Gaming Usability 101

Next Generation (now happily fully merged with Edge) is carrying a story entitled Videogame Usability 101, attempting to lay out some standards for interacting with games. Some of them, like '3. Always let players remap controller buttons to suit their preferences' seems fairly straightforward and hard to disagree with. Others may be a bit more controversial: "4. Always let players skip cut scenes no matter how important they are to the story. What a predicament cut scenes create. As a designer, you want all your hard work to be acknowledged, even the cut scenes. Sadly, interactive entertainment is the name of the game, and it always comes first. That's why gamers play these things. So rather than assume every player wants to watch your story-telling chops, allow them to bypass cut scenes, tutorials, and even speed up the showing of logos when a game boots up. Tell your story through engaging gameplay, and you'll easily be remembered and praised regardless of what you accomplished in a cut scene, tutorial, or start screen branding." Anything on there that you categorically disagree with?

Comments

I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Iguru42]

It's getting pretty bad these days. I can't stand not being able to bypass the logos at startup, never mind long ass cut scenes. Does it occur to the designers that maybe someone might play the game a second time and has no need of seeing the cut scene again?!? My favorite example of designers with their head up their ass is Keiji Inafune. When Dead Rising came out and people started complaing about the save system (one one save allowed). Supposedly, in an interview with Electronic Gaming Monthly, he said that the saves were intentionally designed so that players would feel that there were some consequences for their actions and would be forced to make quick, tactical decisions. Right, don't bother trying to make the actual GAME more interesting. Cripple the save function so the game appears more dynamic..... I really hope if they do a DR2 he has nothing to do with the project.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[UbuntuDupe]

Partially disagree. Making you experience the genuine feelings you'd have if the game's scenario were actually happening, is a good thing. In real life, you can't "save and reload". You can't send information back in time. To the extent that a game allows you to, it is breaking immersion. I would consider the Holy Grail to be a game with a storyline, in which you cannot use information gained in a previous game, in a new one, nor retain useful information past a reload.

Still, you're correct in that there are downsides to this: the "one save" can make it so frustrating as to outweigh any gain that can come form the greater immersion. And unless the game is designed not to dump you into dead ends, it will condemn you to replays you may not have time for. A better compromise is to have a special mode where you are permitted one save, like "Iron Man" option in Alpha Centauri (and I assume, Civilization).

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[CastrTroy]

My biggest problem is when they don't let you remap the controls. My favourite example of this is Tony Hawk Pro Skate 2. On the PC version, you could completely remap the controls. However, on the console version, the controls were hard-coded. I think you could pick from 2 or 3 configurations. I really hate when they don't let you remap the controls. It doesn't add any complexity to the game, and can only make things easier on the person playing the game. There is no excuse for not letting me remap the controls. You don't know how I am most comfortable playing the game.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Aladrin]

Absolutely. 'Consequence for actions' works great in real life, and keeps people from running out into a stream of bullets. It does -not- stop little Johnny from doing the same while playing a game. As for me, it only pisses me off and makes me curse the designer of the game, not the careless action I just pulled. Dying and having to try over and over and over is bad enough, I don't need them to add artificial pain as well.

If they wanted 'consequences for actions' they should have perma-death and NO saves. There have been games like that and they generally just piss me off, but there are those that like them.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[surajbarkale]

It's a game not real life. Immersion comes from being able to recreate any moment in the game I want. I can compare this with my style of reading books. I go through it at a high speed marking the places where I would like to spend the time and then read those again just to increase the value.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, don't bother trying to make the actual GAME more interesting.
Perhaps, just perhaps the notion of what makes something 'interesting' is subjective. Maybe the notion of your actions in a game of survival having consequences, and thus creating the atmosphere of "shit, this is for keep", requires nuking the ability of the player rebooting their gameplay until they get it just right.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Hatta]

Let me guess, you've never played nethack.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Goaway]

Right, don't bother trying to make the actual GAME more interesting. Cripple the save function so the game appears more dynamic..... You know, pervasive saving in games is a fairly recent development. You speak as if it was a basic principle of all games that has to be removed, instead of being something added to a game.

For me, pervasive saving in PC games is what turned me off most of the platform. It changes the gameplay from a smooth flow to a chopped-up sequence of obsessive re-loads to get through the next fight as well as possible.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[ucblockhead]

I don't mind if there is only one save. What I do hate is games that don't let you save at any point. Nothing is more irritating than having to go through a tedious 30 minute section of some game over again not because you died, but because you had to quit playing unexpectedly. I want to be able to save at *any* point in the game so that if, say, my wife calls me to bed or my son starts painting the cat, I can immediately stop and take it up where I left off a week later.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[WinterSolstice]

Seriously - I totally frikkin hate that. I play a game for FUN and RELAXATION. If I wanted stress, I'd be at work.

Or, for example, rock climbing on Half Dome rather than in the gym with all those silly ropes and pads. Heck, why use ropes? It kills the immersion!

Even worse are when the saves are totally worthless, like in Ninja Gaiden for Gameboy Advance where the save game is a stupid cipher.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[lgw]

I played NetHack until the first time I died. Clearly I was dead and couldn't play again. (Actually, I'm not joking, I hate games that restrict saves that much.)

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Boronx]

"One Save" is one of the draws of games like Nethack. It's just a different attitude towards play. It does not work at all in games that aren't randomly generated each time.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't give a crap what "real life' is like! I play games to escape for awhile.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Hatta]

I know. I've encountered a few games where the x axis is inverted and I can't change it. Y-axis inversion is fine, games have always had that. But some games... instead of looking to the left when you point left it moves the camera left causing you to look to the right. Who the hell thinks that's a good idea?

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[xouumalperxe]

I was about to bring up nethack myself. The trick is how you look at the game. I'll give you a moderately similar example -- chess.

The first few games of chess you play, you'll get your arse handed to you in a platter within 10 moves. Then you start making sense of how to protect yourself from elementary attacks, and you get owned after, say, 20 moves. Then you actually start getting the hang of the early game, and can keep yourself alive for long enough to see the mid-game. At this point you might even win a few matches, get a few neat combo plays, whatever. Etc. etc. etc. Anybody who ever got into chess knows what I'm talking about.

The key issue here is how the game is designed. Some games (JRPGs come to mind) are meant to take you through one looooong, mostly linear, trip. Replay value is either nil, or limited to a few different endings, and there's no real reward for playing it much more after you've cracked all the secrets and explored all the finales. So you save and you save and you save yet again, trying to keep your options open, so you won't have to go through 20 hours of gameplay to change the course of that one decision you made that killed off half the game world or whatever. Other games, like Tetris, Chess, Checkers, etc are oriented towards playing loads of individual matches. As a learner in chess, you might want to take back a play or two to explore different angles and as a learning experience, but mostly these games are made of having a very real chance to lose. How quickly would chess become BORING as hell if you were allowed to backtrack all your mistakes once you found out they were wrong? Such a game model should give the possibility to adjourn the game, but never, EVER to allow you to actually backtrack without consequences.

Nethack clearly fits into the category of games where you can play through the game several times in one day, and the focus is on playing loads of individual games, not on progressing in one long thread of gaming. So having only the option to adjourn the game is the way to go.

Since we already have nethack up, let's measure it against these usability rules!

1. Nethack never, EVER prompts you to save. You either go on playing, #quit, die, or type 'S' to save (and adjourn the game)
2. After asking you a few questions about your character, Nethack gives you a short message and prompts "--more--". Sure, it's not "press any key", but both space and enter, the biggest keys on any reasonable keyboard, will proceed forwards. Not perfect, but hardly the worst ever
3. Nethack doesn't let you remap the controls, other than choosing between two basic layouts, whichever is most appropriate for your keyboard. It also has the most extensive key list ever, but at least all the actions are bound to sensible keys, and there's nothing you can do (other than movement) that can't be cancelled, so you'll never get really hurt by missing a key. All in all, bad, but not the worst
4. Cutscenes? No dungeon crawler worth its salt has cutscenes. Next!
5. Top down camera that always shows the totality of the level you're in. If your character knows it, you can see it. It's primitive, but once you think about it for a few minutes, it's actually one of the best interface design choices ever.
6. Nethack uses loads of keys because it needs to. The alternative is making it much more verbose and difficult to play. But I'll grant you that using every bloody letter in the keyboard is pretty hardcore, so no cookie here.
7. I don't really think accessibility even applies to nethack, so I'll skip this one.
8. Unbeatable opponents? Now *this* is one of the game's crown jewels. There might be some pretty close to impossible monsters, but you can get out of most situations if you play your cards right. In fact, that's what the game is all about.
9. In-game is actually pretty good: simply pressing '?' will result in you being given help on mostly anything that you're not supposed to learn through playing,

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[LainTouko]

There's nothing wrong with crippling "power word reload". You just need to remember that you're doing it when you're designing the game, so that the player won't permanently lose without doing something clearly stupid.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Chosen Reject]

For me, pervasive saving in PC games is what turned me off most of the platform. It changes the gameplay from a smooth flow to a chopped-up sequence of obsessive re-loads to get through the next fight as well as possible.

You could just play through rather than reloading. You know that right? Just because an option is there, you don't have to take it.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Goaway]

And risk getting stuck later because I didn't conserve enough ammo in the earlier fights? Due to the fact that there is pervasive save, I can't trust the game designers to have made sure this will not happen - they may just be expecting me to re-load if I get stuck.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Jon Kay]

> You could just play through rather than reloading. You know that right?

...er...that might depend on your tolerance for crashes and reboots wiping out your game,

The PC gaming platform is not exactly what you call highly stable. Early-release or EA games (looking at you, Sim City 4) can get you below 10min between crashes.

Yeah, it's not an issue for nethack. On nethack, I only save between levels to force a pause for thought.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[lgw]

Unbeatable opponents? Is NetHack the rogue-alike that had the Medusa that would instantly kill your character, forcing you to start the game over? Man that sucked.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Hatta]

Yes. So wear a blindfold, or have reflection if you're battling Medusa. Pretty obvious IMO.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Chris Burke]

There's lots of stuff that can instantly kill you in Nethack.

Touching a cockatrice with bare skin will turn you to stone.

Seeing medusa's face will do likewise.

Some monsters can use Touch of Death, and guess what it does if you aren't resistant to magic.

Wands of Death.

Black dragon breath.

Being dragged underwater by an eel.

There's more, plus a host of things that don't kill you -instantly-, but are guaranteed to kill you in a few turns if you don't do anything.

The upside is that every instant death in the game has a counter. It just might take you a couple of deaths to figure it out...

but really, despite how harsh it can be, Nethack has always struck me as the least "cheap" game ever. There's almost always something you could have done, or some way to have prepared.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[gknoy]

What I never understood was, how do you prepare for these "If I just did X ..." situations? Do you have warning that you're going to encounter a medusa (short of seeing it ;)), or of there being a BigHairyNastyThing up ahead, which can inform the knowledgeable player that they should prepare for it (e.g., put on a blindfold, get out a torch, run the hell away)?

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Craig Maloney]

The whole reason why I've shelved Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles is BECAUSE I can't skip the damn cut scenes. Just moving from town to town provokes some silly storytelling nonsense that has nothing to do with the plot, and I can't skip it. After a few minutes, I just wanted to toss the whole damn game out the window. Bad game designer! No cookie!

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[bishop32x]

If you're playing right you should. Eat a floating eye and carry a towel, or blindfold. Find an amulet of telepathy,a ring of warning or one of the many artifacts which grant you telepathy or warning. Also, most of the really big bads in the game occur either as a result of a players action or in a set place.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[imasu]

Consider nethack an early form of electronic advertising for the "cp" command. Seriously, it took one death in nethack for me to figure out what to do. I pretended it was just part of the game.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Chris Burke]

What I never understood was, how do you prepare for these "If I just did X ..." situations? Do you have warning that you're going to encounter a medusa (short of seeing it ;)), or of there being a BigHairyNastyThing up ahead, which can inform the knowledgeable player that they should prepare for it (e.g., put on a blindfold, get out a torch, run the hell away)?

There are a few situations where you always know you'll run into trouble. The level where Medusa lives is always there, and is easily recognizable, so you know if you get there that Medusa is nearby.

Other than that, you prepare just by knowing it is possible to get into certain situations and having the appropriate counters on hand. E.g. Touch of Death can be countered with Magic Resistance, so you should go about finding an item with that property before you're likely to encounter a monster who uses it. If one shows up before you've gotten resistance, well then you should be prepared with something like a scroll of teleport level or a wand of digging so you can get your sorry butt out of there before they have a chance to use it. Or just general caution such as *never* going around blind without gloves on if you think it's even remotely possible there's a cockatrice corpse lying around (in your blind groping you'll touch it and turn to stone).

All of this is subject to the random number generator. Knowing that you want magic resistance, spell reflection, a blessed unicorn horn, a blindfold, etc etc is one thing, actually getting it before you need it is another. Though in your travels you'll usually find something that could at least help save you. In Nethack, there's usually more than one way to approach something.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[jimmux]

I've just discovered nethack as a great game on mobile platforms. This kind of "several plays a day" approach makes it ideal as a game you can pick up and play for the duration of a bus trip.

I would also make the comparison to a good beat-em-up. I know most people dismiss them as mindless button-mashers, but if you take the time to learn the game at increasingly advanced levels of strategy it can be a rewarding experience.

I love a good RPG, but I personally find beat-em-ups and driving games to be among the most replayable genres out there, and both would be spoiled if it was possible to save and reload at any point mid-game.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[JoshJ]

I played a Tomb Raider demo one time where the character movement was so clunky I opted to turn the character using the camera (which resulted in me using inverted controls for character movement). Oddly enough, I didn't really find it disorienting, but that's probably because I deliberately went out of my way to make the switch.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[lgw]

There are a few situations where you always know you'll run into trouble. The level where Medusa lives is always there, and is easily recognizable, so you know if you get there that Medusa is nearby. The *second* time through. For me there was no second time through, as Medusa exceeded my tolerance for game designers screwing with me, and I never played again. Not my kind of game, I guess. OTOH I've quit each MMORPG I've ever player when the designers started changing things arbitrarily and I grew tired of being screwed with, so my distaste with this sort of thing certainly isn't limited to NetHack.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Hatta]

What's the fun in that? You might as well turn on eXplore mode.

Really, as much as it hurts to lose a promising character it just makes it that much better when you finally ascend.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[adona1]

someone might play the game a second time and has no need of seeing the cut scene again?

Absolutely. Something I really dug about God of War (apart from the lack of loading times) was that I could skip the cutscenes with the press of a button. Now, I like God of War II even more, but putting it in to play a second time, I find that they won't let me skip them. Granted, the story is compelling so it's not a big deal, but if you die and repeat the scene ad nauseum without being able to jump past it, it gets grating.

At least it wasn't designed by EA ;)

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[xouumalperxe]

Like I said before: You're reacting to the game as if it were meant to be played like you play most computer games, where the board game perspective is much more adequate. You're not supposed to win first time 'round. Or the 20th time 'round either, for that matter. It's all about the learning experience. You'll soon be able to get to the bottom of the gnomish mines in a couple of hours tops, or perhaps to Sokoban if your class/race/alignment combo isn't very favourable to doing the mines right away.

Don't get me wrong: It's perfectly ok that you don't like the game. It's just that I think you made that decision without fully understanding what sort of game you were playing. Like going into Rainbox Six: Rogue Spear guns blazing and complaining that the hostages that got in the way were the designers screwing with you

Nethack is all about the learning experience. You're supposed to eventuallly figure out that even though item descriptions change from game to game, every effect is always worth the same amount of gold. So if you #chat a vendor up, and he tells you that he'll sell a certain spell book for 100 coins, you'll know that that sort of spell book is one of a limited amount of spells. If you engrave letters on the floor with a wand, you'll get different effects depending on the wand you used. Did the bugs on the floor stop moving? That was either a wand of death or a wand of sleep. Did the bugs vanish? It's either invisibility or teleportation. This sort of logic works for a lot more stuff. Drop items to the floor, and let your pet walk over it. If it avoids the item like all hell, it's probably cursed. If it walks all over it without trouble, it's safe to wear.

Then there's good sense. You need food, sure, but eating the corpse of other humanoids is considered cannibalism, which is a no-no with your god. Eating the corpses of zombies is a baaaaad plan, as the meat will be rotted to all hell and back. Old kills are the same. Lichens don't rot though. Stuff like this piles up, and you'll soon have figured out how to survive through a fair bit of stuff.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[imasu]

The fun is that it eliminates the one flaw of an otherwise almost perfect (well, at the time) game. And I didn't do it *every* time I played, of course. But it is a nice and logical checkpointing thing to do every few levels. Damn. I want to play now. It's just an apt-get away too. Thanks man, now my week is shot :)

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[angrymilkman]

Since its so hard to interpret guidelines since they don't provide a context in which the solution is applied and they don't actually tell you what usability problem they solve I tried to capture the best elements of interface design using the concept of an interaction design pattern. Two years ago I created this site: http://www.helpyouplay.com/

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[KDR_11k]

It's a move camera vs. turn camera metaphor thing. Some games, when you press left on the camera controls, move the camera to the left, others rotate the view of the camera to the left.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[fractoid]

There's almost always something you could have done, or some way to have prepared. Admittedly I haven't played Nethack, but that sounds like a horrible design. Play once, get to level 1 and realise that unless you buy 'Ball of String' your pet kitten will rip your face off. Play again, get to level 2 and discover that you should have picked up a Funny Twig that you need to press a button hidden in a knothole. Play again, get to level 15 and find out that because you forgot to pick up a pocket handkerchief at level 4, you're screwed and you have to start over.

I've always thought it a hallmark of bad game design if it's possible to screw up your game such that you can't possibly win, in such a way that you don't find out about it until much later. The usual example of this is failing to pick up some seemingly useless item that is required to solve a later puzzle, at which point you can't go back and get the item. "There's always something you could have done" doesn't make it fair if that thing was not reasonably forseeable, and it's definitely not fun if the game requires copious trial and error, each time repeating much of the game, to work out. With the short games of 10 years ago, it's fair enough to require repetition, but to find out 30 hours into an RPG that you forgot your coat, and your coat contains the keys for the blast-o-rocket you parked on Mars in the pre-story, and that you'll have to restart? No.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[damaki]

I totally agree. I bought Final Fantasy 12 the month it was released. I haven't played it much. Why? While I could play continuously for many hours when I was a student, now that I work, my gaming time is more restricted. Yeah, I know the "don't save whenever you want" paradigm of the FF, but I never felt it was as annoying as now. I cannot play it for twenty minutes then stop, only because I cannot choose when I save and I cannot be sure I will be allowed to save my game when I need. Yeah, it breaks the game flow, players can exploit the save, blah blah blah...
I'm still trying to figure out why I shouldn't be allowed to play a japanese style RPG only 20 minutes in a row. And please, realize than even FF4 to FF5 on GBA have quick save. If a GBA can quick save, why a PS2 could not? I don't care if it takes a whole memory card as long as I can have the damn instant save.
Dear game creators, please take in account that most gamers are not kids any more and that they have a life. Even a half assed save like in the 360 version of Oblivion is far better than nothing, at least I can save whenever I want, though the character will not spawn exactly at the same place on load.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[MPolo]

The "there's always something you could have done" in Nethack is a little different than the sort of thing you are facing... It's more like, you see a cockatrice coming towards you, and are playing a martial arts master. You read the description of the cockatrice, which clearly says it turns to stone. You attack it with your bare hands anyway and turn to stone. Next time you are facing a cockatrice, you will think, "Hmmm, maybe I could run away from cockatrices if I'm not wearing a pair of gloves" (and carrying a dead lizard, which is far from obvious, but in-game there is an Oracle who will tell you this if you give her enough money).

There are some real instant-death traps, that you can hardly avoid. Starting at a certain level of the dungeon, some of the pit traps have poison spikes with deadly poison -- unless you have gotten poison resistance before falling into the trap (or have been searching diligently for traps so as to avoid falling in in the first place, though I seldom spend a lot of time on that -- although the special ability of being able to cursorily search for traps automatically on every step, like dwarves, rogues and some others have is very handy). It probably takes a bit longer to learn where these start showing up and taking suitable precautions. Or you can play a barbarian and have poison resistance from the start...

