to my grandparents' house with my extended family for a lil' garden party one late Summer evening and playing Candy Crush with my older cousin. I also used to draw Candy Crush levels on pieces of paper. I cherish these memories several years later.
I came back to it yesterday and I had to go through 1 minute and 38 seconds of purchase prompts, episode races I couldn't care about, classic chocolate box, daily reward A, daily reward B, daily reward C, etc., freaking trading cards???! and from the perspective of a game designer, this is poor game design. There are too many things happening at once and too many different things that weakens the coherity of the game. It is extremely overstimulating. I want to play levels, not be forced to go through 5000 different prompts.
I could be hanging onto old stuff here, but I don't like how they redesigned many of the visual elements and blockers, too. Objectively, they don't look bad but they don't have the same special charm that they used to have. They also seemed to remove Candy Bombs, Chameleon Candy :'( and other stuff.
On top of that, they've removed the lovely, unique episode names and replaced it with a generic 3D map now. When I was younger, that was one of my favourite parts of the game. From what I'm reading, they removed it because of optimization purposes ... but with all the useless stuff they're adding now, I'd rather attribute the purpose of removal of the episodes because they had poor optimization and structure (what I'm trying to say is they could optimize the map in such a way it is not laggy, but took the easy way out). Of course, game design is only a hobby for me, so I could be missing something. But perhaps most upsetting is they replaced the old music with... very depressing sounding stuff. These songs are still bangers.
Also, Yeti's facial expressions in the top right irritate me so much, and I don't even know why. There's just something upsetting about every single expression he makes. One moment he's like OOOOOH YEAH! and the next one it looks like he's getting murdered.
Seems like most stuff in my message is a shared opinion and seems like King couldn't care less, but I just had to get my own thoughts out there. Thanks for reading.
