Quote:Original post by Ranger Meldon

Quote:Original question by Wavinator
Out of curiosity: To what degree, if any, has this list impacted your game buying decisions?

This is a good question, and difficult to answer. But then, that doesn't surprise me based on some of your other posted questions; you seem very much about the bottom line, and I suppose I can't help but respect that.

I asked not to criticize, but more to understand. The list of irritants you posted, on average, speak to a strong interest in very complicated or intensive solutions. Reputation, rag doll physics and customization are difficult challenges for any game, expensive and time consuming. So when I see them come up as complaints, I think, "Hmmm... how many feel this way? Of those that feel this way, how many are willing to stop buying a game because of it? Okay, now how many are willing to pay extra for a game or lose other features to support it?"

What I find hard to understand now is if someone tells me that they want something just because they want it, no matter how difficult it is to get (like "I want a Star Trek holodeck NOW!") If the desire is unconnected from reality, then I'm interested in how to educate the customer (heh, or avoid the customer, since some cost you more than they're ever willing to contribute).

Quote:
I also try to burn into my mind a graphical "scar" of the look and feel of a worthless game, so that any other game that looks the same, or looks like it would act the same, I don't buy.

:) Reminds me of trying to detect from the screenshots when games had hand painted animation vs. an animation you could really interact with. I agree with you about not getting suckered, which is 2x as tough because of the return policies most stores have.

Quote:
However, all that having been said, I mostly posted this list as a resource for us programmers to know what to avoid in our own games. I didn't really design this list to reflect observations that would influence my buying decisions. I just know a crappy game when I play one, and not usually before then. Like most things in life, it's a lot easier to identify what you don't want than what you do want, and even then only in retrospect.

But do you REALLY think a game is crappy if it doesn't give you a $50,000.00 ragdoll physics system complete with feinting and tripping as a result? That seems a bit extreme.

The (obvious) alternative is to add more actual roleplaying. Really, you don't need skill/stat/perk advancement at all to make a great RPG.

I really wish level-ups and classes would just go away. There are better and more flexible ways to handle character advancement. Classes do make balancing easier, though.

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
I asked not to criticize, but more to understand.

Ok, I want you to know one good thing right now: I did not think that you asked in order to criticize. I completely understand and share your urge to be more aware. I don't even know you (I mean, how could I?) and I still already like your posting style. You don't ask stupid questions or post trivial comments. You may focus more on the bottom line than I do, but that doesn't make your focus bad. It just makes it different from mine, and that might even be because yours is borne more of experience than mine. At any rate, let there not be a misunderstanding between us. You ask whatever you feel like, and I will do my best to answer. Sometimes I just have an aggressive typing tone that comes off sounding defensive or annoyed when it's not.

Now for the actual reply part:

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
The list of irritants you posted, on average, speak to a strong interest in very complicated or intensive solutions. Reputation, rag doll physics and customization are difficult challenges for any game, expensive and time consuming.

I feel compelled to defend myself. :) I will agree with you if you revise the first part of that statement to read "a strong interest in merely more complicated or intensive solutions." Don't get me wrong, I know people aren't going to keep buying your game if your graphics are beautiful and your gameplay sucks. However (comma), we are quickly reaching an era in computer gaming where all the basic child's play programming techniques have been done literally hundreds of times over. The average consumer is getting sick of it, and wants to see something new (what a shocker) or at least something more. If that means a reputation system that works or a "rag-doll" physics subsystem, then so be it. I don't see why it would be a bad thing to realistically explore these possibilites. Let's face it, as Maddox says, "rag-doll" is basically just a BS hype name for an engine that supports basic Newtonian physics. Sure, if you happened to buy such a technology from someone else, you might pay 50 grand. But if you open a physics textbook and start using some imagination, you can write your own. Time intensive? Hell yes, especially at first. But at least you now own the source code, and are beholden to no one. I'm not big on reinventing the wheel, but some wheels need to be made by a man's own hands in order for him to better understand his world and control his own destiny.

Besides, once you start figuring out how to do it yourself, it'll probably seem a lot less intimidating. After all, the fact that a commercial subsystem already exists proves that it can be done; somebody had to sit down and write that code themselves for the first time. So can we. "As man has done, man can do." Anything's easy when you know how to do it. Reputation might actually be a little tougher, because it's not already based on well-understood laws. However, if you can conceive of it, you can do it, if you'll try. Customization is not that big of a deal. You just break up your models into smaller parts, and allow the player to mix them together, limited only by certain rules, like you can't attach a blade to the tip of another blade, etc. When they're all done, you can even simplify your physics a little bit by merging the submodels into one bigger model that looks the same but has a unified skeleton. Of course, you'd want to keep track in an array of what subparts the weapon is comprised. That way, the player can recustomize the weapon in the future without you having to keep track of the specific details of all those submodel vertices, or how to break apart the merged model.