If you want to give the game a chance, start out playing barbarians or valkyries, and be ready to die a lot. (These characters are a bit more durable than most. The Valkyrie also gets one of the best weapons in the game if she gets her god to like her.)

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Scudsucker]

The PC gaming platform is not exactly what you call highly stable.

It's the publisher that determines stability, not the platform.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[ben there...]

A better compromise is to have a special mode where you are permitted one save, like "Iron Man" option in Alpha Centauri (and I assume, Civilization). I haven't heard of that in years of playing Civ casually. Though most of that time was spent on Civ3 and Civ4. I guess it's against the rules to reload in the GOTM competition, but even the required "HoF" logging/competition mod doesn't directly enforce that rule. The only built-in mechanism to prevent cheating that way is the default option to keep the same random seed on reload. That makes most/all random events happen the same way no matter how many times you reload.

Personally, I reload quite a bit. There's just too much luck involved in the game, and I don't really like bad luck ruining my chances of winning early on. Like having your first worker getting eaten alive by a bear one square outside of your city. Or your first 3 warriors all get killed in one turn of random barbarian attacks. I try to learn from it and not leave myself open to random events in future games, but I'd still rather reload than start over or play a failed game where I'm too far behind.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[iainl]

The way the saves are set up in Dead Rising, though, they allow for those of us who can't sit down and spend 6 hours playing one game. But you still have to decide whether the situation you're in is so bad that you're going to restart and 'lose' a couple of hours' gameplay. Although it's not really losing, because you're still levelled up, and the feeling of playing through those first few hours again with a powerful character is completely different.

Zombie movies are all about the desperation of the situation, making choices about saving others versus your own survival risks, and I felt the save system did a fairly good job of reflecting that.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[gryyphyn]

And I couldn't disagree with you more. I understand wanting to skip the cut-scenes because you want to be lazy. That's all I see out of it. Your comment about playing a game a second time through and not wanting to see the cut-scenes again is akin to saying you don't want to watch the whole movie again, just the fight scenes. Or reading a book again and skipping to the end because you don't want to work for it. Our society is creating a slew of people who want instant gratification. The problem is that the gratification they want isn't constant play, it's constant lack of thought. Story in a game is usually decent, much of it actually being quite good. Take Halo 3 for example: a FPS that panders to people who just want to shoot guns and blow stuff up. But the story scenes (that's what they are folks) are well thought out, scripted and built. I enjoyed watching them. I ask you to consider again just exactly what the story scenes really mean to the game. I say they need to start placing your objectives in the story scenes just to force you to fully experience the game, even in replay.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Hatta]

Go play nethack. It is a pillar of brilliant game design. The only thing you can do to "screw up your game" is die. It does take a lot of learning and a bit of trial and error to figure out how not to die, but it doesn't get boring because the game is different every time. Random levels, random treasures, random monsters, the game has almost perfect replayability. Before long you'll realize that the game really does give you everything you need to survive, and whether you live or die, succeed or fail is up to you. It's extremely well balanced in that regard.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Hatta]

Yeah I kind of explained that in my post. My point is, who thinks moving the camera is intuitive?

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[steveo777]

Perma-death does suck, and I was never a fan, but it really forces you to get to know the game. If a designer insists upon perma-death, they dang well better make the game worth it. I loved Steel Battalion. But it really takes a few hours of play every time if you want to get past the fourth mission. Horribly frustrating at times, but totally worth going back to over and over.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Hatta]

The fun is that it eliminates the one flaw of an otherwise almost perfect (well, at the time) game.

You mean, the challenge? There's something about all the blood, sweat, and tears put into an honest ascension that makes it a real accomplishment. That somehow, in some little way, you really have earned the title of demigod. My first ascension is something I'll remember for the rest of my life.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Chris Burke]

Play again, get to level 15 and find out that because you forgot to pick up a pocket handkerchief at level 4, you're screwed and you have to start over.

It doesn't work that way. You can backtrack, so if you want something from a previous level you can just go there and get it. Also, Nethack isn't a Sierra adventure game. You don't need The Funny Twig for The Knothole Button and there's no replacement for that twig even though in the background there's a whole forest that is surely littered with twigs. There are usually many ways to solve a problem. For example, to beat Medusa, you just need some way to not see her. Any method of blinding yourself works (and there are quite a few ways, blindfolds are just the simplest and easiest to control). My favorite method of beating Medusa is to use a Wand of Polymorph and a Ring of Polymorph Control to turn myself into a creature that is immune to her gaze (doesn't have eyes, is already made of stone, etc).

I've always thought it a hallmark of bad game design if it's possible to screw up your game such that you can't possibly win, in such a way that you don't find out about it until much later.

It's basically impossible to do this in Nethack without trying. Like, you could find the Amulet of Yendor (the artifact you're trying to find), then find some really weird place to hide the amulet and then forget about it, like dig a whole, put the amulet in it, then fill up the whole with a boulder and forget where you buried it. Don't know why you'd do that.

It is possible to be rapidly killed by something, and for that something to be a surprise the first time you see it. However this is Nethack, and just because you don't have the thing you need to beat the bad guy doesn't mean there's nothing you can do... you'll almost certainly have something in your bag that gives you a chance to run away.

With the short games of 10 years ago, it's fair enough to require repetition, but to find out 30 hours into an RPG that you forgot your coat, and your coat contains the keys for the blast-o-rocket you parked on Mars in the pre-story, and that you'll have to restart? No.

Well, first off a successful ascension in Nethack is around 6-10 hours of play (and the game is well over 10 years old). Second, your mistakes usually have rather immediate consequences like being killed. And the game does kill you, and this does mean you have to re-play, but the randomly generated dungeons are part of why the game has such good replay value. But in the end, Nethack is nothing like the puzzle-oriented adventure-games-dressed-as-rpgs that you're thinking of.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[TheLink]

"I've always thought it a hallmark of bad game design if it's possible to screw up your game such that you can't possibly win, in such a way that you don't find out about it until much later"

How about a nice game of American checkers/English draughts...

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[lgw]

"Trial and error" it the antithesis of good game play IMO, which is no doubt why I dprodded NetHack so quickly. "You have all the information you need when you're confronted with the challange" is my speed.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[lgw]

PvP is different. :)

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[TheLink]

Not if you play against Chinook and Chinook is told not to tell you that "you lose in 20 moves" ;)

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[Jonathan_S]

I cannot play it for twenty minutes then stop, only because I cannot choose when I save and I cannot be sure I will be allowed to save my game when I need. Yeah, it breaks the game flow, players can exploit the save, blah blah blah...
I'm still trying to figure out why I shouldn't be allowed to play a japanese style RPG only 20 minutes in a row. And please, realize than even FF4 to FF5 on GBA have quick save. If a GBA can quick save, why a PS2 could not? I don't care if it takes a whole memory card as long as I can have the damn instant save.

This is annoying. I can see why they want to space out the save points, but it messes with your ability to play on your time and stop when you want to. Maybe the game designers should compromise and build two different save functions into the game.

One would be the normal FF style save which you can go back to at any point, but can only save at save points.
The other would be a 'pause' save. You can use it at any point to save your position, but once you un-pause the game the pause point is gone. You can re-pause whenever you want, but you can't going back to a pause point after un-pausing.

That would keep the penalty for dying, by forcing you back to your last normal save, but still allow you to start and stop playing whenever you wanted without losing progress.

Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more....

[damaki]

Your "pause save" is what FF3 to FF6 on GBA do. It is an auto-erased-on-load quick save.
I totally agree, this is the best compromise so far.

Unskippable cutscenes are just wrong.

[Dr. Manhattan]

I have little enough time to play games as it is, and the time I have is intermittent and scattered. Waiting through a cutscene (or worse, a startup logo) that I've seen a dozen times already is exceedingly frustrating and means I buy fewer games.

Re:Unskippable cutscenes are just wrong.

[ClamIAm]

I have little enough time to play games as it is, and the time I have is intermittent and scattered.

This presents a different problem for me: because of the time between plays, I sometimes forget what's going on in the story. It would be really nice if all games gave you the option to replay cutscenes you've already seen.

Re:Unskippable cutscenes are just wrong.

[provigilman]

Actually, that's a good point. Not only should all the cutscenes be skippable, but why the F aren't "replayable" cutscenes standard at this point? Tons of games I've played have had something in the menu like "saved movies" or "theater" or whatever that allow me to replay cutscenes that I've already seen. This should be standard in every game, that way it's there if you need it, and you won't have to worry if you bump the controller during a cutscene and skip past it by accident.

The saved game dilemma

[Joe the Lesser]

I've played several games where I am at a difficult section where I need to try over and over again. However, between the difficult spot and the last available save spot would be some cutscene.

If it took 20 times to get by the spot, that was 20 forced brain-numbing times through the cutscene, and often after a few tries I would just put the game down. It wasn't worth a 5 minute wait to get killed again.

When I fail I want to retry as soon as possible.

Re:The saved game dilemma

[Selfbain]

The first Golden Sun game on the DS has a fairly lengthy cut scene right before one of the bosses. It took me several tries to beat them and I was ready to smash the game by that point.

Re:The saved game dilemma

[Otter Popinski]

This really should include boss battles that take place during a cutscene and involve hair-trigger button pushing. I think it took me an hour to beat Zeus in God of War II. Get killed, retry, and watch three minutes of dialog (which I've already seen ten times) only to mash the O button instead of X at a critical moment. It's not fun -- it's absolutely infuriating.

Re:The saved game dilemma

[JoshJ]

Your hope ends here... and your meaningless existence along with it!

Re:The saved game dilemma

[david.given]

I've played several games where I am at a difficult section where I need to try over and over again. However, between the difficult spot and the last available save spot would be some cutscene.

Bloody Metroid bloody Prime.

Oh, look, here's a boss. I've just met it for the first time and it's killed me. Fair enough, that's what bosses do. Okay, back up to the save point and let's try again. Uh... the closest save point to the boss is five minutes' walk away. On the other side of a puzzle room. And a room-full of low level monsters I have to fight through. Every time.

Screw that. I gave up at the second boss. I simply couldn't stand having to replay long, tedious, uninteresting chunks of the game simply to catch up to where I was before I died. This is particularly evil with boss fights, because you're expected to die lots of times fighting them.

No. Evil. If you have bosses, put a save point right outside the room.

Re:The saved game dilemma

[edwdig]

Bloody Metroid bloody Prime.

Oh, look, here's a boss. I've just met it for the first time and it's killed me. Fair enough, that's what bosses do. Okay, back up to the save point and let's try again. Uh... the closest save point to the boss is five minutes' walk away. On the other side of a puzzle room. And a room-full of low level monsters I have to fight through. Every time.

You must've been missing the save points. There was only one boss in Metroid Prime that was any significant distance away from a save point, and it was about 2/3 through the game. It was some sort of security drone in the Phazon Mines... for whatever reason, they put a save room immediately after the boss fight rather than before it.

Prime 2 also had one boss like that, about halfway through (Alpha Blogg I think it was called). Prime 3 didn't have anything like that.

Re:The saved game dilemma

[grumbel]

### There was only one boss in Metroid Prime

The thing is, it only takes one of them to break the whole game. In both Prime1 and Prime2 I ditched the game after being stuck on those bosses for to long and only picked it back up month or even years later. What made the Prime games especially annoying is their tendency to respawn enemies, so you can't do it in a tactical way as in other games (move forward, kill enemies, fall back, save, repeat, till the way to the boss is clear). Prime games only are fun as long as you don't die.

This really is one the core issue of game usability: Never ever force the player through the same challenges again that he as already mastered. The problem with a hard boss is basically never the hard part, but the easy part which you have to replay again and again just to have access to the hard one, be it pieces of the level or earlier boss phases. Same issue is hugely important for cutscenes and savegames, when you have to watch a cutscene for the first time, its basically never an issue, its only when you are forced to watch them again that they become highly problematical. Savegames on the other side are the tool that should be used to minimize exactly this repetition, but getting the balance right between quick-save-orgies and uninterrupted-challenges can get hard.

Re:The saved game dilemma

[david.given]

You must've been missing the save points.

Nope. Here's a map. Look up Varia Suit, which you get after defeating Flaahgra, the first real boss. It's in the middle of the Chozo Ruins. The nearest save point, the black dot in the yellow circle, is two rooms away, southeast. The room immediately to the north of the save point is full of stuff you need to shoot to get past; the room immedately south of Flaahgra is a puzzle room which requires you to do stuff in the right order, shoot things, and climb up a series of annoying platforms.

And you have to do this every time you want to get there.

Actually, that was only one of the reasons I gave up. The other reason was that every time you left a room, it would respawn. Which meant that travelling required you to shoot the same monsters again, and again, and again, and... it was just dull. It's a shame, because Metroid Prime would be exactly the sort of game I'd like otherwise. Take away the respawning and allow you to save anywhere, and I'd actually enjoy it.

Re:The saved game dilemma

[edwdig]

Well, in Prime 1, the one boss with a badly placed save isn't too big a deal. It's a very simple boss that you should be able to beat very easily once you have a clue what's going on. It really should only beat you if you're totally not expecting it and come in very weak.

Prime 2 I will agree was extremely frustrating when it came to that boss without a save.

Anyway, I'm not trying say those cases weren't design mistakes. I'm just responding to someone who was claiming these issues occurred early and often, ruining the game. If you think that's the case, then you're just completely missing the save points, which aren't hidden...

Re:The saved game dilemma

[Blakey Rat]

Worst example: Sonic the Hedgehog for Xbox 360. (The new 3D one, not the old one on Xbox Live.)

Ugh. In fact, I think that game breaks every single usability rule in this article.

Re:The saved game dilemma

[edwdig]

Nope. Here's a map. Look up Varia Suit, which you get after defeating Flaahgra, the first real boss. It's in the middle of the Chozo Ruins. The nearest save point, the black dot in the yellow circle, is two rooms away, southeast. The room immediately to the north of the save point is full of stuff you need to shoot to get past; the room immedately south of Flaahgra is a puzzle room which requires you to do stuff in the right order, shoot things, and climb up a series of annoying platforms.

Just checked that as I had a save not long after. It took just over a minute to get from the Save Point to the door to Flaahgra's room while playing on hard mode (which I think doubles the hitpoints of everything).

For "The room immediately to the north of the save point is full of stuff you need to shoot to get past", it was 3 one hit to kill enemies that appear directly in your line of fire.

For the other room, the "puzzle" is scanning a few symbols that are on your way up, no order required. Once you know where they are, they barely slow you down. Shoot a missile at the wasp hives when you walk in and you won't get any wasps to worry about. For the tenacles, they should be right in your line of fire as you approach, so it's not exactly a challenge to shoot them. As for the platforms, they're very large platforms spaced closely together. The jumps get much harder as you progress through the game.

The other reason was that every time you left a room, it would respawn.

You can definitely go at least one room away and come back without the enemies respawning.

Which meant that travelling required you to shoot the same monsters again, and again, and again, and... it was just dull.

Most enemies you can just ignore and walk right past if you're just passing through a room. Remember, most creatures aren't really enemies. They only bother you if you get too close to them. The environment is your real enemy. Ignore the creatures unless they're preventing you from getting where you're trying to go.

Re:The saved game dilemma

[KDR_11k]

Final Fantasy X has a 15 minute cutscene (that's if you skip everything that can be skipped) before one nasty boss, my party could go from full health to zero in one turn so any attempts at the boss were usually shorter than 5 minutes. Needless to say I didn't attempt that more than 3-4 times before throwing the game into a corner.

Re:The saved game dilemma

[david.given]

Just checked that as I had a save not long after. It took just over a minute to get from the Save Point to the door to Flaahgra's room while playing on hard mode (which I think doubles the hitpoints of everything).

Right --- but you're better than I am (or you wouldn't have been playing on hard mode!). For me, it was a tedious slog. I don't play games for tedious.

The environment is your real enemy. Ignore the creatures unless they're preventing you from getting where you're trying to go.

The point where I finally gave up was a particular hub room inside the Magmoor Caverns that was full of automated turrets. In order to get anywhere you had to cross this room. It was sufficiently large and complex that in order to get my bearings, I would have to take out all the turrets, and they were fairly tough. At about the fifth time I had to pass through, I'd finally had enough and quit.

Thank you!!

[provigilman]

4. Always let players skip cut scenes no matter how important they are to the story. What a predicament cut scenes create. As a designer, you want all your hard work to be acknowledged, even the cut scenes. Sadly, interactive entertainment is the name of the game, and it always comes first. That's why gamers play these things. So rather than assume every player wants to watch your story-telling chops, allow them to bypass cut scenes, tutorials, and even speed up the showing of logos when a game boots up. Tell your story through engaging gameplay, and you'll easily be remembered and praised regardless of what you accomplished in a cut scene, tutorial, or start screen branding.

Yes, this is a must. When you have replay a section, or just when replaying the game, it sucks beyond belief when you waste hours watching the same cut scenes again and again.

Re:Thank you!!

[roadkill_cr]

Very true. Also, if you happen to be re-playing the game again sometimes you want to skip some of the more mind-numbing cutscenes.

Re:Thank you!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Even games like that try to find a compromise solution, such as "Heavenly Sword", need to lean further towards simply letting us skip cut scenes.

In Heavenly Sword you can skip a cut scene if you've seen it before...*that* play session. So if you fail a mission you can replay it, and skip the cut scene. But if you fail and save your game, you can't skip the cut scenes next time you boot the game.

Better, but not quite good enough. *if* it saved the fact I had seen the scene once in the game's settings file, and never made me sit through it again, I would be happy. I personally don't mind being forced to watch the story *one* time.

Note: It must not make me watch the cutscene again even if I start a new game. The "has been seen" data must be stored globally. I often watch my friends play a game like Final Fantasy before I play it, so I have already watched most of the cut scenes from *their* playthrough. --and if there is an unlockable *hard* mode or whatever, unless the cut scene is new, make it skippable!

-Xalseqsn

Re:Thank you!!

[Chris Burke]

Heh, yeah I know, there's nothing worse than a non-skipable cut scene.

Oh, wait, I can think of one thing, though it's more a variation on a theme: The un-skipable Summons in a Final Fantasy.

FFVII's summons were absolutely awesome... the first time. They were still pretty cool up through let's say the twentieth time. But after the thousandth time you've used your summon you'll just want to gouge your eyes out waiting. Especially since the power of the summon seems to scale with the length of the cutscene. Okay, Bahamat Zero, would you mind flying to our planet from outer space a little FASTER maybe? Or how about just sticking around in orbit above my head, since you know I'm going to need you again soon...

Re:Thank you!!

[mpathetiq]

Note: It must not make me watch the cutscene again even if I start a new game. The "has been seen" data must be stored globally. I often watch my friends play a game like Final Fantasy before I play it, so I have already watched most of the cut scenes from *their* playthrough. --and if there is an unlockable *hard* mode or whatever, unless the cut scene is new, make it skippable!

But if you watch your friend play on his machine, you'll still be forced to view it on your machine. Just make every cutscene skippable.

Re:Thank you!!

[Fallingcow]

FFX had normal and shortened summon/overdrive animations, selectable in the menu. Did FFVII not have that?

Re:Thank you!!

[bigstrat2003]

No, it didn't. FFIX had short animations most of the time (it was random, and the first FF to have shorter summons), but summons also hit noticeably harder when you got the full animation, so you felt gypped when the animation was shortened.

That said, I never had an issue with the summon animations in FFVII, and I've played it tons of times.

Re:Thank you!!

[rkanodia]

The best part of the summons in FFIX was that, at some point in the game, you were offered a Faustian bargain in the form of an equippable item that would guarantee that your summons were always the full-length, full-damage type.

Re:Thank you!!

[Bobartig]

Bahamut Zero nuthin', can you say "Knights of the Round"? It was 13 mini summons all back to back. The first time, you feel light-headed from phenomenal ass whuppin you just unleashed. Later on, when you fight bosses that require 12-15 castings of "KotR" to defeat, and all party members equipped with Mime, it unleashes this unending summoning sequence that just goes on and on...

Of course, my party all had Final Attack -> Phoenix, the master materia with their respective W's... the game aspect was already over.

Re:Thank you!!

