it's true that on some occasions, some games could do with some more work on the underlying engine.
god of war is a good example. the engine for that game was quite apalling, the amount of times i lost my temper because i got killed by walking into the flat side of a blade.

but i do think that people will go for the more imaginitive games simply because that's what games are all about.
an unimaginitive game is for all intents and purposes totally useless.

"but i do think that people will go for the more imaginitive games simply because that's what games are all about. an unimaginitive game is for all intents and purposes totally useless."


I think that's a very true and interesting point. I am certainly guilty of this and I suspect it was the reason I didn't enjoy Sins of a Solar Empire. That game was primarily made up of empty space and its emphasis was definatley on rules and number-systems. It did a really good job making sure that all its number systems worked time and again BUT, to bring it back to the immutable game design point, it lacked a sound, animation and response for most of the stuff you did in the game. Many RTS games suffer from the same thing and that is why they are still a niche market.

I guess most consumers will buy games based on their 'creative' appeal rather than their 'scientific' base. After all, I DID buy God of War and only disliked it AFTER I play it. From a consumer stand-point, I guess the rules only matter once they've already bought the game; in things like reviews or a friend who either liked or disliked it. The gimmick is there to sell the game; maybe that's why it's evidently more important than rules?

But I'm inclined to believe that where the fluff and gimmicks sell a game, the rules keep the audience playing it - GTA style. I've heard that story is a good reason to replay a game too. Though I still believe rules and story (plotline, more precisely) are very much the same thing; they can each follow tried and tested methods for success.

Can our industry not afford to worry about this kind of replay for replay's sake? Shouldn't this be the reason consumers will buy the sequel anyway? Or do developers simply disagree with this?

In terms of Design, Fallout 3 is pretty bad.
I mean, the interior of the ship is completely different orientation to the exterior. the doors are rotated 90 degrees to the interior.
for somebody like me who relies heavily on spacial awareness when playng games (i use my own mental map instead of the game map) that's more than a little confusing. more than a little frustrating.
the sewer and subway systems do not correlate with the land above. you can walk down a tunnel in 2 minutes and come out a distance from the start perhaps 5 times the distance you just walked. then walk down a tunnel for what seems like ages and then come out and you've hardly gone any distance.

regardless of the many flaws in this game, I have played this game for the longest out of any game i played this year or even last year. I've also bought all the expansion packs for it.

the reason is not because of the underlying elements that support the game, but rather the actual game itself. fallout 3, in a nutshell, is "walk around a future wasteland and kill mutants and amass a horde of weapons and other stuff" the important stuff is done well. the interiors and how they relate to the outside world is certainly not good, but i can forgive that because of the things it does well.

"The interiors and how they relate to the outside world is certainly not good, but i can forgive that because of the things it does well."



So by implication, the invisible walls in God of War don't matter so much because they're not the focus of the game, right? The game offers an experience and delivers; so all its blemishes don't seem so bad? It's a fair point and I get the feeling a lot of gamers feel this way. But it feels like this is more of the "I've seen this much and I can't go back now" philosophy. As in, you like what you see and you hope it gets better - but it never does.

On the flipside, if you present the same scenario to someone who doesn't usually play games (say, a casual gamer), they won't forgive you for it. Legitimate confusion and frustration will follow and this is basically because they don't understand that sometimes games get it wrong. More precisely, they don't understand that the invisible walls aren't that important so the rest of the game is still good. NintendoDS wins because their smaller games get it right fairly consistently.

Likewise, I like to test my games on non-gamers because it shows me whether I've gotten the psychology right, without the bias of normal gamers who are apparently a lot more forgiving in their judgment. A non-gamer isn't used to using a product that is essentially broken and therefore has high expectations. I find that to be very valuable.

Quote:Original post by MachiniMax
As in, you like what you see and you hope it gets better - but it never does.

that depends totally on personality type. there are many people in this world who always want bigger and better. there are equal number of people who are perfectly happy of more of the same. actualy, there are probably more people who are satisfied with more of the same as long as it's good. the type of people who watch football and other similar sports for example.