Anything's hard if you decide ahead of time that it's going to be hard. Some of the most profound things in the Universe are exceedingly simple. A lot of the suggestions I make seem like a really big deal mostly because people haven't bothered themselves yet with making games that include all these ideas simultaneously. Bump mapping and per-pixel lighting were big, impressive deals when they first came out. Now you see them in a lot of games, and nobody thinks anything of it, except that they look cooler than games that don't have them.

It's not a matter of, "will people not buy my game if I don't do this?" but instead a matter of "how many more people will LOVE my game because I do this?" "How much farther might I raise the bar on the genre if I do this?" "How much less will I feel like I'm churning out yet another cookie-cutter abomination of a game, and feel more like I'm making a labor of love?" After all, if your heart's not into the prospect of devoting your very life to creating a labor of love, why in the world are you creating game software in the first place? Go program e-commerce or bank software. Those are both about as artful as a club to the head. And I say these things not just to you, Wavinator, but to any other programmer reading this, as a warning: you shouldn't be programming games if you don't love what you do, and want to make it better every day. The industry is becoming more flooded all the time with passionless (or worse yet, impassioned but bereft of tenacity or talent) idiots with CS degrees who should be monkey-coding or mopping floors, not making art.

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
If the desire is unconnected from reality[....]

These desires are completely connected to reality; they originate from the creative urge to implement the laws of reality into a virtual setting. People who are writing first-person perspective 3D games should be trying their best to make a realistic 3D world, for the sake of immersiveness. I don't need a holodeck, I just need something realistic that doesn't look like crap. I'll work on beautiful later. Yes, that's how I would rank them: Gameplay, then realism, then beauty.

Quote:Original post by Wavinator
But do you REALLY think a game is crappy if it doesn't give you a $50,000.00 ragdoll physics system complete with feinting and tripping as a result? That seems a bit extreme.

Perhaps it's time for a little extremeness to shake up the perceptions in programmers' minds that it's ok to make a game that is less than your best. Or perhaps to shake up those perceptions in the minds of the corporate money-mongering beaurocrats who give us unrealistic deadlines and pay substandard wages for the hours we work. All this for an endeavor the heart of which they will never understand. Bottom line: If you conceive of something, and know it's possible to do both in terms of implementation and current hardware limitations, but decide not to because "it would be too hard", or because you're not willing to invest the development time, to me that's just plain lazy and reprehensible. That is, at least if you hold yourself to the standard of trying to be a true programming artist, as I do.

I realize that the art of programming is all about balancing competing desires. However, some things should never be compromised. Quality over quantity is one of them. And if this means taking more development time, figuring out Newtonian physics for yourself, and/or making customizable items, then so be it. I know I would love spending three or four years developing a game that players forget about after only a year or so. I would feel like I just wasted the past 4 years of my life, even if I was gainfully employed at it the whole time. Bottom line: Yes, I do think much less highly of a 3D FP RPG game that doesn't have realistic physics, reputation system (if applicable), and/or features like customization. Yes, if I see one more Quake 3 engine clone converted into an RPG, I might scream. Yes, I would probably not buy a game any more that doesn't start getting things right.

~Ranger Meldon~ M.M. .:

Edit: Before you think I'm saying any of this in anger, please remember that I don't think you're stupid and I like your questions a lot. This is just me, on some topics.

[Edited by - Ranger Meldon on July 1, 2005 10:41:05 AM]

Here's another bad element which applies to games in general: grave, obvious mismatches between story/scripting and gameplay. In scripted sequences, people may get killed from getting their throats slit, yet during gameplay, it's more often than not impossible to kill with a single cut, even if the opponent is unconscious. I can understand that single hit kills are often avoided for gameplay concerns, but when they occur anyway at specific, predetermined points, I really feel cheated. In KotOR, it gets downright ridiculous. Thermal detonators are talked about like they are mini-nukes, capable of obliterating anyone within a sizeable area. But later on, you can have them explode right at your feet for only 15% HP damage. Another example (not RPG) is Red Alert: You get to see some really cool, somewhat realistic video clips, but actual gameplay is totally different. I would have liked the game better if it didn't have those action clips to remind me of just how limited and unrealistic the game is.