[Chris Burke]

I had blotted that agony out of my brain, actually. I never beat FFVII, but I did watch my friend fight Sephiroth, who took many KotR summons, and who had his -own- lengthy summons and special attacks with cut scenes. It was truly ridiculous. We were both basically spectators to the fight.

Re:Thank you!!

[Cecil]

KotR/Mime was only really "needed" to kill Ruby and Emerald Weapon (the optional superbosses), and even then you could do it without if you were properly equipped and used the right tactics. Any other use of KotR is simply overkill, and as you noticed, a waste of your time.

With Sephiroth it's actually much faster to kill him with other techniques. Limit breaks will ruin him with extreme prejudice, even normal attacks with a 2x or 4x cut materia will make short work of him. And there are plenty of good magics in the game, too.

In any final fantasy game as you get closer to the end and more and more things start hitting the 9999 damage cap, the relative damage-per-second of your normal attacks starts increasing very quickly. By the end of the game everything other than "Attack" is just eye candy. That's just how the game is made.

Re:Thank you!!

[Carnildo]

I had blotted that agony out of my brain, actually. I never beat FFVII, but I did watch my friend fight Sephiroth, who took many KotR summons, and who had his -own- lengthy summons and special attacks with cut scenes. It was truly ridiculous. We were both basically spectators to the fight.

KotR is a trap. If you use it to beat Sephiroth's first or second forms, the later forms will show up with far more hit points than normal. You're far better off using limit breaks or other high-power attacks.

Re:Thank you!!

[ProppaT]

Yeah, the real solution to this problem is to make the skip button a nonstandard button on the controller, such as the start button or one of the shoulder buttons your rarely use. While not being able to skip a cut scene is the worst, accidentally hitting the button and skipping a cut scene is even worse. Sometimes you play a game for an hour to get to a save spot and an important part of the story pops up right before the save spot. Accidentally skipping is more or less makes you loose an hour of play time to go back and see the cut scene.

Re:Thank you!!

[KDR_11k]

I think for skipping it's good enough to show a "do you want to skip" menu to prevent accidental skipping. Then again our HCI professor kept telling us it's better to not ask and just let the user "undo" his error (i.e. replay the cutscene).

Re:Thank you!!

[provigilman]

That would actually be pretty useful... You could give the "replay" option at the end of any cutscene, whether it was watched or skipped. That way if you accidentally you could still see it, or if you missed something you can watch it again.

Re:Thank you!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or do what a lot of games do and keep a menu of unlocked cut scenes. Nothing is more frustrating than not being able to watch a cut scene again with vital info.

Re:Thank you!!

[KDR_11k]

That's better than having an option that's only accessible right after the cutscene. Having an option that goes away immediately violates the "let the user undo" principle. The idea behind that is that the user won't realize he messed up until he's already past your security questions because he answers those without thinking (as he'll pick the same answer 99.9% of the time).

Cutscenes MUST always be skippable

[_xeno_]

I don't think that's very controversial. Cutscenes really must always be skippable, simply because it's foolish to assume that everyone is playing for the first time. Even if the game "knows" it's a new game (think DS game fresh out of the case) it can't be sure that the player hasn't played the game before and therefore doesn't want to see the stupid cutscene for the fiftieth time.

Don't get me wrong, I generally will allow the cutscenes to play. But some cutscenes are just annoying. For example, when you start the Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, it gives you a recap of the events that occurred during Wind Waker. However I've already played Wind Waker and would have very much liked to skip past the recap to the new stuff.

Massive bonus points for any developers who add TiVo-style controls to their cutscenes. Sometimes I just want to jump back and rehear a line I missed.

In fact, I'd say that the first item, "Never ask a player if they want to save their game" is much more controversial. In a perfect world, that works (when there are enough save slots that auto-save is possible) however the world isn't perfect. In Phantom Hourglass I might not want to overwrite my save slot just because I hit a "save point." This is a limitation of the DS - there are no memory cards, so you're limited to whatever space the game gives you.

However for something like Half-Life 2, the autosaves work well. I don't need to be asked if I want yet another autosave, so it doesn't bother asking.

Otherwise I generally agree with the list.

Re:Cutscenes MUST always be skippable

[CastrTroy]

The game where I hated cutscenes the most was Final Fantasy 7. Every time you attacked, it would show a very long cutscene. After seeing the same cutscene 700 times, this starts to get really annoying. It's kind of cool to see the attack sequences the first time around, but after that, I really don't want to see them. The only other thing I should add, is that if the cutscene is that important to me progressing in the game, like in many RPGs, make it so that I can replay it by pausing the game and selecting the cutscene (never seen this actually done in a game), or make it require confirmation to skip the cutscene. The only thing worse than not being able to skip a cutscene, is not being able to progress in a game, because you skipped a cutscene, and don't know what to do.

Re:Cutscenes MUST always be skippable

[Adradis]

If there is space for it, even simply having a simple "overwrite" autosave would be nice. Die without saving your game recently? You can reload from the saved file, and possibly change your choice, or reload from a recent autosave that's much closer to where you were.

It shouldn't take much more space than a standard save, and would allow you to bring it back to it if your game were to suddenly crash/shutdown/various failures.

Having it overwrite YOUR save files is a bad thing. Having an automatic save system that is used as a temporary backup type save, however, can be a very GOOD thing when implemented properly. The extra space it uses would probably be worth the potential redundancy, especially when it saves you an hour of work because you didn't save, and the game crashed (Computer games especially).

Re:Cutscenes MUST always be skippable

[oncehour]

There was the theatre in FF10 where you could replay cutscenes. It was more interesting than useful, unlike your example. I think allowing control over cutscenes would really improve a lot of their use as well. Some cutscenes can be incredibly powerful, but if someone around you ruins the mood you either have to restart without saving or play the entire game over again. Imagine getting a phone call just seconds before Sephiroth kills Aeris. The impact is dead. Gone. With a bit more control you could pause it and even rewind it just as you get the interruption. I notice with Tivo I now tend to pause shows that I watch as soon as someone interrupts me. Not only does it let me give them more of my attention, but it also lets me focus more on the story and really totally enjoy it. More control is a good thing.

Re:Cutscenes MUST always be skippable

[oncehour]

Whoops. Forgot newlines don't count as newlines on Slashdot.

Re:Cutscenes MUST always be skippable

[ArmyOfFun]

Massive bonus points for any developers who add TiVo-style controls to their cutscenes. Sometimes I just want to jump back and rehear a line I missed. Absolutely, in addition to having rewind, pause and fast forward I really like games that let me play cutscenes I've already seen whenever I want. It's crucial when 5 minutes after watching a cut scene, I realize there was some info mentioned that I'd like to revisit. There's also times where it's been a couple weeks between play sessions and I'd like to watch the last cutscene or two to refresh my memory as to whats going on.

Re:Cutscenes MUST always be skippable

[Ant P.]

A thing that annoys the hell out of me are games where you can only see the full story + cutscenes again if you delete the single save file that also contains all the high scores.

Re:Cutscenes MUST always be skippable

[tepples]

If there is space for it, even simply having a simple "overwrite" autosave would be nice. Die without saving your game recently? Better would be to automatically save after dying. You could even skip the cut scene of your character's funeral.

[Quicksave] shouldn't take much more space than a standard save Yes it would. Sometimes the serialized state of a game including the AI state of each enemy unit is several megabytes, but the only part that persists between maps is a few kilobytes. Besides, wouldn't quicksaving in, say, Tetris make the game way too easy because you can always undo a bad piece placement?

Re:Cutscenes MUST always be skippable

[Bob Bobbinson]

I'm sure this was said before, but in terms of Phantom Hourglass every cutscene is skippable. If you push 'start' then a you'll see 'skip' appear in the top right screen, tap that and cutscene is skipped.

Re:Cutscenes MUST always be skippable

[despisethesun]

They do if you select "Plain Old Text" from the dropdown below the comment textarea.

Though I prefer "HTML Formatted" myself, which requires html line breaks for newlines.

Re:Cutscenes MUST always be skippable

[CastrTroy]

That's why whenever I'm playing a video game, I always use headphones, and unplug the phones. I also make sure to put up a "Go Away" sign on my front door in case anyone thinks of knocking.

Re:Cutscenes MUST always be skippable

[arthurh3535]

Actually, I think save-games need to be carefully considered for the genre and game design.
 
In NWN2, there is an auto-save ability, but it's dumber than a rock. It has no concept of auto-saving per 'module' which it really should, so that the module-designer can create regular save-points.
 
Other games ask to save (and allow you to rename when needed, but that can be irritating and immersion breaking. So I don't think there's a be-all end-all solution. You've got to factor what can work with how irritating it can be to the player.

Re:Cutscenes MUST always be skippable

[fractoid]

Besides, wouldn't quicksaving in, say, Tetris make the game way too easy because you can always undo a bad piece placement? I dunno, if I pause a Tetris game at any appreciable speed, let alone if I quicksaved and restored (were such a thing possible), it kills my rhythm and I most likely rapidly die. Once you get up to a goodly speed in time-attack style puzzle games, maintaining flow is the most important part of the game. Or so I find.

Re:Cutscenes MUST always be skippable

[KDR_11k]

I think that was about the "do you want to save?" message many games display. If you didn't want to you probably wouldn't have selected "save" and even if you can still cancel out of the savefile selection.

Re:Cutscenes MUST always be skippable

[magus_melchior]

Re: Phantom Hourglass. I think the opening "cutscene" was more for the Japanese gaming youth, as it was done in the style of kami-shibai, or "paper drama". Essentially a story told to kids by a wandering merchant with pictures and snacks, sort of like a roving movie theater before the days of motion picture in Japan. Had I played Wind Waker previously, I still would've enjoyed the recap scene and Link sleeping through it.

It seems to be stretched out to 10.

[mr_mischief]

The first 8 are a hit with me. I'm not sure about 9. I definitely don't think 10 is a big deal unless jumping out of the game engine is entirely disruptive.

An in-game tutorial is a good idea for lots of games. Sometimes an out-of-game tutorial as a separate program or perhaps a manual and web site make more sense.

For a FPS, stay in the game engine and allow the respwan from there. That's standard. If it's a memory or logic puzzle, then the player shouldn't be allowed extra time outside the level to look at the screen. In a RTS, your game is often over if you've lost, and there's no point to staying in. The choice to kibitz, if available, can be just as effective from a menu as from over the top of your headquarters exploding.

It feels much like many other "Top 10" lists. It feels like it started out strong and was rounded out to finish with mediocre follow-ons. That's a shame, because the title didn't even say anything about 10 things, and the subtitle/synopsis could have left that word out.

Another thing that's a bit silly, but understandable, is the console-specific tilt. I'd say the first 8 features they list make as much sense on the PC or any other platform, but they don't mention that.

Re:It seems to be stretched out to 10.

[DoomHaven]

Number 10 is actually my biggest beef thus far with the Wii. I like the Wii. I *love* the Wii. But, I hate that there isn't a good way to exit from any game to the Wii menu without hitting the "Home" button and getting that "All progress made up to this point will be lost" warning. I'd like a way to leave the game, that's consistent among the games, so that I know if I do that sequence, I'm saved, I'm going to exit, and I'm good.

Re:It seems to be stretched out to 10.

[Glytch]

Some games don't even let you use the home button. Wii DDR won't let you quickly get out of a battle song.

"Beat the master with 3 boo's or less! Oh, looks like you screwed up and got 4 boos right off the bat. Too bad, now you've got to wait three minutes listening to the announcer insulting you until it ends and you can try again! Nope, the home button won't work! Ha ha!"

I love the game otherwise, but what kind of a dumbass thought it would be a great idea not to be able to quit a battle instantly?

Always let players...

[AKAImBatman]

...skip cut scenes using a non-gameplay key. There's nothing more annoying than missing an important cut-scene because you accidentally hit the Fire button. Especially when the cut scenes intrude on the game suddenly and unexpectedly.

There is one of the items I disagree with:

8. Never use insipid, indefensible enemy attacks.
"It's impossible to get out of the way every third attack!" I shout at the on-screen boss in despair. Ah, the indefensible enemy blitzkrieg. This technique was more prevalent in the age of quarter-munchers where arcade makers needed to extend profits at the expense of cheap gameplay, but any remnants of this move should be completely abolished from interactive entertainment.

One man's "impossible" is another man's "challenge". Just because it's impossible for you doesn't mean that it's truly impossible. Go check out some Youtube videos of people playing a Bullet-hell shmup on one life. Inspiring feats, to say the least. Yet I know that I need infinite lives to pass these games because I'm simply not that good. Therefore, #8 should really say, "Know thy audience." That way you'll make sure you put the right level of difficulty in the right game.

Re:Always let players...

[revlayle]

like for example, Kingdom Hearts 2, not necessarily it is the best game in the world (I enjoyed it however), but there was always a way to skip any cutscene: Press start, and confirm the skip (also, that provided a way to pause cutscenes without having to skip them - esp. long ones, which this game had).

Re:Always let players...

[Floritard]

Actually I think a better idea is to do the 2-3 second wait before accepting input. Lots of games do this, so that skipping is possible but not accidental. Gives you a chance to retire that trigger finger and decide for yourself whether you want to watch this particular cutscene or not.

Re:Always let players...

[roadkill_cr]

I think the idea behind the article is that there are still games which guarantee you will be hit - for example, where it'd be impossible to go through bullet-hell on one life. In fact, the bullet-hell you reference is exactly what he is asking for - not impossible, but very challenging.

Re:Always let players...

[Bobfrankly1]

...skip cut scenes using a non-gameplay key. There's nothing more annoying than missing an important cut-scene because you accidentally hit the Fire button. Especially when the cut scenes intrude on the game suddenly and unexpectedly. Couldn't agree more that being penalized for accidentally pressing a button (especially after an intense boss battle that took 10+ tries to complete) but some games have givin the option to skip, but with a confirmation dialog. Xenosaga was a pretty great game, but some of the cutscenes were long-winded, and playing through a second time, you could press start, and then choose b (i think) to return to the cutscene or press x to skip. Give the player a choice, but make sure it's the player's choice with a confirmation.
-
I've been known to have intelligent thoughts on occasion, I just need my first occasion...

Re:Always let players...

[ucblockhead]

Better: DON'T MAKE CUT SCENES THAT APPEAR IN COMBAT!

Of all the things wrong with Lair, this is the worst. Why on Earth they think I need a 10-second cut scene to show the thing I just blew up blowing up is beyond me. All it serves to do is make it even more confusing where you actually are in relation to everything else. Cut scenes should only appear in periods where there is no action, like between levels/missions.

Of course, the ideal is to go the Half-Life route and design the game so you can tell your story without cut scenes.

Re:Always let players...

[bigstrat2003]

Agree and disagree. Agreed that cut scenes should always be in between missions or at breaks in the action, but Half-Life's refusal to use cut scenes is bloody awful. There are things I like about Half-Life, and others I don't, but Half-Life's storytelling is crap because they don't have cut scenes. Games without cut scenes are cool if there's no story, but if you want to have your game have a story, they're mandatory, imho.

Re:Always let players...

[Blakey Rat]

I would argue that Half-Life doesn't have a story, only a setting. Unless you consider, "our magical device exploded and now aliens teleport all over and kill people, oh also there's a guy in a suit" a story.

That said, one of the things I hated about Half-Life 2 was the loooong stretch of time in Barney's hideout where you can't do anything but dink around while the characters are all running their mouths. If they're going to talk about something I don't care about for a long time, making me retain control of my character only makes it seem like a longer time. The other risk with the Half-Life approach is that you might not be looking at the relevant point in the environment while the cut-scene occurs.

(Take, for example, the first level of Halo 2. In one of the fights on the space station, you can hear the radio broadcast of a ship in the background as it gets invaded, and then explodes from a bomb. You're supposed to be looking out the window to see the explosion, but the first two times I played it through, I wasn't looking out the window and therefore had no clue why the radio chatter was there.)

Re:Always let players...

[Some_Llama]

"but Half-Life's storytelling is crap because they don't have cut scenes."

I always thought the story telling was crap because it had no story. Just threw you into a situation where you knew nothing of your motivation and you just responded to "go this way, try to survive, we'll tell you what happened later", in ep1 they gave a brief bit of story.. but probably because so many people complained about hl2.

Re:Always let players...

[coolGuyZak]

All it serves to do is make it even more confusing where you actually are in relation to everything else.

I'd say this is the fault of poor cut-scene design. If the scene started from where you were and panned to wherever it wanted to be, it wouldn't be nearly as disorienting. (Harder to keep interesting, though. Ah, opportunity costs...)

Re:Always let players...

[Das Modell]

System Shock, System Shock 2 and BioShock have few cutscenes, as most of the story is told through audio logs and messages. And yes, Half-Life does have a story, whether you like it or not.

Re:Always let players...

[Das Modell]

I would argue that Half-Life doesn't have a story, only a setting. Unless you consider, "our magical device exploded and now aliens teleport all over and kill people, oh also there's a guy in a suit" a story.

Well if that's your logic, then no game, book or movie has a story, since any story can be simplified like that (Lord of the Rings doesn't have a story, it's just some midget running around with a magic ring!).

That said, one of the things I hated about Half-Life 2 was the loooong stretch of time in Barney's hideout where you can't do anything but dink around while the characters are all running their mouths. If they're going to talk about something I don't care about for a long time, making me retain control of my character only makes it seem like a longer time. The other risk with the Half-Life approach is that you might not be looking at the relevant point in the environment while the cut-scene occurs.

First you complain that HL doesn't have a story, but then you say that cutscenes and dialogue are boring? Sounds to me like you don't even want a story.

Re:Always let players...

[Blakey Rat]

First you complain that HL doesn't have a story, but then you say that cutscenes and dialogue are boring? Sounds to me like you don't even want a story.

No, I want a story. I loved the Halo story, because I could actually get into it and I cared about the characters. Half-Life 2 doesn't have that at all... it never answers any damned questions about anything. Maybe there's a story buried in there somewhere, I dunno, I couldn't find it. When you are "betrayed" in HL2, I didn't feel shocked or surprised, I yawned.

And for the record, the first time I played through it, I did listen to the extrodinarily long and dull "not-a-cut-scene" in Barney's hideout, but it only takes one playthrough to realize that none of that dialog matters at all to the rest of the game.

Re:Always let players...

[Das Modell]

I agree about HL2's storyline, but your first post was contradictory without this clarification. HL2 has a story, it just isn't a very good one.

Re:Always let players...

[captain_cthulhu]

man, I really agree with you on the non-gameplay button thing. I never realized the solution was so simple even though I subconsciously thanked them when they did it this way.

on your other point though, I think they are talking about something different - it's when the game requires that you take damage, no matter who you are.
it happens more frequently than people realize, I think - although no one game overuses it in my experience.

Subtitles!

[machinecraig]

Subtitles for most (if not all) spoken content would be awesome, even better is when it gets kept automatically in an in-game journal as in Deus Ex. This could be considered more accessibility than usability - but it's very nice when you can pull up that critical conversation that you had a few days ago.

This helps solve one of the biggest gaming problems:
"Am I supposed to escort the Foozle or KILL the Foozle???"

Re:Subtitles!

[sanosuke76]

Absolutely one of my big points. Subtitles are important if you've got people constantly chattering away in the background, or you don't want to have inconvenience friends by pausing the movie you're all watching, just because you're at a cutscene in your turn-based (i.e. perfect for doing while watching something else) RPG.

I would also add that, even if you don't have a full journal, at a bare minimum it should be possible to access your current objective and any supplemental material (i.e. tactical maps in the SOCOM series) from the pause menu.

Of course, I will have to say that the one game I feel does the best at keeping track of your objectives so far, is Oblivion. It keeps track of everything, in a really nice interface, even when you've got 14 quests which are all active to one degree or another! And once a quest is over, it gets archived over into a 'completed quests' tab, so you never have to go through a gameplay guide racking your brains to figure out if you've done all the side quests or not.

Re:Subtitles!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish journals, or even just a brief description of what you're supposed to be doing, were more widespread.

Two things that suck:
You find a solution for a later puzzle, say, a combination to a safe. You don't find the safe for three more days - how are you supposed to remember that combination without a journal? Don't penalise me because I didn't want (and didn't expect) to write something down manually.

Coming back to a game after a month or more, and basically having to restart the game because I can't remember exactly what I was doing or what quests I had left to complete.

