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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?
As usual, a balence of both is often the best solution - most sensible suggestions should be listened to, and the better ones acted upon.
Is it a boat?
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.
Anyone else think of the Simpsons episode where Homer designs his dream car?
Money for nothing, pix for free
This is what happened to Tribes 2. Tribes 2 was the best game ever until they fucked it up. What happened was they had a forum built into the game itself, so most players participated in it. They used it the same way the counter-strike forums are used. "The AWM is cheap take it out of the game!" "Change this it sucks!" "Make it so people can't steal vehicles!"
The Tribes 2 devs made the mistake of doing everything the players wanted. The game turned to crap. After everybody stopped playing they finally restored the game to a decent classic version, and now you can play online with the small community in what was one of the best games ever.
Now look at Counter-Strike. It's the most popular multiplayer online game ever probably. They hardly ever do what players want. They only make changes in the interest of game design. The AWM is still there. The game is still hard. Heck, they make changes to piss players off. Like when they changed the p90 way back in the beta 7 days.
So, why does this happen? Because players are dumb. They don't know anything about game design. They only want you to change the game in such a way so that their current style of playing will immediately become the best style and they will win every time. Think about it. All those guys who say take the AWM out are guys who don't have the skill to deal with someone else sniping at them. That's part of the game and to be good you need those skills. The vast majority of the time players don't ask for game improvements. They just want the game to change to suit themselves rather than become better players. This usually turns the game into crap and all the real players leave. If you don't do what the players want and you just stick to good design all the good players stay, and the idiots stay too. They will always complain, but they will keep playing your game until the end of days. There are guys who have been complaining about things in CS since the very beginning and now they are playing on steam and complaining it is crap and the shield is cheap.
Tribes 2, Counter-Strike. Real world examples and evidence. Don't give in to the whims of players. The vast majority of players like things the way they are. Only the few idiot fanboy types are asking for changes. Don't listen to them. They may seem like the majority on the forums, because they are the majority on the forums. But they aren't the majority of your players.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
What developers should however do when making a sequel, especially when they intend to ride the wave of the previous installment of the game, is look closely at what their clients like about it, and not go and remove it.
Have a look at 3DO and Might and Magic 9. The same hack&slash pushed this game into a 9th (!!) title, having a very solid clientelle and fan base.
Then, right after #8, someone up in management decided he wants to go do what the mass-selling games do. Let's transform it into a simple-to-use "RPG" game that the masses can understand, he said. And so they did.
It may have been wiser to do such a stupid experiment on a new title (like they did when they decided on a genre-change - with Heroes of Might and Magic - which went quite well, and ended them with two hot-selling brands) rather than dumb down a game that was bought for being technical hack&slash and alienate your own paying crown, in search of some dream of the masses chasing you with money.
The mistake managers make here is thinking that many new people will buy your game in addition to those who bought the last 8 titles. They're wrong of course. Take away what people liked for 8 titles, and they won't buy the 9th. You end up relying solely on your hypothetical newly-added clientelle. In M&M9, they stayed hypothetical.
Same goes for Unreal 2, or better yet, Deus-Ex 2, being released now. DE1 was one of the best games of all time. Then Mr. Spector sold out to a big paycheck to make a console shooter and slap the DE2 title on it, dumbed down the RPG elements of the game (which is what made it stand out from the rest of dozens of shooters on the shelves 2 years ago), removed reloading, replaced ammo with universal ammo (a way of saying either all your weapons work, or none of them do). Between the lines this reads: you never run out of ammo. Whoopee. This was done at the expense of what I suspect will be alienating the entire DE1 PC crowd.
Furthermore, where DE1 broke ice, DE2 will mingle with the crowd, be like all other console shooters, and disappear from the shelves 4 months later. I can understand why his producer takes the "exploit, trash and throw away" attitude at Spector's titles. After all, corporations are in it for a quick buck. But for someone who may have an interest in preserving the title/brand (not to mention releasing yet another one) this seems a clear no-no way to go. Looked what happened to Unreal 2. If, that is, you remember it ever came out. In less than a year, the game utterly disappeared.
So should game devs listen to their own crowd? If that crowd paid them for making a previous title, listening to them and understanding what they paid for is the sole ticket to making them pay again.
Cheers.
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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.)