Should Developers Listen To All Gamer Feedback?

Thanks to GameSpy for their 'Spy/CounterSpy' editorial discussing whether the videogame developer should listen to all fan feedback regarding in-development titles. The writer suggests: "Who in their right mind ignores advice from the people who are going to pay for your product? And in the end, that's what it comes down. Fans pay the bills - and they deserve respect." Bit he also points out the negative angle: "Fan suggestions are usually what would make the game better for that one individual. Developers need to consider the global effects of any suggestion and work to keep the majority happy." Are there some game titles or genres where a vocal minority's agitation for change has resulted in an inferior title?

Comments

Hitman : Code 47

[andyt]

Hitman : Code 47 was a fantastic game. It was all about the suspense. You could spend fifteen minutes getting yourself into a position for the perfect shot, knowing that if you fouled up, you had to start all over again. It was tense, exciting and something entirely different from anything else out there. It was also as buggy as hell, but what can you expect when the publishing house tells the developers that they will be releasing it on a certain date, whether it is finished or not?

Of course, what happened when it was released? The whining began. "It's too difficult", "you can't save midlevel", "I can't circle-strafe" etc. etc.

And so they made some changes to the sequel. Now you could easily finish a level by just charging in, all guns blazing. Things getting a bit tricky? No problem, just quicksave! Sure, you could hide your guns in a tray of groceries, pose as a postman to pass through the gate, duck into the kitchen, collect your weaponry, sneak up the stairs, bludgeon your target to death with a golfclub and escape without a shot being fired.. but why go to all that bother when the game doesn't penalise you for just shooting everyone in the head?

By listening to the "fans", who never seemed to understand the point of the game, they turned one of the most innovative games of recent times into a sub-par FPS.

Console games vs. PC games

[Falkkin]

It's interesting to me that most of the comments I see so far involve PC games. One huge difference with console games is that they are generally unpatchable, and therefore, any feedback on the part of gamers will only get incorporated into the next installment of the game. If the game is truly a bust, there may not be a next installment, so console developers have a greater motivation to get the important design issues (game mechanics, balance, replayability) right the first time.

This is a huge advantage if your development team is good at game design, and a huge disadvantage if your developers suck at it. For better or worse, the rules of a console game are essentially static. On the other hand, players of PC games know that they can influence the developers (via posting on official message boards and the like) in an attempt to get the rules of the game to work in their favor. Therefore PC gamers are more likely to be voice any gripes they have about the game.

It'd be interesting to see a PC game-development group come out and say "for the first N months that our game is out, there will be no gameplay-affecting patches, only bugfixes and the like"... this would discourage people from going straight to the messageboards with "OMGOMGOMG I got pwn3d by strategy X, and I'm too much of an idiot to figure out how to beat strategy X, so clearly strategy X is overpowered, please nerf". Having a moratorium on balance patches would actually force people to think, "well, I think strategy X is overpowered... but they're not going to fix it for at least 2 months... so in the meantime I better shut up and figure out some way of countering it."

Part of the reason I don't play Warcraft III anymore is that I don't have a ton of time to dedicate to nothing but games, and the balance-update cycle for WC3 seemed to be so short that every time I played it was a different game -- each of the units I was used to playing suddenly became stronger or weaker, or cost more, or less, or took a longer time to build... it got to the point where it was impossible to actually play a good game without revisiting the messageboards every day to see what the current complaints were about (and therefore what would be nerfed in the next patch.)

Ultima Online

[Hythlodaeus]

Ultima Online has seen a series of changes, each one lowering the risk/reward ratio. Of course each time that happens, it makes players happy (more loot, no pk's!) but now it's so easy it's boring.