And yes - subtitle always. I don't care if I can't turn them off, but I care a great deal if I can't turn them on - I have a family, and I don't always have the luxury of being able to hear what's going on. This also combines with the journal issue to make an extremely frustrating game if my goal is given in the cutscene itself.

Re:Subtitles!

[gryyphyn]

Absolutely. You have the ability to set subtitles on at least the PC version of HL2 and it's fantastic. There's some sections where there's just too much noise to hear what someone is saying and it's nice to know that I can glance down and review the last bit of dialogue. But it would be nice to have a story scene replay option of some sort...

Re:Subtitles!

[ShadowsHawk]

BioShock did a really nice job with this. They keep a log of all audio journals that you pick up. Select one to read it and the audio will start to play. Very nice implementation.

But also let us pause the cutscenes...

[Ted Stevens]

If time is put into the cutscenes, make sure we can watch -- and pause -- them. John Woo's Stranglehold for Xbox 360 is an example where this fails. The game claims to be "cinematic." Please, developers, let me watch the cinema even if the pizza arrives during a cutscene!

Re:But also let us pause the cutscenes...

[rabiddeity]

Every game on the Wii allows you to do this, though rather unintentionally. If you press the Home key at any point, it pauses the game and brings up the system menu. It's a really REALLY nice feature for when you have to take a phone call or answer the door in the middle of a cinematic, but it works at any point in the game. That's good interface design.

Re:But also let us pause the cutscenes...

[Tarison]

Try the "turn on the controller" button, which jumps to your gamer profile options. In most cases, I've found this works at pausing the game, even in a cutscene.

Yes, but..

[\\]

Let me skip any and every single cutscene/tutorial, but also give me the opportunity to replay them at my convenience.

If I've decided to skip something that actually has important information, or I decide I want to watch something later because I'm in a groove, where is the harm in letting me access it when I want to?

Re:Yes, but..

[Seakip18]

I can see this easily being done, unless the scene is rendered by the engine. I think Deus Ex and Bioshock had it dead on. Miss something? Just jump to your screen and re-listen to it while you happily blast away.

Flip side of the coin.

[Commander Doofus]

Always let players repeat any cutscene previously viewed. Sometimes they accidentally skip it by slipping and pressing a button, sometimes they want to review a scene for a possible clue, sometimes they just think it looks cool.

Re:Flip side of the coin.

[SnoopJeDi]

Sometimes, I'll boot up Perfect Dark, play a few rounds of deathmatch, and then watch all the gameplay cutscenes in one long go, like a short film.

Awesome feature imo.

Re:Flip side of the coin.

[Higaran]

Project Slypheed is a good example of this, there are certin wepons that you will can not get enough points to buy during your first pass trough the game. It lets you play the game again from the beginig with all the stuff you have, and let's you skip all the cutscenes, or you can go back and watch anyone you want again, some look bad ass with this giant space laser destroying the surface of a planet.

A good example of piss poor usability in a game

[TobyWong]

A good example of piss poor usability in a game:

The Battlefield series.

Fantastic core gameplay. Horrible menu system/options etc. Take 2142 for example. Who's brilliant idea was it to force users to redo their kit loadout EVERY SINGLE TIME THEY CONNECT TO A SERVER. This is shit that is obvious after using the game for 10 minutes. Also how the key assignments for assault rifle and rockets change depending on which team you are playing for. Ummm hello?

I remember reading a quote along the lines of "It's a good thing Battlefield is such a great game because it really blows". This really sums up the dichotomy that is the BF franchise.

Re:A good example of piss poor usability in a game

[chriskovo]

actually they are changing this with the next patch you can now save your fav kit loadouts.

Re:A good example of piss poor usability in a game

[Jamu]

It's not the fact it's being fixed. It's the fact that they still don't care about the player. The product you get with that attitude to game design speaks for itself.

Re:A good example of piss poor usability in a game

[Blakey Rat]

BF2142 is a hive of bugs and crap. I bought it at an encouragement of a friend ("You'll like it, it's like Tribes-- no Tribes *worked*") and ended up basically tossing it in the trash after attempting to play it only a few dozen times. It's terrible. When it actually runs long enough to get into a game, it is actually not a bad game-- but then you get to the next round and suddenly you lost all your unlocks for no reason, or the server crashes and you lose all your experience points, or you get booted and the friend's list stops working so you can't find your buddy again, then you go back to playing Xbox.

I'd Include

[Greyfox]

Never throw the player into a boss fight they absolutely can't win. The JRPGs in particular are fond of making you fight a boss early on in the game with absolutely no possible way you can win. It's annoying and unnecessary to do so. It's strange how this is handled with varying degrees of competence in the same game. Suikodan III, for example, lets you level up early on and win several of those fights you're supposed to lose. One of the characters will call you a cheater if you beat him. Later on in the game though you fight a duel with a guy and it's impossible to win it.

So if you put a fight in the game that the party is "supposed" to lose, you should either include the option of them not losing or make it a (skippable) cut scene because no degree of interaction from the player is going to change the outcome at all.

Additionally, do not kill members of my party off without giving me some way to rescue them. If I completely dominate the boss that was supposed to beat my party and kill that guy, don't kill that guy.

Re:I'd Include

[ElleyKitten]

Never throw the player into a boss fight they absolutely can't win. I second that. I hate running through all my potions and phoenix downs just to find out that if I had stood there and done nothing it would have had the same effect. Also completely aggravating? Working my ass off to beat the boss, and then watching a cutscene that assumes I lost. GRRR!

Re:I'd Include

[EasyT]

Also completely aggravating? Working my ass off to beat the boss, and then watching a cutscene that assumes I lost. GRRR!

You remind me of an experience I had a long time ago playing Phantasy Star II, for the Genesis. One of the characters, Nei, gets forcably killed partway through the game in a bass battle. I happened to have a one-of-a-kind item that allowed me to raise a fallen character during combat, and I used it to bring her back to life. We then beat the bad guy with her alive, only to have the game treat her as dead as soon as we left combat. It was one of the most annoying experiences I've ever suffered while gaming.

Re:I'd Include

[Jimmy_B]

Additionally, do not kill members of my party off without giving me some way to rescue them. If I completely dominate the boss that was supposed to beat my party and kill that guy, don't kill that guy.

No, that would be a huge mistake, and it's one that many JRPGs have made. If the player has too much control over which characters are around, it becomes impossible to write good dialog. The writers won't know which characters are part of the conversation, so they have to spend all their time writing alternative dialog for each combination of characters that may be present. Instead of railroading the player onto one well-written path, the player gets to choose between many poorly considered ones, characters don't get fully developed and the story suffers.

Re:I'd Include

[Anonymous Coward]

As another poster mentioned, Chrono Trigger did all of the above with class and style. Generally it's all only available on a second playthrough without insane amounts of grinding, but starting from the second playthrough you can:
1) Immediately take the portal, solo the final boss, and win
2) Beat the final boss when he's supposed to kill Chrono and win
3) Beat the final boss after he's killed Chrono but before you resurrect him and win
4) Beat the final boss after resurrecting Chrono but before reaching the End of Time and win
5) Beat the final boss at the actual end of the game like you're supposed to
and amongst various other bad endings, each of the above had its own appropriate ending, along with various cutscenes added based on the characters you met that playthrough, etc.

Re:I'd Include

[fractoid]

Working my ass off to beat the boss, and then watching a cutscene that assumes I lost. GRRR! Second only to 'working my ass off to beat a level, then having the game crash because it assumes I can't win.' ;) Case in point: The Terran campaign in Starcraft, where Kerrigan gets taken by the Zerg. Clear the Protoss base, load Kerrigan into a drop ship, lift your buildings off and nick off to some remote corner of the map. Your time runs out, and zerglings swarm until the game goes blooie. :P

Re:I'd Include

[Das Modell]

That reminds me of a scene in FEAR where a guy pops up in front of you and hits you in the face with a piece of wood, incapacitating you long enough for him to make a speech and leave the area. As soon as the guy appeared I shot him in the head several times as a reflex, but the cutscene was pre-destined to occur regardless of what I did.

Re:I'd Include

[Anonymous Coward]

Some games deal with this in a good way, like you have to survive for X seconds or X rounds and after that the cutscene starts.

However if you actually have to die it's a bitch. I remember one SNES RPG where I resisted death for almost an hour or some such before finally dying and noticing I was meant to loose >.

TFA mostly right

[vux984]

#1 - save games automatically - good point. do it. But don't overwrite their last save. Create a new one.

#2 - always say "press any button" to start game. whatever. I'd say its more important to just work with the common ones. Nothings more annoying than games with non-standard or backwards 'menu navigation'.

#3 - go one further - acknowledge left handed players and design a map, sure it won't match every lefties preference but nothing sucks worse than having to remap a game from SCRATCH because its totally unusable for a lefty especially since at this point we haven't played it yet and don't really know which commands are most important, a lefthanded-template to start from would be nice. (This applies mostly to keyboard / PC games of course)

Also let us save and restore our control maps on the fly for crying out loud. More than one player plays the game, and my brother uses some whacky options. And don't lock it up in some player profile we select when we start the game. When I play NFS carbon for example my friends and frequently just hand off the controller between races in career mode, we don't want to each run our own separate career, and we want to be able to swap control preferences easily.

And for those new 'games for windows' that apparently have to support xbox controllers, if i don't have an xbox controller don't effing show me what my control layout looks like on one. And don't prompt me ingame to push xbox controller buttons. (I'm looking at you Lost Planet!!)

#4 - cutscenese - yeah we need to be able to skip them, especially the long one at the beginning, and doubly so for anything we might see -during- gameplay. ESPECIALY the one right before the boss fight that you'll have to redo a dozen times or so. I've given up on games because I couldn't handle the cutscene between dying and trying again. And seriously, get rid of those cutscenese that are 4 minutes long, then require you to manually walk forward 3 feet, open a door, and then launch into another 4 minute cutscene.... that's just retarded.

#5 - good camera controls - obviously

#6 - good controls - obviously

#7 - accessibility options - meh, this is important, but not top 10.

#8 - cheap enemies is an issue. cheap level design is even worse.

#9 - always present in game tutorials - god i hate these. When the first 5 missions of a cmapaign are really the instruction manual/tutorial. Yes, have tutorials in the game, but give players the option to skip the 'learn how to move my units' missions, or set them aside as the "Tutorial Campaign".

#10 - let players in and out of the game painlessly. obviously a good idea.

Re:TFA mostly right

[wilhelm]

#9 - always present in game tutorials - god i hate these

It all depends on the kind of game you're playing. I play a lot of sports games, and sometimes an in-game tutorial is awesomely helpful. F'rinstance, the latest Madden game has a skills practice mode, which is fantastic - it lets you see the exact effect the various combos and moves actually do, and actually lets you practice a little, with increasing levels of difficulty, without having to do jump into a full length game and do trial and error. The latest FIFA game has no such skills practice mode, and as a result I don't have a whole lot of enthusiasm to play the game, since it's very hard to do anything. Reading about button combos in the manual, and being able to practice them, are two very different things. And as much complaints as Gran Turismo's license tests get, they're valuable to get the feel of how the controls work, basic car handling, etc. Experienced players can breeze through the easier tests.

On something like Starcraft, the tutorial scenarios are nice, but perhaps they could be streamlined a bit. From what I recall (it's been quite a while), they're set up so that each scenario is the tutorial for using one type of unit. Even though, IIRC, those scenarios are fairly short, it would still be not difficult to combine a couple units' scenarios.

As with the cutscene stuff, the tutorials should always be optional. That's one of the big complaints about the Gran Turismo license tests - they're mandatory to be able to enter all but a few of the most simple races.

Re:TFA mostly right

[vux984]

On something like Starcraft, the tutorial scenarios are nice, but perhaps they could be streamlined a bit. From what I recall (it's been quite a while), they're set up so that each scenario is the tutorial for using one type of unit. Even though, IIRC, those scenarios are fairly short, it would still be not difficult to combine a couple units' scenarios.

Starcraft is about what I had in mind when I wrote that. The second time I play the starcraft campaign I may not need to start at the "I've never played an RTS in my life stage".

I don't mind that the tutorials are there, I mind that I can't skip them, or just play the last 3 in the series, or whatever.

Re:TFA mostly right

[DeeDob]

#1 - save games automatically - good point. do it. But don't overwrite their last save. Create a new one.

--> Games like Quake 4 do this. It leaves you after a while with dozens of save files you have to manually clean-up. Really, the best system is like TFA said. Like Halo games: Have a checkpoint auto-save system that overwrites the last save all the time. Then remember which levels he played and allow them to start in any level he previously played in. This works with almost all games but non-linear RPGs and Sand-box games.

#2 - always say "press any button" to start game. whatever. I'd say its more important to just work with the common ones. Nothings more annoying than games with non-standard or backwards 'menu navigation'.

--> And i say those menu are just plain idiotic. Period. They come from the habit of old arcade coin-ups where you had "insert coin to start". They just replaced "coin" with "start button". The whole screen is just a relic of the past to begin with. I still wonder why almost ALL games have one.

#3 - go one further - acknowledge left handed players and design a map, sure it won't match every lefties preference but nothing sucks worse than having to remap a game from SCRATCH because its totally unusable for a lefty especially since at this point we haven't played it yet and don't really know which commands are most important, a lefthanded-template to start from would be nice. (This applies mostly to keyboard / PC games of course)

--> PC games almost all allow you to remap buttons as you wish them. The problem is more on consoles, where this feature is very inconsistent from one game to the other. I still don't get why they use "presets" of control methods when it would be so easy to let the player remap their buttons how they want.

Also let us save and restore our control maps on the fly for crying out loud. More than one player plays the game, and my brother uses some whacky options. And don't lock it up in some player profile we select when we start the game. When I play NFS carbon for example my friends and frequently just hand off the controller between races in career mode, we don't want to each run our own separate career, and we want to be able to swap control preferences easily.

--> This i disagree. Profiles actually makes it that each player can have his own save, settings and preferences for himself. I don't want this to go away. I can't remember the number of times my wife or i accidentally wiped a save of each other by accident because there was no "locked" profile.

And for those new 'games for windows' that apparently have to support xbox controllers, if i don't have an xbox controller don't effing show me what my control layout looks like on one. And don't prompt me ingame to push xbox controller buttons. (I'm looking at you Lost Planet!!)

--> I'll just say that PC games will use more and more the 360 controller and will be designed around it. They are trying to get rid altogether of the mouse/keyboard set-up that, let's face it, was never designed or intended as a gaming device to begin with. (I know PC purist won't like it, but it's the current trend).

#4 - cutscenese - yeah we need to be able to skip them, especially the long one at the beginning, and doubly so for anything we might see -during- gameplay. ESPECIALY the one right before the boss fight that you'll have to redo a dozen times or so. I've given up on games because I couldn't handle the cutscene between dying and trying again. And seriously, get rid of those cutscenese that are 4 minutes long, then require you to manually walk forward 3 feet, open a door, and then launch into another 4 minute cutscene.... that's just retarded.

--> agreed 100%

#5 - good camera controls - obviously

#6 - good controls - obviously

#7 - accessibility options - meh, this is important, but not top 10.

#8 - cheap enemies is an issue. cheap level design is even worse.

--> I find japanese games are the most guilty of

Re:TFA mostly right

[vux984]

--> This i disagree. Profiles actually makes it that each player can have his own save, settings and preferences for himself. I don't want this to go away. I can't remember the number of times my wife or i accidentally wiped a save of each other by accident because there was no "locked" profile.

I agree. Note that I don't have a problem with 'profiles' themselves I just don't want the control settings *locked* away behind one. There is no reason why you shouldn't be allowed to import your wifes control settings into your profile. Nor should a single profile be linked to a single control set; let me create multiple control sets and rotate between them within my single profile.

Re:TFA mostly right

[DeeDob]

There is no reason why you shouldn't be allowed to import your wifes control settings into your profile. Nor should a single profile be linked to a single control set; let me create multiple control sets and rotate between them within my single profile.

I still fail to see the usefulness of it all. Why would anyone feel the need to import somebody else's preference? If you play with him/her, he'll log using his own profile. On a console like the 360, it's only a matter of clicking X and selecting the new profile. You don't even need to get out of the game.
And rotating between controls sets? In most games, you can pause and change your set-up as you go. Sure there arn't any buttons to dynamically change on-the-fly during the game, but really what's the point of that? The problem i see with this is that some games would become overly complicated, mapping different actions to the same button, depending on your settings.

I'm sure you have your reasons for thinking it's necessary, but i really don't think it is. It would make menus overly complicated for something as trivial as this.

Re:TFA mostly right

[vux984]

On a console like the 360, it's only a matter of clicking X and selecting the new profile.

You are answering soley in terms of consoles. My original post was primarily referring to keyboard/mouse PC games, and I said so in that post.

but i really don't think it is. It would make menus overly complicated for something as trivial as this.

When switching from a left handed person to a right handed person in your average PC game its a completely different setup. Its not remotely trivial to change it. A lot of lefties don't even use "W/A/S/D" for movement in FPSes.

If you're playing Quake4 or Unreal Tournament, or Ghost Recon, or almost anything else, its a royal pain to switch from player to player.

Good ideas, bad attitude

[Sciros]

Most of what the author says is obvious and a waste of page space ("don't ship with a bad camera" uh-huh thanks Capt. Obvious), some of it is of no concern ("press (A) to start" on the title screen is just fine, even newbies aren't that retarded and if they are they have no place using a controller with more than 1 button in the first place), but FREAKING ALL OF IT is written with the attitude of "screw you, game DESIGNER, I am your audience and you will bow to me." That's the mentality of a spoiled little brat. Sure, cutscenes being skippable is a good idea, IF coupled with the ability to go back and re-watch these cutscenes on-demand should you skip one by accident. Because, you know, not ALL of us have the "stop showing me story and character development I wants to mash some buttons NOW!1!" mentality when we're enjoying a video game.

Even though the core *ideas* are generally fine, I wouldn't want this guy designing games for me, ever. The best games come from people who love their craft and the characters and story they are presenting to you, not folks who keep driving home the point of how much they DON'T.

Re:Good ideas, bad attitude

[lgw]

Screw you, game designer, I am the customer and if you want my money you will bow to me.

Feels good to say it. These 10 points were basically all the same thing: give the player as much control over the experience as possible. I agree completely: when I want a passive non-interactive experience, I will watch a movie. Gaming should be, as much as possible, interaction between player and designer, not merely the player consuming the designers narrative.

Re:Good ideas, bad attitude

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironically, the mod who got to you is one of those spoiled little brats. I personally agree with you, but I don't expect to see much support for those opinions on /.

Game design is hard from the ground up, and most of the audience thinks you can magically add anything to a game with your developers wand, just that you CHOOSE not to. That's what the article is like -- completely arrogant gamer mentality with no insight whatsoever.

Re:Good ideas, bad attitude

[Sciros]

I don't follow that all-or-nothing logic at all. Visual entertainment does not need to be so divided into the fully interactive and the fully passive. A movie where you get to choose between alternate progressions for the plot, or a game where the exposition is presented via non-interactive clips -- there is nothing inherently bad or, rather, unenjoyable in these per se. The important thing is quality, and even that is relative and depends greatly on the subject and audience.

As for the principle of a game designer catering to a "customer," that completely disregards games being art, and I imagine you would agree that an artist is just as understandably a servant of his own inspiration as he is of his patrons.

Re:Good ideas, bad attitude

[lgw]

Game Designers are totally free to create a game that completely satisfies their inspirations. Later, when they get hungry and the power goes off, they can write a game to make money. The latter should cater to the customer. :)

Re:Good ideas, bad attitude

[Blakey Rat]

As for the principle of a game designer catering to a "customer," that completely disregards games being art, and I imagine you would agree that an artist is just as understandably a servant of his own inspiration as he is of his patrons.

Bunk.

The vast, vast, vast majority of artists are creating commercial products. For every one art-consumed painter laboring away in his one-bedroom apartment, there's a dozen guys out there making cartoons, comics, magazine layouts, 3D animation, greeting cards, designing rings or silverware, TV commercials, writing romance novels, etc etc.

Do you seriously believe that all of those people would be doing creative work if there was no money in it? Do you believe that, say, the movie Metropolis is not art because Fritz Lang charged admission to see it? Do you believe that H.R. Giger is "less" of an artist because he designed monsters for movies?