Quote:Original post by MachiniMax
On the flipside, if you present the same scenario to someone who doesn't usually play games (say, a casual gamer), they won't forgive you for it. Legitimate confusion and frustration will follow and this is basically because they don't understand that sometimes games get it wrong. More precisely, they don't understand that the invisible walls aren't that important so the rest of the game is still good.

I'm not sure how you back this up. sure, if design is atrocious and is glaringly obvious, then that may be true. but invisible walls are not normally in the areas that the average player is guided to. the designers put in visual stimulus to guide teh player along. i have found that inexperienced players are less likely to wander off into areas the designer doesn't want them to. only experienced players tend to do more exploration due to their experience of places to hide secrets etc.
also, only experienced players will care enough. a person who doesn't play many games will not really think of it as a big deal and just go in another direction. I have found that it is only players that have spent years playing games have high expectations.

"I have found that it is only players that have spent years playing games have high expectations."



Are you sure? True experienced gamers actually have expectations specifically of the game - so if Gore: Ulitmate Soldier doesn't live up to Unreal Tournament III, it's gonna get into trouble. But that's actually that bias I mention before; the average gamer has some idea of what is typically good and bad in a game whereas the non-gamers doesn't. I've had plenty of non-gamers try one game I made and like it heaps, even though they weren't able to play it.

So sure, they were forgiving on the surface - but in truth, they couldn't actually play the game at all (the controls/interface were too complex). That's more what I mean, opposed to the personality thing.

However, the personality thing does come into play; but I believe it's more about the market than quantifiable design. Good application of this and the "hope it gets better but never does" thing comes into play with Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy). This was a game that had a pretty good mechanic (Laser Disc quicktime events, pretty much) which it explored thoroughly and which I played to the end. But I found that only the first act of three was really worth playing. It was a story-driven game and the story quickly fell apart with supernatural crap and aliens.

Now this IS a personality thing. There are people out there who I'm sure would have called the game boring if it only centred on human emotions/drama and left out all the scifi crap. But read any review on the net; this game fell apart about half way through. Even stories require some measure of stability in the same sense that rules do - something leads to something else in logical progression. Introducing irrelivant plot points and throw-away encounters for the sake of content doesn't work in a story, much less a story-game.

But then, plenty of people like Tarantino's 'From Dusk Till Dawn' even though that story is essential shitehouse. They like it generally because of the way it is presented; that that is the same reason I actually played Fahrenhiet to the end - the gameplay (ie; rules) saved it.

God of War was not the same. Its rules were clunky to me. Particularly the hydra approach "kill one troll, spawn two trolls"; lesson learned - don't kill the first troll... Didn't the designers see that one coming? But if you don't kill the first troll, you can't move on through the level (thanks, invisible walls); so I'm boned if I do and boned if I don't. I never wanted to kill the 'troll' and I suspect that after the third of fourth time, most people would have done it out of necessity rather than fun-factor. Whereas killing people in Max Payne almost never got old.

And why is a peasant woman faster and more nimble than Kratos? Why must I bash down that solid rock barrier when I cannot break through even the thinnest of wooden doors? In fact, why can't I break through that door when moments ago, I broke through another just like it? Innconsistent. Needed to be fixed. Wasn't. It wasn't fixed because once those things are 'made' it's too hard to change them; basic problem, bad game design. If that was just the start of the game, I might have forgiven it, but it never fixed those issues. It was broken the whole way through. That's a huge amount of broken. Even smaller games like Alter Echo are exactly the same.



"There are equal number of people who are perfectly happy of more of the same."


Just wanted to add on this point that I was discussing the prospect of a Portal sequel to someone the other day and wondering what would make that game work. There were two schools of thought... The 'Halo' approach where everything is pretty much the same but put into a different although similar story. Then there was the 'ICO' approach where the sequel has throwbacks to the original game but is otherwise entirely different (sotc). The second option is good because you're not grinding the issue into dust (like they did with Max Payne 2) but then you lose most of your original audience because you've made a different game. The first approach is good too but the chances of accessing any new market are very limited.