Re:Good ideas, bad attitude

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the parent is flamebait. Being a game developer myself, I get enough attitude from the client every day without some whiney armchair designer giving it to me in a condescending tone as well.

There isn't anything really wrong with the ideas presented in the article, but they ARE obvious, and the tone IS unnecessary.

So, all that being said, I hate unskippable cutscenes! In fact, I haven't worked with anyone that doesn't. In my experience, these sort of blatantly bad design decisions are perpetuated by a QA team that is both poor and given too much control (my last job) or "designers" over at the publishing end that have no idea how to implement a video game or what anyone wants outside of their marketing drones' studies (current job).

Re:Good ideas, bad attitude

[coolGuyZak]

Lang and Geiger are not less the artist because they got paid, nor did they necessarily compromise their vision to satisfy profitability. Both leveraged their vision to make money. I (and, possibly the GP) posit that game designers are in the same camp, and the compromise between inspiration and cash-dollars is between the artist/designer and their employer.

Re:Good ideas, bad attitude

[Sciros]

Indeed. It can be a compromise, and almost always for the sake of livelihood it MUST be a compromise, but to *expect* it to be wholly one-sided at the expense of the artist's vision is unfounded and in my opinion unreasonable, and hence my confusion about the earlier replies to my original post ^_^

Re:Good ideas, bad attitude

[Sciros]

^_^ A clever answer, truly. And a good point, but I am not saying it should be one or the other; there can be a middle ground, and in fact the artist's vision, if not overly compromised, might lead to what even the customer considers a better product.

Re:Good ideas, bad attitude

[lgw]

The very best games made are no doubt driven to a large extent by artistic vision, but in a designer for whom taking all of the basic steps is second nature, effortless.

90% of everything is crap, but 99.999% of everything "driven by artistic vision" is crap, despite the very best stuff coming from that category.

Re:Good ideas, bad attitude

[Sciros]

Haha I tend to agree. I was mostly bothered by the article's author basically coming off as saying 'screw artistic vision' (at least IMO) when most of what he was talking about is, indeed, "basic steps" that shouldn't compromise artistic vision in the first place. It's not a topic he touched on, but his attitude made me think about it.

one to add

[doctorzizmore]

I just finished Odin Sphere and one feature I liked was the ability to change difficulty at any point. I know this is kinda lame for hardcore gamers, but if you're a real hardcore gamer then you would just ignore this anyway. I loved the game and story, but towards the end there a fair amount of level grinding you had to do. I'm not as young as I used to be and I felt like I had better things to spend my time on, so I just set the difficulty to easy and finished the game. I don't think I would have gotten to the end otherwise, so for game writers who would like their stories to be appreciated by all levels of gamers this feature is a great idea.

Re:one to add

[JoshJ]

I just found Odin Sphere "too weird" and had to stop playing it. I'll get back into it at some point, but does the combat ever get better than "hack at the enemies and hope you don't get hit, then back off and charge back in again"?

Re:one to add

[doctorzizmore]

I wouldn't say the combat system is especially deep (yeah it is pretty much "use magic, then hack and slash") but I think the real fun is trying to kill enemies as efficiently as possible so you can earn good prizes and use those to level quickly. I like Odin Sphere because it doesn't try to do too much, but everything it does do it does perfectly. I can definitely understand not liking the game tho.

Let Them Eat Cake

[SonicTheDeadFrog]

I'm one of those geeks who actually likes watching cutscenes...the FIRST time. I absolutely hate having to sit through a cutscene - great and wonderful though it may be - for the fifth time because the developer decided to put some difficult boss fight or other obstacle directly after it with not possibility to save. And while we're on the subject of skipping cutscenes, I think it can go too far in the other direction. A couple of times I have been engrossed in a cutscene and I sneezed on the controller and the cutscene ended midstream, cutting me off from important or enjoyable story bits. I also hate it when games don't allow you to pause cutscenes. Blue Dragon and Final Fantasy XII are great examples of how cutscenes should be done. Now if we could just do something about those lengthy battle animations...

Re:Let Them Eat Cake

[Sciros]

Yeah, skippable battle animations ftw. That would be really nice in FFXII. Though that game also really needs a "theater mode."

Re:Let Them Eat Cake

[Anonymous Coward]

The cake is a lie
The cake is a lie
The cake is a lie
The cake is a lie...

The two I disagree with.

[apparently]

1. Never ask a player if they want to save their game.

Because the office world has taught us that auto-save never, ever ends up writing over data we wanted to keep. Ditch the word "never", let players save when they want to, but also auto-save to a different save file.

2. Always say "press any button" to start a game.
So after years of having to press the Start button, gamers can't seem to remember where that button is located? Weird. What if the main screen has some different options that the player needs to choose? Perhaps the user wants to select a different keymapping (rule #3!)? Wouldn't that necessitate that the press a button other than Start? I always assumed that the wii requires specific button presses to start games so that games don't accidentally start because the wiimote got dropped, etc...

Re:The two I disagree with.

[Blakey Rat]

I think the main point is, "make it damned easy to start the game." What specific button it is isn't important.

For instance, don't make me decide whether to send Xbox Live invites, then decide what game mode I want to play, then decide what character I want to play, then decide which level you want to start at, and then strand me at the equipment buying screen, and then play a long cutscene. Make it so the default button to start (A or Start) the game just starts. Some games get this horribly wrong, and it takes ages to get to the actual gameplay. (Sonic the Hedgehog for Xbox 360, I'm looking at you!)

Re:The two I disagree with.

[apparently]

Article seemed pretty specific in its issue with the Start button, which I don't really agree with:
A game specifically asks a player to "press start to begin." When prompted, the newbie gamer looks down at a confusing set of buttons, thinks for a second as to which button they need to press, then they hit it.

I don't have an XBox, so I can't completely speak to your point, but how can you have a game "just start" if there's some customization you need to do, such as selecting a specific character? I agree that most games of late kick off with some useless cutscene that just prolongs the actual playing of the game.

controls

[JoshJ]

I find it strange that he complains about "17 buttons" on the PS2/PS3 and Xbox.

L1, L2, L3, R1, R2, R3, triangle, O, X, Square. That's ten. Start and Select make 12. The "analog" button isn't used in gameplay, but that's 13. Then what? Counting the d-pad as 4 buttons is silly because in MOST games it, like the joysticks, simply serves one purpose.
Most games ignore L3 and R3, or use it for some function that's tied to the joystick it's on (e.g. using R3 to recenter the camera when the right stick controls the camera).

The start button has done the same thing in every game since the Super Nintendo era, so complaining about it is silly. It's standard. It pauses the game and/or brings up the menu. Period. Select is rarely used and could be gotten rid of. Analog was used on the PSX and some PS2 games for toggling the controller mode (again, standard among every game because it actually applied to the controller), but it had no role in game.

The joystick or d-pad is always used for movement. Granted, some FPS's use the d-pad for things like "switch weapons with left/right and zoom with up/down" in which case it's really two additional functions. (not 4! It's a logical pair and if you know that "right on the d-pad is next weapon" it's obvious that "left on the d-pad is previous weapon"!)

Ultimately, I think the most complicated console game I've played in terms of keymapping are the FPS'es like Timesplitters where all 8 shoulder+face buttons were used and you used the left-right and up-down pairs for weapon swapping and zooming, and the two joysticks did move/strafe and turn/look; making for a total of 12 functions- counting "fire" and "secondary fire" as different concepts.

I don't think 12 functions is too much to expect someone to know for a complicated game.

Compare this to a fighting game, say Virtua Fighter, which technically has an 8-way joystick (or uses the d-pad for 8-way movement) and 3 buttons. Kick, punch, guard. That's simple, right? Well, there's kick+punch, punch+guard, kick+guard, kick+punch, kick+punch+guard, down-forward kick, etc, making for movelists with over 100 commands. Almost every modern fighting game (minus Smash Brothers) has upwards of 50 commands and even Smash Brothers has quite a high number of moves with just "attack, special, shield" thanks to being able to smash them, smash in the air, smash while running, etc.

Shoot, compare it to Nethack, which used nearly every button on the keyboard (lower AND uppercase) for something.

Complaining about console games having "too many buttons" is absurd. PC games are where this "problem" really lies, and if done right (such as Civilization 4- all the buttons were really just shortcut keys to something you could get at through the GUI somehow) it's not a problem.

Granted, if every direction on the d-pad and the 8 general directions on each joystick did different functions that weren't even logically connected, he'd have a complaint, but I'd argue that such a design would be a bad user interface in general because it's not using the expected behavior of the joystick/d-pad.

He's spot on about allowing controller remapping, subtitles for deaf people or kids whose parents make them turn the volume off, forced-death boss fights (I remember one in Chrono Cross where I used a massive number of potions, curative spells, ethers, etc to survive and continually damaged the boss, ultimately giving up and letting him kill me just to see if I was "supposed" to lose it- and promptly reset so I could redo it without losing all the items.)

Also, tutorial levels should damn well be optional. Cutscenes should be skippable (though make it buttonmasher-proof like Xenosaga did) and re-viewable. Not everyone is playing the game for the first time.

I fully disagree with "never ask the player if he wants to save his game", as does anyone else who's ever gotten stuck in Riovanes Castle in Final Fantasy Tactics without a backup save. (Yes, I got through. Yell and Auto-potion are a ridiculous

Re:controls

[Tyler Eaves]

Some games DO use the d-pad as buttons. Forza Motorsport 2, for instances, uses them to scroll through live telemetry overlays while racing. Project Gotham 4 uses them to manipulate the in-game radio.

Re:controls

[JoshJ]

I assume the radio one does something like left/right is previous/next station and the Forza one has either left/right or up/down as previous/next overlay? My point is that the d-pad (whether in pairs or as a whole pad) is typically used for related functions. It'd be like declaring that the c-buttons on the N64 pad are "4 separate buttons" in a game like Mario 64 where they all serve one shared function- moving the camera. Sure, the PS2 technically has 17 buttons plus two joysticks. They're NEVER used for 17 functions, so there's really only a dozen or so functions at most you have to learn. It's not "buttons" that the player memorizes, after all, but functions.

Yep

[Sycraft-fu]

Note: There are some spoilers here, but only for really old games.

Always been a pet peeve of mine when the story is forced with a battle that you have to lose. I've got no problem with the fact that many games stories are mostly or totally linear. However what I do have a problem with is when they want to do that by putting you in an unwinnable situation. Do better writing instead, don't expect me to play along.

This is especially true because in some games you find that the situations ARE winnable, but then it doesn't work. Deus Ex was like that. There's a situation where you are supposed to either stand by your brother, or try to run away. Either way you get captured. Ok, except that if you are like me and are good at that sort of game, and take proactive steps to defend yourself and don't do things the normal way, you can win.

When I was playing through it the first time I really suspected an ambush there, so I'd gone to lengths to sneak around and plant proximity explosives and was prepped for a fight. Sure enough, you talk to Paul, a fight breaks out. I was ready and took all the bad guys down. However then there was nothing to do, the game didn't acknowledge that contingency. I either had to blow my self up, or go "run away". There was no "You killed the forces that were after you," option, even though it was perfectly feasible to do.

You are absolutely right in that any time you let the player fight, winning needs to be an option. You can heavily stack the deck against them if that's how it is supposed to be, but have the code in there to deal with a win if it happens.

Chrono Trigger did that really right. You encounter the big boss in the game way before the end, and he kills your lead character. However the battle is NOT forced that way. It is how it is going to go the first time you play the game through probably because it is so stacked against you. However, if you went really insane on level grinding, or if you do the "replay the game with your existing characters" mode, you can kill him right there and then, and win the game.

THAT is done right. You have an expected outcome, you stack the deck to try and ensure that, however you have the game prepared to deal with the alternative.

Re:Yep

[lgw]

I thought Deus Ex was pretty good about that. The scene with attempting to rescue Paul, for example: if you ran away (leaving through the window was the trigger), Paul was dead for the rest of the game. If you won the fight (or at least left through the front door of the Ton, the other trigger) Paul was alive for the rest of the game.

The only unwinnable fight I recall from that game was the one where Gunther ambushes you in the subway - you may be remembering the wrong fight.

Re:Yep

[Fallingcow]

If you survive the apartment battle you just get captured by Gunther when you leave the subway station in Battery Park, which is where Jock is supposed to try to meet up with you (so you have to go there). The difference between running away and fighting and winning is that if you run away, Paul just dies, but if you fight and win, he gets captured "off camera" after you leave, and you can save him from the MJ12 facility on Liberty Island when you break out.

Re:Yep

[kat_skan]

If you had the micro-fibril muscle aug you could avoid Harmann and just move one of the concrete barricades out of the way. Not that it did you any good, of course. You still had to get captured. :P

Re:Yep

[Sycraft-fu]

So what you do is sneak around the hotel and plant a couple grenades. Some explosives in the main room and gas in the hallway work great. Then talk to him to start the event. The grenades go off. If you are skilled and have some heavy weapons, you can make short work of the attackers. Well then what? You both are free to go now, but he just keeps running around telling you to go before it's too late. You won the fight, but the game acts as though you didn't. You then either have to blow yourself up, which will trigger the next scene, or take the train back and get blown up.

Gunther was the more classic unwinnable fight like the grandparent was talking about, in that he simply didn't take damage. Here I'm talking about being able to win, but the game just not responding. Everything acts as though you didn't do anything.

Re:Yep

[lgw]

Ahhh! No wonder I couldn't escape, I had the aug that boosted melee damage instead, since meleeing down the big battlemechs was such fun.

Re:Yep

[lgw]

All you had to do was walk out the front door (technically, you didn't even need to fight the agents). The engine was limited in terms of what it could use for triggers, but the designers did a great job with what they had, except for that one fight with Gunther where you *had* to get captured to progress the story. The fact that you could save Paul (and walk out the front door) and the game would take into account Paul being alive instead of dead in many places later on was cool.

Re:Yep

[Sycraft-fu]

Thing is to save Paul, all you had to do was stand by him. Just trigger the event and stand there. You get blasted and the game continues, Paul is alive. The idea is you went down fighting with him, you both survive. The idea isn't that you actually win the fight. They never counted on that as far as I can tell.

Re:Yep

[Fallingcow]

I may be imagining things, but I seem to recall him saying thanks, and that he'd catch up with you later, after you knock out the first wave of attackers (the ones that charge the door) but before you engage the ones that are waiting in the lobby.

But, I may be thinking of some other part. Guess it's time for my bi-annual Deus Ex playthrough again...

Re:Yep

[kat_skan]

Shame they didn't account for it. Escaping the ambush and having the next mission be to break into UNATCO HQ to retrieve whatever it was Daedalus wanted from Paul would have been interesting.

Re:Yep

[Das Modell]

Gunther pissed me off to no end. I spent a lot of time fighting him only to eventually read from a walkthrough that I can't win. Every time I died I immediately quickloaded so I didn't realize that I'm supposed to let myself die. Really embarrasing game design.

Re:Yep

[Anonymous Coward]

The Gunther scene was hours of my time wasted too.

I sneaked around through the vents, killed everything in sight except him by stealth, and still had massive damage potential left. I let him have it all, obviously to no effect, but I did manage to knock him down the stairs and sneak past him to what I thought would be escape and freedom. Instead the top to of the station has impassible barriers all about. There is no where to go, and nothing to do but die.

2 things not on the list.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fast main menu load times. HL2 based games are serious offenders here.

Allow fast alt tabbing. Basically every PC game needs to function like World of Warcraft in "maximized windowed mode" I simply can't stand games that hitch and make your PC nearly freeze for quickly changing to another task while you are playing. LET ME READ THE WEB WHILE YOUR GAME LOADS!

Re:2 things not on the list.

[mdarksbane]

Problem is that the game itself takes a performance hit when you do that.

A lot of games are running in a special full screen mode and at an increased process priority - this gives the game a larger than normal portion of your CPU time, increasing your frame rate. Running it in windowed mode makes it behave a little more like a normal app, making your web browsing and switching faster but slowing your frame rate.

Re:2 things not on the list.

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no friggin' clue what the hell you are talking about. Priority is not dictated by whether the program is full screen or not. Stop pulling crap out of your ass.

Re:2 things not on the list.

[Blakey Rat]

What does the amount of screen space taken have to do with the process priority?

(The correct answer is: it doesn't. World of Warcraft and Civilization 4, to name only two examples, run at the exact same framerate in windowed mode as they do full-screen.)

Re:2 things not on the list.

[mdarksbane]

I said AND at a increased priority. If you are running in full screen, developers often assume you care more about game performance than you do about the performance of your system in general. So they will SEPARATELY set the process at a higher priority. This is obviously a per-game setting that the developer can choose to do or not. It has nothing to do with "full screen mode" specifically, but is often toggled along with fullscreen.

And yes, it can run faster when you go to full screen depending on what the current bottleneck is, as the system is no longer compositing the game into a window or redrawing the whole rest of your desktop. Moreover, when running in fullscreen "game mode" the game can change the resolution of the full screen to something that will run faster. If it has to switch resolution when you alt tab out, that will slow donw the switch as well.

So no, I'm not talking out of my ass - I actually AM a game developer, and our program does precisely these things.

Blank screen?

[tepples]

I can't stand not being able to bypass the logos at startup Would you rather have a blank screen while the game loads from optical disc? That's what the logos are partly designed to cover up.

Re:Blank screen?

[blighter]

Not always.

Crackdown, for example, has a series of unskippable logos when you put the disc in. At the end of those you get to "press start" and then you get the loading screen.

Thank god for pic in pic so I can watch tv and still see when the game is finished with its unskippable logos and has finally actually loaded.

Re:Blank screen?

[Sockatume]

I believe that the unskippable logos are a requirement of the licences for the Dolby Digital SDK and whathaveyou. The logo has to be on screen for a mimimum amount of time at every boot, just as it has to be printed at a certain size of the game box and in the manual.

Re:Blank screen?

[magus_melchior]

Ever play a recent EA game for PC? There's an full-screen splash at startup complete with their slogan that, like zombies, don't go away with a click or keypress (I suppose you could force-quit it if you're really fast). Like the FBI warning screen on DVDs, only more annoying.

NetHack

[tepples]

I would consider the Holy Grail to be a game with a storyline, in which you cannot use information gained in a previous game, in a new one, nor retain useful information past a reload. NetHack: Levels are random. Saving is automatic. Death is permanent.

Re:NetHack

[Solra Bizna]

You kill the master lich! Welcome to experience level 39.
You fall into a pit! You land on a set of sharp iron spikes.
The spikes were poisoned!
You die...
Would you like your possessions identified? (ynq)

My average lifespan in that game is still only level 10, and I've been playing since before I could read...

-:sigma.SB

Re:NetHack

[Anonymous Coward]

Man I suck at that game..

I'm sure it's great, but the curve kicks me butt

A few links on gaming usability and accessibility

[hansamurai]

Here's a great article and "game" that I found a while back. The author calls it the world's most inaccessible game where each level breaks a cardinal sin of game design. The designer them goes on to describe how it's broken and how to avoid and fix it in the future. I thought it was a great idea and it applies here.

The site I write for also deals directly with usability and accessibility in video games. I think these aspects of gameplay are often overlooked for various reasons and things like unskippable cutscenes and unskippable story sequences (not necessarily cutscenes but just long drawn out blobs of text - see my First Hour Okami review next Monday) are just plain foolish and obnoxious to the player!

The KoTOR Scenario

[GMFTatsujin]

I'd add a major rule, based on my experience with Knights of the Old Republic. After watching my character whip ass in lightsaber duels with poise and confidence, he was suddenly a complete klutz at a particular challenge.

The challenge was the podrace. My character has the reflexes of a trained Jedi; I do not. Yet *I* had to drive the pod with my pitiful skills. My character's 18 DEX was nowhere to be seen.

So the new rule is:

In a game where the action is judged by statistics based on the character's abilities, such as a role playing game, never add an arcade element that depends on the player's abilities. Or more generally and colloquially stated: remember who is in the driver's seat for a particular style of gameplay.

Re:The KoTOR Scenario

[rtechie]

The challenge was the podrace. It's a minigame. A non-required minigame like the space battle minigame. Such minigames are a staple of RPGs and it would defeat the purpose if you could "tune" your character to beat the minigames since beating the minigames can give your character an edge in the game.

For example, in Bioshock there is a minigame that involves hacking turrets, cameras, vending machines, etc. As your character acquires upgrades the hacking becomes far easier to the point where it's basically automatic. This quickly makes the preferred way of dealing with enemies to hack turrets. On Medium this makes the game frightfully easy (on Hard the health of the bots and turrets are reduced when hacked, making them relatively fragile).

game vs. real life

[tepples]

It's a game not real life. Of Second Life, Habbo Hotel, World of Warcraft, The Sims, Animal Crossing, and Harvest Moon, which are games and which are not?

Article is a little flat

[grumbel]

While many points in the article are valid, it fails to discuss that some of their "solutions" have severe negative consequences, which can do far more damage then the original problem:

1) Auto-Save: In Halo this works because you have clear cuts between the levels, so when you mess up the checkpoint you can resume at the start of the level. Other games don't have such clear cuts, so you really don't mess up a users game-state without asking first. Another solution would be to have special auto-save slots beside user created ones or just saving to a new one instead overwriting an existing one. But the good solution depends heavily on the game in question and with a lot of non-linear ones, just letting the user do the saving is still the best, a little auto-saving as backup when the game crashes or such can however always be useful.

2) Kind of a non-issue, if a user doesn't know where the start button is he likely will have huge problems in the game, so just forcing him to look at the controller right at the start doesn't really sound like a bad idea.

3) Remappable controls are nice, but not without its dangers, since in quite a few games you might end up with custom configurations that just don't work for the game and makes certain special moves or combos impossible, something that might be impossible for the player to know right at the start, when those combos are only available much later in the game. I would however still allow it, since without it some input devices might be unusable with certain games. On consoles this is generally a much smaller problem then on PC, since on consoles the games tend to be optimized for exactly that controller, while on PC you really can't know what kind of input one might through at the game. The best solution trouble caused by custom config is of course to have a default config that is so good that the user just doesn't see a need to mess with it.

4) Skipable Cutscenes: Good idea, but can easily lead to people skipping cut scenes by accident, thus missing important pieces of story unintentionally. Solution would be to make cut scenes skipable, but making the skipping hard so that it isn't triggered by accident (i.e. use 'start' instead of 'a', press that skip button twice, require the player to use the option menu for skip, etc.), especially on the first play through. Also cutscenes should be visible from outside of the game if possible, quite a few games already feature a menu option that lets them rewatch past cutscenes, but by far not all.

5) Cameras can get annoying, quite true, so getting them right is important. One thing I am wondering: On a TV/movie set walls are often removed to make room for the camera, allowing the camera to be placed in location that are outside of the room itself and would be physically impossible if the room would be real. Games on the other side basically never do this, instead they let the camera collide with the fourth wall. Any reason for this? Or any games that do otherwise (aside from top-down RPGs that leave away the roof)?

6) Not sure I agree with this, having button that do nothing can often feel wrong and as games aren't designed in a vacuum, but always for a special machine with a given controller, I think the extra buttons should be taken into account. Of course one shouldn't change the game all that much for it, but sometimes non important additional functions can be nice (i.e. in Ico you could zoom onto your character with a button, nothing relevant to the game, but a nice additional function). Ability to quick-change weapons or such can also be done with buttons that don't have any real use otherwise.

7) Speaking about closed captions, turning them of is ok, but nothing that important. What I find much more important is to allow mixed languages for captions and speech, some of the few games that do this are Dreamfall and Fahrenheit, which allow you to independently select language for subtitle and speech. Its a little thing, but its great to be able to play a game in a foreign language and

Re:Article is a little flat

[Blakey Rat]

5) Cameras can get annoying, quite true, so getting them right is important. One thing I am wondering: On a TV/movie set walls are often removed to make room for the camera, allowing the camera to be placed in location that are outside of the room itself and would be physically impossible if the room would be real. Games on the other side basically never do this, instead they let the camera collide with the fourth wall. Any reason for this? Or any games that do otherwise (aside from top-down RPGs that leave away the roof)?

The only game I've ever played that did this was Oni by Bungie.

I'd love it if World of Warcraft added this feature, since the camera gets so cramped in smaller rooms (or inside huts, or other indoor areas that quests require) that you can't see anything beside your own character's backside. Even worse if you play a Tauren, who are fricken' huge, or a druid that can shift into bear form (also fricken' hug.) It makes you tempted to play a gnome just to avoid the camera issues.

Re:Article is a little flat

[ezweave]

Checkpoints, even in Halo 3 (especially on a few parts) are more frustrating than saves. "Hey I just beat ten guys and the last two keep clobbering me..." So instead of being able to save after you kill the first ten, you have to keep doing it all again. Checkpoints are a way of teasing your users. They should be auto-saves! Equally frustrating in Halo 3, is that the "save" feature, just keeps track of the last checkpoint. So hitting "exit and save" doesn't actually save your current progress.

Re:Article is a little flat

[chrisvdp74656]

I'd love it if World of Warcraft added this feature, since the camera gets so cramped in smaller rooms (or inside huts, or other indoor areas that quests require) that you can't see anything beside your own character's backside. Even worse if you play a Tauren, who are fricken' huge, or a druid that can shift into bear form (also fricken' hug.) It makes you tempted to play a gnome just to avoid the camera issues.

I used to loathe certain instance runs (SFK & SM, I'm looking at you) for exactly that reason as a Tauren, and I usually wound up having to switch to first person camera and make use of target's target interface mods. Then I rolled a blood elf and whoa, I can see!

An FOV command would be nice tho, so even if you are in a cramped instance you can crank it up to 150ish and still see.

Re:Article is a little flat

[grumbel]

The problem with a completly free save system is that you end up in quick-save hell where you keep saving after each and every tiny obstacle instead of focusing on the game. In many sandbox games that can be a good thing, since it allows you to easily test out different tactics and stuff to see how they turn out, which after all is half the fun in a sandbox game, but in a quick linear action game it would likely do more damage then good.

I think a good compromise would be to only allow free saves when you are clear of enemies or behind cover, its kind of the way it worked in Operation Flashpoint (XBox). It wasn't directly enforced by the game, but due to its one-hit-kills mechanics you would think twice before just saving at a random spot, since a enemy behind you could kill you in an instant, rendering your save useless, since you only had one per mission. So you ended up always going behind cover and laying down before entering the save. In Outcast (PC) it was enforced, you could save freely, but before being able to do so, you had to do a special in-game action, which took a few seconds, so it couldn't be performed while under enemy fire.

Re:Article is a little flat

[coolGuyZak]

A pet peeve I have about games, particularly those on the Wii: If you have the resources to allow for a variable "N" saves, don't limit me to 3 or 4!

Re:Article is a little flat

[hidannik]

BioShock FTW!

Dying in BioShock results not in a reload but a re-spawn. You get half your HP back and a minimum amount of MP, and you get to keep your inventory/weapons. And you get respawned at the nearest revival booth, which could be some distance from the fight you were in.

This solves both the two-tough-guys-out-of-ten problem and quick-save hell. And it's way more immersive.

It's not a completely free ride though. There are disadvantages, they're just different from the normal checkpoint/quicksave/save-anywhere methods. For instance, while you get to keep your weapons, you don't get any more ammo for them; if you were low on ammo when killed, you still are. Also, damaged enemies can use the time it takes you to get back to the battle area to find a med station and heal themselves.

Hans

Because loading is inherently unskippable

[tepples]

Waiting through a cutscene (or worse, a startup logo) that I've seen a dozen times already is exceedingly frustrating and means I buy fewer games. Then play NES. Games on PlayStation and newer platforms are shipped on optical discs, and these take time to load. The startup logo and in-game cut scene are there to cover up the loading. Would you rather look at a blank screen while the game loads? Or would you prefer to play the game without textures?

Re:Because loading is inherently unskippable

[DudemanX]

Or you know we could play games on these things called Pee Cees. In which case all it has to do is load the game menu from my 10000 RPM hard drive and should only take about a second or two. EA disagrees with my immediate need to find a server and start capturing silos though and needs to show me 30 seconds of commercials every time I run BF2142.

Even on consoles though it shouldn't take more than a few seconds just to load a game menu and maybe a background image. The real data and texture loading should be done when you actually get around to loading the first map.

Re:Because loading is inherently unskippable

[tepples]

Or you know we could play games on these things called Pee Cees. I have one PC and three friends over. How many of us can play at once?

In which case all it has to do is load the game menu from my 10000 RPM hard drive and should only take about a second or two. No, you have to reinstall the game because you took it off your 10000 RPM hard drive to make room for other games that each have 8 GB install footprints.

Even on consoles though it shouldn't take more than a few seconds just to load a game menu and maybe a background image. And reviewers will criticize the game for having menus that look spartan and not in a Halo way.

Re:Because loading is inherently unskippable

[KDR_11k]

Yeah, because GBA and DS games don't have unskippable logos...

ONCE! and again on demand

[tgibbs]

I'm willing to be compelled to watch the logos, cut scenes, etc...ONCE.
What I do object to is having to watch them over...and over...and over. After I've seen them once, I should be allowed to skip them.

However, there is a reciprocal issue. I want to be able to see any cut scene again if I want to.

I can't think how many times this has happened:

I've finally reached a major cutscene, the reward for the last two hours of play, that finally explains critical plot points.
And the phone rings.
So I hit "start" to pause the game, which works everywhere else in the game.
But because it's a cut scene, it thinks that I want to skip instead of pause.
So now I've missed the cut scene, and the only choices the game offers are to start at the beginning of the next level (missing the cutscene)...or go back to my last save and replay part of the level that I JUST BEAT, just to see the cutscene.

Or sometimes, somebody comes in and interrupts me while the cutscene is running, and there is no way to pause it. And then when I want to go back and watch it without interruption, I find that I can't.

The "skip cutscene" button should NEVER be the same as the button you use to pause the game--and that button should pause the cutscene, just like it pauses at any other point in the game. And if you do somehow miss the cut scene, there should be a mechanism for seeing it again without having to replay the entire level.

Re:ONCE! and again on demand

[Lord Bitman]

Why force it once? Do you like sitting through cutscenes just because the game isn't psychic, doesn't realize you've already seen it on another computer or previous install?

Re:ONCE! and again on demand

[fractoid]

I think the 'force-once' crowd are probably thinking of games that use 'action' for 'skip cutscene' (maybe 'a' is both 'fire' and 'select', and in cutscene mode 'select' skips). Nothing more annoying than finally finishing a segment of gameplay, and then accidentally skipping the cutscene. Well, nothing apart from having to watch a cutscene a million times because you can't skip it...

On a PC, you can have, say, ESC skip the cutscene, and unless it's regularly used in the game, you can skip if you want without risking missing something by skipping accidentally.

Unusable controller mappings

[tepples]

I really hate when they don't let you remap the controls. But if you've remapped the controls to the point where they are unusable, how would you get back into the menu to make them usable again? And what can player 1 do while player 2 is piddling around on the controller mapping screen?

Re:Unusable controller mappings

[tixxit]

And what can player 1 do while player 2 is piddling around on the controller mapping screen?
Hit player 2 on the back of the head for taking so long.

But if you've remapped the controls to the point where they are unusable, how would you get back into the menu to make them usable again?
Easy, don't let them remap the start button and have the remapped controls be the gameplay controls, not the menu navigation controls.

Re:Unusable controller mappings

[Blakey Rat]

But if you've remapped the controls to the point where they are unusable, how would you get back into the menu to make them usable again?

Have you ever encountered a game where re-mapping the IN-GAME controls also remaps the MENU controls? Seriously?

And what can player 1 do while player 2 is piddling around on the controller mapping screen?

Over the net, you can leave the lobby and join another game. In real life, you can smack him. In either case, you can yell, "hurry the hell up!"

Re:Unusable controller mappings

[tepples]

Have you ever encountered a game where re-mapping the IN-GAME controls also remaps the MENU controls? I have, several times, on the PC. Unlike console controllers, PC game controllers do not have a consistent mapping from position on the controller to button ID number, so games have to make everything remappable. StepMania for PC is intended to be navigated entirely with a dance pad if the player chooses. Pressing left on the dance pad moves to the previous song; pressing right on the dance pad moves to the next song; pressing Start on the dance pad starts the game. This game allows two keys per function, so you can still leave the keyboard mapped, but it's possible for the player to completely fsck up the bindings to the point where he has to go into the INI file and delete the keyboard bindings, and even if not, people using a set-top PC don't want to have to plug in a USB keyboard all the time to troubleshoot things.

Re:Unusable controller mappings

[CastrTroy]

what can player 1 do while player 2 is piddling around on the controller mapping screen?

Well, the Wii allows things to be save inside the controller. So if you go to a friends house to play a game, you can bring your wiimote, and your saved controller configuration with you. Also, you only need to mess around with the controls the first time, after that it's saved, so no more messing around. If it's your first time playing the game, and you're just at a party or something then just use the default controls. But for a game that you are going to be playing day after day for weeks, it makes sense that you should be able to modify the controls.

Re:Unusable controller mappings

[tepples]

Well, the Wii allows things to be save inside the controller. The Wii also has a lockout chip. Do you have a solution that applies to independent game developers, who must develop for a platform without a lockout chip? As I understand it, these platforms are Mac OS X on Mac mini and Windows on a mini-ITX PC.

Re:Unusable controller mappings

[GeneJoker]

If the menu is up, use one, unchangeable keyset. You must in some way be able to access this keyset, even if it is just as some kind of mystery blackbox, because otherwise you can't physically write for the game.

1) Assuming it is a mystery blackbox:

From the menu, give the option to remap the keys, through a capture system. "Select an action" >Jump "What do you want to be jump?" >presses a button "jump is now bound to whatever you just pressed".

If the gameplay is on, run each input through the blackbox and the custom set built up by the player. If the game result matches, perform it. If the results differ, use the custom result, /unless running it through the blackbox would have accessed the menu structure/, in which case use the blackbox result. In this way, even if some idiot rebinds "start", the game will simply ignore it and open the menu anyway. The only problem is, for your game this removes the number of remappable buttons for gameplay by one.

Boohoo. They'll like this a LOT better than no customisation at all.

This failsafe can be expanded to any function you do not want remapped, but the only important one is the menu access button, as all the others can be undone by the player himself.

2) Assuming you have full access to the input style/format/etc: just build a custom set, and again, do not allow for the chosen menu access button to be unbound. Alternatively, allow it to be unbound, but force the player to choose a new one before continuing.

NOW LOADING

[tepples]

I definitely don't think 10 is a big deal unless jumping out of the game engine is entirely disruptive. It is, especially on a system with a slow optical disc drive as the primary storage medium, where the RAM cannot hold both the assets for the menu and the assets for the game engine.

i think the best cutscene option would be this...

[PJ1216]

1) allow cutscenes to be paused. i hate it when the phone rings in the middle of one and i can't pause it. who knows how many phone calls from hot women i may have missed when i chose to watch the cutscene instead =P
2) allow cutscene skipping BUT don't make it so easy to skip. i hate when i accidentally hit a button and skip a cutscene and all of the sudden i'm in a situation that leaves me with a "wtf?" expression on my face. i think it was one of the xenosaga movies, i mean games, that when you paused the cutscene a little note at the top said "press x to skip" or something of that nature.

i know many people want to be able to skip it very quickly, but you don't want to punish the ones the game was targeted at (those who want the story line). if you want, you could go as far as making it an in-game option to allow quick-skipping or forcing the pause plus an extra button to skip. I think this would satisfy everybody. everybody could set it to what they want.

on a different note, i think saving should be allowed at *any* point in the game. sometimes you just *have* to stop playing but hate it cause you'll lose like an hour's worth of work just because you haven't reached a savepoint yet.

YES

[Fallingcow]

Step 1 to properly enjoying HL2 is to turn of that goddamned scene that loads behind the menu.

Re:YES

[Some_Llama]

"Step 1 to properly enjoying HL2 is to turn of that goddamned scene that loads behind the menu."

this is one of the most frustrating things to me, lately newer games want to run 5-6 different movies files (EA is REALLY bad with this) which amount to basically ads, EVERY TIME i start the game... i end up just deleting the files so they don't run.

Backwards like O vs. X?

[tepples]

#1 - save games automatically - good point. do it. But don't overwrite their last save. Create a new one. And then do what once the player has exhausted the space on the memory cards? Offer to rent the player more space to save games on the Internet?

Nothings more annoying than games with non-standard or backwards 'menu navigation'. Backwards like O vs. X in PlayStation games from different regions, or the placement of A and B buttons on Xbox vs. DS? And what happens when the player has remapped the buttons such that the menus become useless?

And for those new 'games for windows' that apparently have to support xbox controllers, if i don't have an xbox controller don't effing show me what my control layout looks like on one. Then what graphic is the game expected to use to represent your controller? Most players don't know where "Button 0" through "Button 15" are. Or should we expect players to use a digital camera to produce a photo of their controller?

Re:Backwards like O vs. X?

[vux984]

And then do what once the player has exhausted the space on the memory cards? Offer to rent the player more space to save games on the Internet?

On systems with only "memory cards" sure the behaviour should take that into account, and having rolling autosaves separate from explicit player saves or something.

Backwards like O vs. X in PlayStation games from different regions, or the placement of A and B buttons on Xbox vs. DS?

Backwards like every game lets you push start or 'A' to start, except one which requires you to push 'B' or select to start. I wasn't actually aware O and X are swapped on PS regions... that seems a little demeneted too. As for A/B on the DS vs Xbox, I don't really have an issue with that.

And what happens when the player has remapped the buttons such that the menus become useless?

Typically, you map game functions to buttons, so "fire" maps to "a" instead of "x". It would be moronic to remap button 'a' to button 'x'. Thus, the menus should continue to work just fine, because changing what button causes 'fire' in the game has no impact on the menu.

Then what graphic is the game expected to use to represent your controller? Most players don't know where "Button 0" through "Button 15" are. Or should we expect players to use a digital camera to produce a photo of their controller?

The controls setup, when you are using a keyboard/mouse usually just shows you the functions, grouped by category and the key(s)/mouse buttons you have mapped to them. No image is necessary. If I'm playing with a 360 controller, sure, show me a 360 controller if you want to make it easier, and its part of the 'games for windows' logo program that you support it, but if im not, then don't.

The issue with lost planet was that when a new action was required it would prompt me in game with stuff like "Push to "

Huh?! Why isn't it just telling me to press the 'V' key, which is what the function it wants me to use is actually mapped to? Or at the very least, why isn't it telling me the function name like Push the "Use Object" button. No, its showing me what the function is mapped to on a controller I'm not using. So I have to pause the effing game, and go look at the xbox controller setup to figure out what function that button is mapped to, and then lookup what keyboard key that function is mapped to in order to figure out what to push.

Re:Backwards like O vs. X?

[vux984]

The issue with lost planet was that when a new action was required it would prompt me in game with stuff like "Push to "

supposed to be:

"push {picture of xbox 'z' button} to {perform action}"

Good Article. I'd like to see one per genre

[tieTYT]

I like the idea of this article. I think it would be a good idea to make more that are specific to genres. I'm a hardcore fighting game player and here is a list of things that are really annoying when not followed:

#1 If you want your game to have longevity, make sure you get the best players to spend a lot of time beta testing it. Soul Calibur 3 is a good example of what goes wrong when you don't have good players test your game. There is a character in that game with a move that can instantaneously reverse almost all attacks without risk and leads to a followup that does >50% damage. Most other characters can do a max of 25% after doing a RISKY juggle. Any mediocre player would notice this as a problem immediately. Soul Calibur 3 was popular for about 4 months and then totally died. Soul Calibur 2, which did not have any obvious problems like this, was popular for over 2 years.

#2 Have a great practice mode for the console version. The Soul Calibur 2 practice mode is seriously lacking and there are tons of basics that require another person to help you test. It should be possible to do every basic system feature (rolling, 'tech rolling', laying on the ground and getting up as soon as possible, etc.) without needing a friend to come over. The Japanese console version of Tekken 5: DR doesn't even have a practice mode. When the normal version of Tekken 5 does, this looks like a step backwards and pisses off the hardcore gamers.