Personally, I'm fine with both methods as long as the rules in both games work without flaw. Kind of like Test Cricket vs 20/20 Cricket - I heartily enjoy both.

Wow, this thread has got pretty dense. I've tried to follow it all, but there's a lot of stuff here. I'd like to pitch in with my 2 cents but I'm going to try to keep it simple by addressing the initial post.

As I think has been thrashed out, there's no objective measurement for the overall quality of a game design. I'm a guy who loved SotC and has no time for WoW (which was cited earlier in the thread as an example of bad design), but for all of the beauty and wonder and loneliness and guilt of SotC, it fell pretty flat in terms of sales or capturing the wider public's imagination. WoW is pretty much the antithesis of that, in that it seems to be an incredibly bland and repetitive experience, but the designers presumably have golden thrones as office chairs and sleep on piles of banknotes as a result of their contribution to the astronomical sales.

What's your yardstick here? Is it based on a subjective view of beauty and artistic intent, or is the only sensible measure of the success of a design based on sales? Or is it something else? The point is, it's all well and good arguing whether design is an art or a science (short answer: it's both), but that won't bring you any closer to an objective idea about what's good and what isn't. The best that can be said is that it either captivates the audience it was aimed at, or it doesn't.

What's more interesting is your point about a designer's position in the industry as a whole, based on the interview experience. The truth is sad. On one level or another, everyone who gets into the industry is enticed by this one idea: "You've got a cool idea for a game? Make it, so the world can see it!". This is basically a lie - short of making Indie games, there's no way to retain this kind of auteur status. What happens is that everyone wants to be The Designer. They realise quickly that they can't make the awesome game that's in their heads, but they want to make damn sure that their stamp is left on whatever game they do end up working on. This applies to EVERYONE: the tester's opinions on design clutter up the bug database; the programmers either fight feature-creep or propagate it; the artists try to inject their personality into the assets they create, even if they don't fit into the overall vision. The designers try to reign all this in and shape it into something coherent, and it'd be okay if the picture stopped there. But then the producers step in and demand something related to what their kids find cool at that time, or some new (and entirely inappropriate) technology they'd read good stuff about but don't understand; the Marketing guys declare that the game with be a flop unless they can put bullet points X, Y and Z on the box; the legal team quash anything remotely controversial or driven by player creativeness; the HR department bring their kids in for a focus test, and suddenly an 8-year-old's Word becomes Law... The whole project turns into a bland generic smoosh of ill-fitting ideas. What could have been a tight visceral linear FPS/RPG turns into a soggy, empty, open-world 3rd person action adventure with poorly-balanced "RPG lite" elements, needless quicktime events, poorly-implemented stealth mechanics, with a generic Gothy (but ultimately inoffensive) anti-hero with a shady past. Suddenly, the designer, unless they are extraordinarily strong-willed, is the only person on the team who no longer wants to be the designer.

The hardcore fans of a successful game/franchise/genre care about the designers. But often, the companies who employ the designers do not care about them. Sometimes, a game can turn out crap because the designer is just plain bad at what they do, but much more often, a good designer's ideas get squashed under the weight of other clamouring voices. It's why, on the whole, indie games tend to be more interesting and daring than AAA ones, because there are fewer cooks to spoil a designer's broth. Game design is still an incredibly interesting and wide-ranging discipline, with a lot to learn and new fields of study emerging every year, but it's hampered by the fact that designers need to endure the mandatory side-quests to level up in bootlicking and office politics before they can push their ideas and discoveries through.

when you use abbreviations, please un-abbreviate the first instance so people know what you're talking about.
thanks.

WoW is pretty well know, but I had to do a google search for SotC.

Quote:
good games make the player feel as though the designer is sitting there behind him the whole time, watching him play.

Actually thats kind creepy if you think about it. I don't think I would enjoy a game like that.