#3 Update your game to fix problems. Virtua Fighter 4, the most popular fighting game of its time in Japan, updated its game more than once and fixed a lot of balance problems each time. In the original Tekken 4, the biggest balance issue was a single attack by a character named Jin. Tekken 4 was updated at least 3 times and this attack's properties were never modified. This pissed off the fanbase each time. Tekken 4 is currently ridiculed as one of the worst in the series.

Subtitles for deaf people vs. for foreigners

[tepples]

I don't think 12 functions is too much to expect someone to know for a complicated game. I think the gist is that games should be less complicated, at least through the early levels. Using features on the other buttons should be an option, not a requirement. For instance, I've seen a video on YouTube of someone beating Super Mario Bros. without pressing the B button (except for one "press B to continue" screen).

He's spot on about allowing controller remapping, subtitles for deaf people or kids whose parents make them turn the volume off He doesn't mention deaf people or the Deaf community. Instead, he mentions speakers of a different language. Sometimes, excluding non-native speakers is intentional, as many video games are based on intellectual resources originally developed for books, movies, TV series, or other video games. These resources are often licensed with exclusive territorial limitations on grounds that a particular license broker knows a given market better. If a game can be run in any region, then the game can be imported into markets where you lack a copyright license for the resources used by the game. Besides, it's expensive to translate a game's text into the 23 languages of the European Union, especially for text-heavy RPGs on handhelds. It's even worse for some E-rated games, where you can't expect the player to have learned how to read even his or her native language.

Also, every single action game that doesn't allow you to change the camera angle can fuck right off Should games designed for a first-person view be required to allow for out-of-body experiences? And do games where all the action takes place in a plane, like New Super Mario Bros., need to have camera controls?

Re:Subtitles for deaf people vs. for foreigners

[JoshJ]

Games where all the action takes place in a plane such as Mario Bros don't really have a "camera" to speak of that can get stuck behind walls, behind your character, obscuring the view of things, etc. 2d games just don't have camera problems. In first person games, your vision moves the camera- you move and look around. Now, games in first person view which artificially limit your field of view (e.g. you can't look straight up to see what's with the ledge above you) are a problem. Games in third person that have a fixed camera in each area and don't let you either look around in first person or adjust the actual gameplay camera are the problem i was specifically thinking of. Think Metal Gear Solid without the ability to drop into first person to look around.

Re:Subtitles for deaf people vs. for foreigners

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of non native English speakers would be satisfied with subtitles in English, it helps a lot believe me.

Following spoken English can be hard sometimes and if you then can get it as text that's awesome.

Re:Subtitles for deaf people vs. for foreigners

[ivan256]

I think the gist is that games should be less complicated, at least through the early levels. Using features on the other buttons should be an option, not a requirement. For instance, I've seen a video on YouTube of someone beating Super Mario Bros. without pressing the B button (except for one "press B to continue" screen).

This wouldn't be a necessary requirement if we didn't have an industry obsession with implementing a new game engine for every game. It didn't used to be that way. we used to get 12-15 adventure games/RPGs/etc on a single engine all with the same controls. It was OK if the controls were complex, because you knew what they did from the last game you played.

Now, we have a situation that is like learning to read every time you pick up a book. It's insane. There is no reason we can't generate more content with the same gameplay and still produce fun, engaging titles. Sometimes the only whiz-bang new feature a new game needs is a new plot/set of characters/etc.

Alas, games are reviewed based on how perky the breasts are in the screenshot, and "more of the same" is treated as a negative. And "additional content" is considered an afterthought, and something to be sold on the cheap in small doses.

Don't kill my lame but necessary supporting cast

[bevoblake]

I hate, hate, hate game scenarios where you have to protect (or maybe just want to protect) a supporting character who dies absurdly easily. While I understand that this can occasionally make for interesting gameplay, devs often don't take into account the increasing difficulty levels on games. Watching my NPCs blown to pieces is frustrating, especially when my character is much stronger than anything else on the screen.

Limitation of DirectX

[tepples]

Allow fast alt tabbing. DirectX graphics itself has a limitation that you have to reload all of VRAM, including all textures, whenever you switch display modes. So fast task switching would require either playing the game on a separate machine from the PC or playing a simplistic 2D game.

Re:Limitation of DirectX

[fractoid]

Actually, if you don't set your D3D device's cooperative level to 'exclusive' then your D3D app has no problems coexisting with other windows. Of course, then it can't change the display mode or colour depth, but does anyone not run 32 bit colour and native LCD resolution these days?

Running at 'normal' cooperative level doesn't seem to have a noticeable performance hit these days and allows you to quickly tab back and forth. WoW's 'Full screen windowed' mode does this, and it's a godsend if you're tabbing out for IM conversations, thottbot, /. etc.

If the cutscene can't be skipped, I will not play

[Lord Bitman]

I don't care how important you think it is to the storyline. I love the storyline. I think it's grand and epic and really the best thing about your game.
  But I memorized it 30 plays ago. You've turned a fun game into a tedious experience because You didn't think anyone would like your game enough to re-install it on a new system. Or maybe you don't even bother memorizing that I've watched it before. Or maybe you think my "new character" is played by a new person, so he needs to see it too. Or maybe you just never thought your game could possibly crash right after a 40-minute character creation process and 20 minute introduction, when the game finally does its actual loading, or saving for that matter.

Your game looks good. My friends tell me it's good. I haven't played it, though. I tried to, but I am not going to sit through that crap again. Maybe your cutscenes are secretly skippable, but if they don't skip by pressing Escape, Spacebar, or Enter, your UI is probably so bad in-game that I would hate it anyway, right?

hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I categorically disagree that this is worth talking about.

Annoyance

[mqduck]

I agree with the part about cut scenes, but mainly for a different reason. There are many games where one might want to go back and reply a certain part to do it better and when there's a cut scene in the middle, it can be extremely annoying. They can also be annoying if one is playing the game for a second (or third, etc.) time.

Make the "Groundhog Day Effect" Illegal

[Speare]

I call this one the "Groundhog Day Effect."

I hate it when a game is clearly designed in such a way that the ONLY way you can learn how to solve a puzzle or beat a boss is to be killed (GAME OVER) and try again from the last save. I don't mind dying from my own stupidity, but the game should be solvable in theory without ever having to back up to the previous save point. There are quite a few games where there was no information available about the solution until after you'd committed the fatal mistake and hit a point of no-return-except-RESET.

Re:Make the "Groundhog Day Effect" Illegal

[JoshJ]

I agree with this, in theory. Furthermore, this should be applicable to the entire game. It should be possible to figure out the entire game without having to resort to "process of elimination" of "Okay, try weapon one... Now try weapon two... etc". The problem is, if you expend lots of ammo on various weapons or whatever trying to GET the solution, you may as well be better off resetting anyway. It's sort of a catch-22 as there's really not much of a way to do this without making it too easy/obvious to figure out (like all the old SNES style games with giant flashing "shoot me" spots on the bosses). The important thing IMO is to make it able to be figured out without having to resort to a FAQ or something- everything in the game should be doable without looking it up in a FAQ. None of this "one-time item in a back alley in city X that you permanently miss if you do something else first" bullshit. (Screw you, FFX.) None of this "there are extras all over the world map but you have to know the coordinates to get there, and there's no ingame hints to the coordinate location" nonsense. (Screw off, FFX.) In short, a player should be ABLE to do everything- including every sidequest and getting every item- by the time he's done with the game, and there should be no "point of no return" for anything. What a "point of no return" does is it forces the player to either read FAQs or strategy guides the first time they play the game, or to start over if they want a "master file".

Amen

[jgoemat]

One game that comes to mind is "God of War II". The final scene where you're killing Zeus and you have to do all the random joystick movements and button presses is preceded by a cutscene that you cannot skip. I think the button-pressing is a little arbitrary anyway, but it's not that annoying when spread throughout the game in small pieces and it allows you to still feel like you're a part of the action when your character is doing some heavily scripted and defined things. This particular section was many times harder than any other instance of it in the game, one mistake meant instant death and you were forced to watch that damn cutscene each time you died. I was ready to chuck the game right when I finally got through it, and I was so pissed that I hardly enjoyed the ending cutscene.

Misconception

[jgoemat]

That may be true for some games, but not the ones I remember. Battlefield 2 for instance forces you to sit through several logo movies while it is doing absolutely nothing. You can actually mod the game to take those movies out, but then you can't play online because others don't have the same modded game. The lack of the logo movies sped the game up by the duration of the movies.

The Warped Aesops of Game Over

[tepples]

Here's a great article and "game" that I found a while back. The author calls it the world's most inaccessible game where each level breaks a cardinal sin of game design. The designer them goes on to describe how it's broken and how to avoid and fix it in the future. After the levels dealing with control issues were finished, most of these levels' morals came across as more of a Warped Aesop than anything else:

• Touchy: If the player's missiles can move farther in one turn than the size of an enemy unit, make sure that the missile checks the entire space between the previous location and the current location for collisions.
• Hakuna Matata: Even if you will be selling your game in one country, you should still spend unnecessary money to localize the product to all 23 languages of the European Union. For example, a product by Tanzanians for Tanzanians needs to include languages other than (ki)Swahili.
• Over the Rainbow: I hated Dr. Mario and Puyo Pop.
• Low Budget: Your game will be pirated and run in emulators years after the fact, and you must accept this. Future screens are 4 times bigger in either dimension. (Compare the 256x192 pixel display of the ZX Spectrum to modern 1024x768 pixel displays.) It's better to make sure players can see the pixels than that your graphics look smooth.
• XXXL: I hated fighting games because the characters are too big. (Oh, and this mode forgot to give me the shield on the second and third life.)
• The Bright Side of Life: Your game will be pirated and run in emulators years after the fact, and you must accept this. You must make your game playable even on halfway broken emulators, even if your platform uses palette encryption as a copy prevention method.
• Groovy: I hated Tetripz, and I hated Lockjaw: The Overdose for the same reason. Oh, and I hated Eternal Darkness because I kept losing sanity too often.
• Hear No Evil: 1. Cloaked missiles should not be a puzzle that the player has to solve. Also 2. Even if you can't afford it, you must still license the patents for 3D audio. If your platform doesn't support 3D audio, you must include extra hardware to support 3D audio with your game.
• Smooth Talker: If your platform's CPU is too slow to offer real-time time stretching of speech, you must include extra hardware to support time stretching with your game.

I will use the web site's feedback form to report the URL of this comment to the game's developers. But in fact, I especially liked the "Low Budget" and "Groovy" variations.

Forced-death

[Chris Burke]

He's spot on about allowing controller remapping, subtitles for deaf people or kids whose parents make them turn the volume off, forced-death boss fights (I remember one in Chrono Cross where I used a massive number of potions, curative spells, ethers, etc to survive and continually damaged the boss, ultimately giving up and letting him kill me just to see if I was "supposed" to lose it- and promptly reset so I could redo it without losing all the items.)

The way this should be done, if you feel you must, is how it was done in Final Fantasy IV (USA II). Cecil, the main character, was on the path to becoming a Paladin. As the last part of the challenge, you face off against Cecil's former self as a Dark Knight, who is extremely strong. The in-game message tells you something along the lines of violence not being the way, and you're supposed to let the Dark Knight beat you, though of course this particular lesson is forgotten as soon as you become a paladin and proceed to use violence to solve all future problems. The catch, though, is that if you decide you want cleanse your soul by kicking your evil self's butt it is actually possible to do so. Which is good, not just because it gives you multiple ways of getting through and not having a ridiculous 'forced' loss, but it also keeps the fundamental morality of the FF world intact: Sure, you can solve some problems without using violence, but all problems are solvable through violence if only you use enough of it. :)

Logos cover loading

[tepples]

I'm willing to be compelled to watch the logos, cut scenes, etc...ONCE. What I do object to is having to watch them over...and over...and over. If you don't want to watch the logos repeatedly, then leave the game turned on. What else is the product supposed to put on the screen while it loads resources from the optical disc?

Re:Logos cover loading

[iainl]

Something that isn't being streamed with 90% of the optical disc's bandwidth, would be a good idea. A lot of those unskippable logos aren't really covering anything.

Re:Logos cover loading

[Kalriath]

How many games (apart from on consoles) actually use optical disks for resources? I've actually seen one or two games where the cutscenes only occur when the optical disk is in the drive - and that's because the cutscene is on it. Take out the disk, no cutscene. On consoles, most of the loading occurs either before or after cutscenes (case in point, Halo3 - which sits you at a loading screen for a cutscene, followed by a loading screen for the level)

Light VS Dark

[phorm]

That wasn't so much an issue to me as the huge lack of subtlety between going with the "light" or "dark" side of the force. A little more character-depth would have been nice, as well as more flex in the storyline depending on your alignments.

Camera limitations due to CPU limitations

[tepples]

Now, games in first person view which artificially limit your field of view (e.g. you can't look straight up to see what's with the ledge above you) are a problem. If you're referring to the "2.5D" engine in Doom, Heretic, Hexen, and Duke Nukem 3D, that was an engineering compromise. The target audience for the game didn't have the money to buy what was then considered a high-end graphics workstation from SGI in order to get true 3D graphics, and the rendering tricks from Descent weren't invented yet. Even nowadays, hardware limitations force engineering compromises, especially on handhelds. For example, there's a choice between shipping a $30 game for the target audience that already owns a GBA or DS or shipping a $240 PSP plus memory card plus game.

Games in third person that have a fixed camera in each area and don't let you either look around in first person or adjust the actual gameplay camera are the problem i was specifically thinking of. Sometimes it isn't an engineering compromise but a simplicity compromise. If you want to simplify the design down to four directions and a fire button so that you can attract casual players, then what controls the camera?

Re:Camera limitations due to CPU limitations

[JoshJ]

If you're referring to the "2.5D" engine in Doom, Heretic, Hexen, and Duke Nukem 3D, that was an engineering compromise.

I'm referring to games as recent as Metroid Prime 3, which doesn't really let you look up all the way, which has been absolutely irritating in a couple spots so far (note: I'm not finished with the game so no spoilers please!) with areas that you can see but not lock on to with the scanner because you can't go up all the way.

Sometimes it isn't an engineering compromise but a simplicity compromise. If you want to simplify the design down to four directions and a fire button so that you can attract casual players, then what controls the camera?

Allowing for the second joystick to move the camera around doesn't make the game any more "complicated". A casual player that doesn't know about it will simply ignore it, and the skilled players will use it to their advantage. If you're taking out a set of controls that is fairly common among third person view games just to "attract casual players", then you deserve to lose your job for it, because that's a shitty decision- adding it won't scare away any casual players and it will make any parts of the game with bad camera angles better for the skilled players.

Re:Camera limitations due to CPU limitations

[JoshJ]

Before someone bites off my face, I should clarify that obviously technological limitations change things. I'm referring to modern gaming, not the days of yore where you HAD to fake 3d and allowing people to look around completely "freely" would completely shatter any illusion of a coherent game world. Ditto for budget constraints in flash games (which is what some people use the term "casual gaming" to refer to)- but in the world of mainstream (read: console games (and quality PC games) that aren't Britney and Barbie or movie tie-ins not named Goldeneye) gaming, you have to give the option for the skilled players to have full control over their character and the camera (if applicable).

Remapping MenuEnter and MenuBack

[tepples]

wasn't actually aware O and X are swapped on PS regions... that seems a little demeneted too. X is always on the bottom, and O is always on the right. In PlayStation games in Latin locales, X is enter and O is back, like on Xbox where A is on the bottom. But in PlayStation games in logographic or block-syllabic locales, O is enter and X is back, like on DS where A is on the right.

Typically, you map game functions to buttons, so "fire" maps to "a" instead of "x". It would be moronic to remap button 'a' to button 'x'. I was talking about mapping the MenuLeft, MenuRight, MenuUp, MenuDown, MenuOpen, MenuEnter, and MenuBack commands. If the player screws up mapping those commands to buttons, he can't use the menus. Or should those always be mapped to left arrow, right arrow, up arrow, down arrow, tab, enter, and escape, even if the player is using a joystick or is using a "different" keyboard setup?

Re:Remapping MenuEnter and MenuBack

[Qzukk]

I was talking about mapping the MenuLeft, MenuRight, MenuUp, MenuDown, MenuOpen, MenuEnter, and MenuBack commands. If the player screws up mapping those commands to buttons

I've only seen two ways to remap controls in games: Select one of N pre-made maps, or "press the key/button/footpedal to map to Foo". Either of which makes it really, really hard to map MenuRight to something the user cannot push.

Re:Remapping MenuEnter and MenuBack

[tepples]

Select one of N pre-made maps, or "press the key/button/footpedal to map to Foo". Either of which makes it really, really hard to map MenuRight to something the user cannot push. Unless the user forgets between one play and the next where the menu keys were mapped, or the user plugs in a different brand of controller that has a different number and arrangement of controls.

But which button is Start?

[tepples]

Easy, don't let them remap the start button On a PC running Windows, Mac OS X, or GNU/Linux, how do I know which joypad button is labeled "Start"? On one USB game controller I use, it's button 9; on another, it's button 8.

and have the remapped controls be the gameplay controls, not the menu navigation controls. So if a player is using a controller where the analog thumbstick is mapped to the main axes and the D-pad is mapped to the point-of-view hat, should I force the player to use the analog thumbstick to navigate the menus?

Re:But which button is Start?

[CastrTroy]

So if a player is using a controller where the analog thumbstick is mapped to the main axes and the D-pad is mapped to the point-of-view hat, should I force the player to use the analog thumbstick to navigate the menus?

Simple. I have never seen a menu system where you needed more than 2 axes, and if anybody designed such a menu system, they should be shot. So allow the user to control the menu system with any set of axes. If they want to use the rudder and throttle to move through the menus, then let them, it's not going to hurt anything.

Re:But which button is Start?

[KDR_11k]

Who said PC? He was talking about the console version. PCs have something called a mouse that's very good for menu navigation and should be allowed in addition to whatever fancy gamepad control the game has.

So if a player is using a controller where the analog thumbstick is mapped to the main axes and the D-pad is mapped to the point-of-view hat, should I force the player to use the analog thumbstick to navigate the menus?

You remember that you can map more than one input to a direction? Simply make BOTH the first two axial controls and the POV hat navigate the menu.

Re:But which button is Start?

[tepples]

So allow the user to control the menu system with any set of axes. So how can which form a "set of axes"? Some USB joysticks do not report their hat switches as such but instead as a set of four buttons. And you still haven't answered the other question: how does the PC game know which button on the USB joystick is Start?

Re:But which button is Start?

[tepples]

Who said PC? He was talking about the console version. Set-top video game systems with a lockout chip that are still manufactured: PlayStation 2, Xbox 360, Wii, PLAYSTATION 3. Set-top video game systems without a lockout chip that are still manufactured: set-top PC, Mac mini. Which system should a a new company develop for?

PCs have something called a mouse How well does a mouse work from the couch, or on a converted arcade machine?

You remember that you can map more than one input to a direction? Simply make BOTH the first two axial controls and the POV hat navigate the menu. I have had experiences with several brands of USB game controllers. Many of them do not report a POV hat as a POV hat; instead, they report a POV hat as four independent buttons. And still, which button is "start" and which button is "back", especially after I have unplugged the controller and plugged in a different brand?

Re:But which button is Start?

[Phisbut]

So how can which form a "set of axes"? Some USB joysticks do not report their hat switches as such but instead as a set of four buttons. And you still haven't answered the other question: how does the PC game know which button on the USB joystick is Start?

Top-left corner of your keyboard. It's called "Esc".

Re:But which button is Start?

[tepples]

Top-left corner of your keyboard. It's called "Esc". If I am playing a video game on a set-top PC, I could plug the keyboard into the USB port next to the gamepads. But if I am holding a gamepad, isn't it clumsy to switch controllers to pause the game? But if you're just saying "always bind MenuOpen to Keyboard::Esc and also allow players to bind MenuOpen to another button", that's reasonable, but in a Sega Master System pause-button-on-the-console sort of way.

Re:But which button is Start?

[Phisbut]

If I am playing a video game on a set-top PC, I could plug the keyboard into the USB port next to the gamepads.

If you want to play games on a PC and at the same time refuse to have a keyboard plugged into that same PC, while also remapping your controller which doesn't have any obvious button labeling scheme, then you're shit out of luck buddy. Get a console.

It's like you want to have the milk and the milk money, as well as the cow, the barn and the whole farm.

Re:But which button is Start?

[KDR_11k]

Set-top video game systems with a lockout chip that are still manufactured: PlayStation 2, Xbox 360, Wii, PLAYSTATION 3. Set-top video game systems without a lockout chip that are still manufactured: set-top PC, Mac mini. Which system should a a new company develop for?

What does that have to do with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2?

How well does a mouse work from the couch, or on a converted arcade machine?

Hopefully good enough to allow navigating the operating system.

I have had experiences with several brands of USB game controllers. Many of them do not report a POV hat as a POV hat; instead, they report a POV hat as four independent buttons. And still, which button is "start" and which button is "back", especially after I have unplugged the controller and plugged in a different brand?

Button 1 is OK, button 2 back, that's the standard I've seen with all PC games I played and worked well enough.

Re:But which button is Start?

[tepples]

What does that have to do with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2? Nothing. I am a freelance video game developer, and I don't have access to the boot loader of a non-discontinued set-top gaming platform with a consistent start button because all such platforms have lockout chips, and I don't have a portfolio of prior commercially published games. Therefore, if I want to develop console-style games, I have to do so for a set-top PC.

Button 1 is OK, button 2 back But do most players know which button is 1 and which is 2? Should each PC game come with instructions to get into "Gaming Options" or "Game Controllers" on various versions of the operating system in order to see which button is 1 and which is 2?

Re:But which button is Start?

[KDR_11k]

They're usually numbered, if not the player can just try the face buttons until he finds the right one. If he finds it once he can use it in all games. If that doesn't work he may just have a really sucky gamepqad. Not impossible, I had gamepads that didn't work well with games even back when joysticks and gamepads were common PC inputs.

Would you want to quickload in EVE Online?

[tepples]

Anonymous Coward wrote:

The hell it your point? Some products that the populace sees as "games" are more like a simulation or a virtual place than like "a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other" (Merriam-Webster). Some of these simulations are intended to have long-term consequences for the players, especially products such as EVE Online.

Then start over

[tepples]

And risk getting stuck later because I didn't conserve enough ammo in the earlier fights? Some games intend that you will start over repeatedly. Examples include chess, checkers, tetrominoes, NetHack, and early arcade games. If you don't conserve pawns in the opening of a chess game, and you run out of units in the end game, you only screwed yourself.

Re:Then start over

[Goaway]

Yeeees, and these games are designed to be played as such, and do not have pervasive saving. Your point?

Re:Then start over

[tepples]

Part of my point is that some developers have concentrated too much on epic-scale games and neglected episodic-scale games.

Episodic gaming for the win

[tepples]

There's nothing wrong with crippling "power word reload". You just need to remember that you're doing it when you're designing the game, so that the player won't permanently lose without doing something clearly stupid. And consider designing games where each episode is independent, and playing through an episode once takes an hour or less if you're skilled. Arcade-style games such as Tetris and Tekken meet this criterion. Once you realize the episode is unwinnable, you can start the episode over without losing nearly as much as you'd lose if you started over in a Japanese RPG or a sim game.

Coming in with more life bar

[tepples]

The problem with a hard boss is basically never the hard part, but the easy part which you have to replay again and again just to have access to the hard one, be it pieces of the level or earlier boss phases. But that's the whole point. By replaying the minions and earlier phase, you optimize your performance against them so that eventually you still have a full stamina bar when you encounter the final phase.

Re:Coming in with more life bar

[KDR_11k]

Yeah but what if you pass that point after 2-3 attempts while the boss takes 20?

Re:i think the best cutscene option would be this.

[JoshJ]

The problem with "save-anywhere" is it can be abused: you could, for instance, save before you perform an attack in an RPG, and if it misses, reload the save and try again. A lot of portable games get it right, though- a quicksave that lets you turn it off for whatever reason, but automatically erases when you load it. You also have the permanent save at save points, of course.

Re:Don't kill my lame but necessary supporting cas

[JoshJ]

Yeah, this is the pits. Final Fantasy Tactics was notable for this (Yardow Fort City- Save Rafa! anyone?) and one trick you could pull was to remove the equipment from one of your characters to make it weaker than Rafa to lure the AI to that character. It didn't always work (depended on what the Ninjas had equipped and throwable) but when it did, Rafa ended up in a relatively safe position and you could deal with the Summoners.

Some handhelds are still in days of yore

[tepples]

I'm referring to modern gaming, not the days of yore where you HAD to fake 3d and allowing people to look around completely "freely" would completely shatter any illusion of a coherent game world. Days-of-yore platforms such as Game Boy Advance SP still exist. Even Nintendo DS is such a platform to an extent, as it has a hard limit of 2000 polygons per scene.

but in the world of mainstream (read: console games (and quality PC games) that aren't Britney and Barbie or movie tie-ins not named Goldeneye) gaming How is handheld gaming not mainstream?

Interactive cutscenes

[rm999]

"Sadly, interactive entertainment is the name of the game, and it always comes first. That's why gamers play these things. So rather than assume every player wants to watch your story-telling chops, allow them to bypass cut scenes, tutorials, and even speed up the showing of logos when a game boots up."

A compromise, like in half-life, is to have an interactive cut scene. In these, you can still control your character, but the exterior action is playing the role of a cut-scene. I personally am not a fan of these (I'm on the extreme end of hating cut scenes), but I admit they are better than cut-scenes if the story HAS to be explained.

Re:Interactive cutscenes

[grumbel]

In terms of storytelling they are certainly preferable over non-interactive, however when it comes to the issue of cutscene skipping they are far worse then non-interactive ones, since you can't skip them and since there really isn't a proper way to implement skipping. There simply isn't a clear line where the cutscene begins and the gameplay ends and so no easy way to implement a skip.

SNES did not start the button craziness

[pokerdad]

Nintendo arguably started the "my controller has more buttons than your controller" trend with the SNES's 12 buttons, but what's done is done.

Considering that two gens before SNES, Intellivision and Colleco both had more than 12 buttons, I find it hard to credit Nintendo for this one. If anything Nintendo delayed the trend by introduding the NES with so few.

Re:SNES did not start the button craziness

[Creepy]

yeah - I was going to say the same. The Intellivision and ColecoVision both had 12 buttons in a telephone layout which accepted membrane overlays, however, making the layout of new games easier to learn. The Intellivision had 16 buttons and the ColecoVision 14, but the Coleco side buttons were the same, so technically it had 13 (In the same respect, I believe the Intellivision had 14).

Nintendo had no managed layout like an overlay, so it was a bit harder for the new user because you had to memorize the button mappings.

Are you guys kidding me!?!

[gmezero]

WTF, this thread clearly shows who does and doesn't have a life, or a job, or a family or a clue.

Video games are entertainment for me. I am not entertainment for arrogant developers.

Re:i think the best cutscene option would be this.

[PJ1216]

in a single player game, its not really that important to stop cheating. i mean, its not hurting anyone. plus, the user is apparently having more fun than they would without cheating (otherwise, they wouldn't do it). who cares if it could be abused. there are plenty of games that have cheat codes put into them purposely because sometimes its fun to be invincible. or sometimes they understand that maybe someone can't get past a certain point and therefore gives them a free pass so to speak. the only time cheating is really important in stopping is in anything that has an online component or competitive component. if they want to save before every punch, let them. to me that sounds like one of those scenarios you don't really have to worry about being abused too much.

Video game feature musts

[freezingweasel]

1. Never ask the player if he wants to save.

This can be good or bad. It's annoying for the pro perhaps, but for the novice who may not have saved for the past hour, about to go into a tough battle, it could save a lot of frustration. In-game tutorials the 30th time around are annoying too. Perhaps the triggering of both can be linked to a "beginner" switch in the options menu, on by default, but which you can turn on/off anytime.

Saving fills 2 purposes: keeping you from slipping too far back and allowing you to return directly to a particularly fun section later. Perhaps there should be the normal save system, plus one auto-save to save your bacon in case you were lazy and you could choose which to load at start-up. One problem with Enchanted Arms on the 360, each and every save requires navigating menus.. yes I want to save on the hard drive agan, yes I want to use the same file again etc. Any involved save process should be coupled with a quicksave option using the same choices as the last save.

Also, SAVE ANYWHERE. The DS close lid to save function needs to be on everything in some way. Life happens. If the end of a game is 4 back to back boss fights and you've beaten 3 (one of them just barely after MANY retries) you shouldn't have to go through it again after unexpected company (parents, S.O.) stopped you because someone thought it was "more challenging" to not allow saves between these points. Sure it's more challenging. So is randomly remapping keys between levels. It's also stupid and annoying. I didn't pay $60 for a game because I was LOOKING to be in a bad mood... We don't play games in theaters. Interruptions happen.

2. Always say "press any button" to start a game.

Yes. A game is something the user is buying to enjoy, not be maddened by. Maddening challenge you overcome with skill is one thing. Maddeningly bad design doesn't give you a feeling of accomplishment when you overcome it. Like or hate Resident Evil's cylinder control scheme, to most casual players, if you don't move in the direction you press without a DARN good reason, the game is broken.

3. Always let players remap controller buttons to suit their preferences.

Yes. The more complex controllers get, the more this is needed. On the NES this wasn't needed, because seemingly 90% of all games used A for jump and B for shoot. Since almost all games had the same functions, there was no need to move things around. On the Playstation, different games use different buttons for block, attack, magic, menu (no longer just the start button!) etc.

REALLY useful remap options would be, swap any analog stick with the d-pad. Some of us prefer it. Swap the face buttons as a unit with a d-pad / stick. It may reduce control of the player's speed, but that's the players decision. (If they do go from an analog to digital, offer a run/slow button to be mapped in and give them the choice of which is the default) Allow the user to customize the "run" speed in RPGs.

Phantasy Star Online had a WONDERFUL idea letting you use a shoulder button as a shift key to change the functions of face buttons. This should be standard practice. This would be a HUGE improvement to Zelda, keeping more items easily usable at once without forcing the user to keep bringing up the menu to swap items where there's 2 item buttons and 3 items needed.

Non-standard controls NEED an alternative. DS programmers, we're all glaring at YOU! We understand you love the touch screen and mic. We don't love having our screen roughed up, an inerface that blocks our view when our fat hand is in the way of the action, an interface that with one point of contact doesn't allow the control of a gamepad (you may be using 2-3 functions on a gamepad at once) and we don't want to have to keep cleaning spit from the screen as every other game makes us hiss and scream into our DSes. Games requiring screaming are also a bad idea in public... If you want to OFFER an alternative interface, fine. Just don't lock us int

Re:Video game feature musts

[grumbel]

1) A beginner option would be a very bad idea, since the user can't really predict what "beginner" actually means, i.e. 20 years of video games might still not help me a thing to figure out how this or that attack exactly works in a game or that it doesn't exit at all. Instead tutorials should simply be written in a less stupid way, i.e. don't teach me how to walk and look around, since those are trivially figured out by just touching the controller, neither have a instructor tell we for a minute which button is for shooting, just give me a little hint about that and be done with it (see God of War, Operation Flashpoint and such which explain new function via HUD).

The worst case about tutorials is often that they are blocking, you have to listen to totally uninteresting explanations and only after that you are allowed to perform that actions, this is stupid. If I already know the game or are clever enough to figure it out myself, I want to be able to just do it without the talk. A game should talk to the player when he is stuck, not stuck him by with all the noisy talk.

About the DS save game system, yep, thats great, especially because its a function of the device, not the game. So it works almost everywhere (except GBA titles...) and also important it feels 'right'. Similar function implemented in software often feels quite wrong, especially on the PC (Hey, why it is deleting my savegame?!). It would be good if the big consoles would have similar function where you could just send the console into standby and repeat exactly where you left of, thus giving you basically a save-everywhere, but without allowing quick-save-orgies. Wii has this for some virtual consoles, however not all from what I understand and not for any Wii games.

2) RE1 came before the analogstick, so its control scheme is understandable and basically the same for most other games of that era. They however really failed to fix it in later games, while you could later use the analogstick, the games never made use of it, most annoyingly you could only aim up, down or straight, not half up or half down, thus making proper aiming not hard, but simply impossible. This really should be another rule every game should follow: If you use the analogstick, then use it properly, not as dpad emulation (almost all 2D shoot'em ups suffer from this).

3) This is something where I disagree, at least for consoles. With consoles you don't develop games in a vacuum, you know what controller the player will be using and thus overly configurable controls will only mean that the player will end up with non working controls. Say you have a game where you have to sneak and you have mapped the dpad to walk, woops, can no longer access sneaking and game gets impossible. The balance would of course also be totally ruined by stuff like that, since dpad controls work quite differently then analog ones. In those cases where would dpad and analogstick can be used equally well, they should simply allow to use both at the same time and luckily many games already do.

When it comes to touch screen vs dpad it depends, in some games like Advanced Wars it really makes no difference and both are allowed. In other you really can do it only one way, i.e. Kirby wouldn't work without the touchscreen. There are cases where it could be configurable, but isn't, like Starfox, but that isn't really much of a usability issue and more an issue of idiot game design. Some developers feel the need to force the touchscreen and mic on you even where it totally isn't up for the job, the solution here is to just not buy those games, since they are really broken by design, not by accident. Usability arguments can't fix idiots at work (finger pointing at Factor5... sorry, guys, different platform, same lets force "new cool and totally unusable control on user" problem).

4) Very true, however rewind can often be extremely difficult to implement when cutscenes are run in-engine, but at least pause really is a must-have and its something that really should be enforced by q

Re:Video game feature musts

[freezingweasel]

> 1) A beginner option would be a very bad idea, since the user can't really predict what "beginner" actually means

Beginner wouldn't mean "to games" but "to people who have played this game through once already". Everyone would start in beginner, but those who knew how to play could turn it off.

> 2) RE1 came before the analogstick, so its control scheme is understandable

Even with the NES you could move in 8 directions. (up, up-left, left etc) Being able to move at 30 degrees clockwise of straight up isn't a benefit worthy of tossing away intuitive controls. If the paths are wide enough 45 degree increments are fine. This is a case where even if you want to show off your "great new idea" in controls you should also offer the standard method. Sure these controls were fine for Combat on the 2600, that was against another similarly restricted human. Cylinder controls are a great fit for Doom, with a 1st person perspective. If I could look out my character's eyes in RE I wouldn't mind the controls at all. RE2 on the 64 fixed this, and I greatly enjoyed it. The controls are there to put you into the game, not distract you from it.

> most annoyingly you could only aim up, down or straight, not half up or half down, thus making proper aiming not hard, but simply impossible.

There's no excuse for not putting in the 45 degree angles. Even if you can't shoot from where you are, you could take a step to the side, putting the enemy in a line of fire, like we all had to for Contra, which is probably faster than waiting for your character to slowly turn in the direction you want.

> This really should be another rule every game should follow: If you use the analogstick, then use it properly, not as dpad emulation (almost all 2D shoot'em ups suffer from this).

> 3) ... at least for consoles. ... overly configurable controls will only mean that the player will end up with non working controls.

So long as they're required to leave one button mapped back to the menu to change things back, they're fine.

> Say you have a game where you have to sneak and you have mapped the dpad to walk, woops, can no longer access sneaking and game gets impossible.

It's pretty much a given that if a game has a sneak option, you'll have to use it at some point. The same is true of lesser used special items. There's no issue with swapping functions in/out as needed, like Zelda items.

> The balance would of course also be totally ruined by stuff like that, since dpad controls work quite differently then analog ones.

Genrally I'm either running full speed or walking slowly to not run off the edge of a platform. One run button is all I need for "good enough" d-pad control. As for avoiding an enemy's line of sight, perhaps I can't walk at the same speed the searchlight is moving, but I can run faster, wait for it to move up again, then dash a bit more.

> When it comes to touch screen vs dpad it depends, in some games like Advanced Wars it really makes no difference and both are allowed. In other you really can do it only one way, i.e. Kirby wouldn't work without the touchscreen.

I haven't played Kirby or Advanced Wars to know. I can definately see the advantage of a touch screen for any strategy game, or point & click type adventure. (If Shadowgate gets ported to the DS, it better not be d-pad only... mice faked with d-pads are pretty painful too.)

> Some developers feel the need to force the touchscreen and mic on you even where it totally isn't up for the job, the solution here is to just not buy those games, since they are really broken by design, not by accident.

The latest Zelda? Countless occasions where you want to use the boomerang while running and can't do both at once? In Nintendo's favor, they seem to have made this version a bit easier than normal. Rolling was darn near mpossible to pull of on demand but I kept doing it accidentally while running. The A

guidelines lack context

[angrymilkman]

The problem with guidelines (and this has also been recognized with usability guidelines) that designers have a hard time interpreting them since guidelines assume that they have absolute validity yet they are often only applicable in a particular context. Skippable cutscenes, good idea but also a good idea for the first cutscene shown before you start playing the game? There are so many factors involved that determine whether this guideline works or not. A better format (in my opinion) is to use the format of an interaction design pattern which clearly connects a solution to a particular design problem that is valid in a particular context only. I did this for a number of usability and accessibility problems in games two years ago: see my website at: http://www.helpyouplay.com/

And so is decompression

[tepples]

Yeah, because GBA and DS games don't have unskippable logos... Granted about the GBA, which uses a word-addressed storage. The DS card, on the other hand, is a block device, a medium that resembles a hard drive, optical drive, or USB flash drive more than it does a traditional Game Pak. So it does have loading. Besides, on a platform with such a slow CPU, it takes time to decompress assets such as a JPEG title screen.

Re:And so is decompression

[KDR_11k]

I bet the loading is not going any faster if you play an FMV which are becoming more and more common on the DS.

ironic

[captain_cthulhu]

4. Always let players skip cut scenes no matter how important they are to the story. I find it ironic that Nintendo (arguably the kings of game usability/intuitiveness) often doesn't let you skip the cutscenes in their games.

on of the better compromises I've seen is where you can't skip the cutscene on the first viewing but you can on subsequent viewings. few things are more annoying that dying several times right after a cutscene you can't skip.

Reinventing the game wheel for copyright reasons?

[tepples]

This wouldn't be a necessary requirement if we didn't have an industry obsession with implementing a new game engine for every game. What obsession? How many games used the RenderWare engine? The Torque engine? The Unreal engine? The Build engine? The id Tech engines (Doom, Quake/Quake II, Quake III, Doom 3)? The id Tech-derived engines (GoldSrc, Source)? The only obsession I see is among smaller developers, who don't have the startup capital to license a big-name engine.

Re:Reinventing the game wheel for copyright reason

[ivan256]

You're talking mainly about graphics engines. That's really, really different.

Look at games series like Prince of Persia, Final Fantasy (since 8), Elder Scrolls, hell, even Madden.... Sure, they might leverage some of the older bits, but the games focus as much or more on additional features as they do additional story. Unreal, Source, Quake/doom engines? Sure they got reused, but not for more of the same gameplay with different content.. They got re-used for their ability to push polygons onto the screen, and that's it. It's very unlike how SCUMM, or the like were used back in the day.

Expansion pack pricing

[tepples]

Sure, they might leverage some of the older bits, but the games focus as much or more on additional features as they do additional story. A sequel that uses the same engine with new content and a few token new features isn't called a sequel. It's called an expansion pack, and players expect it to be priced appropriately.

Re:Expansion pack pricing

[ivan256]

A sequel that uses the same engine with new content and a few token new features isn't called a sequel. It's called an expansion pack, and players expect it to be priced appropriately.

Who said anything about "sequels"? You *can* write a new game with all new plot, characters, art, etc., and use the same engine. That's neither a sequel nor an expansion pack, and except for a small number of whiners in online forums, I'm sure that most people would understand the difference.

Let me give you a real life example. Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate II used essentially the same engine, and were priced as different games. Would you consider one of those to be an 'expansion pack'?

What about King's Quest 2 and 3? GTA 3 & Vice City?

There are still games that follow the model I'm suggesting. They're just the exception, not the rule.

Use the game engine for cutscenes

[magus_melchior]

I'd like to see game designers have enough faith in their coders and artists to make cutscenes using the game engine itself. There's been a few occasions when I see a trailer full of cutscenes from a game, and be let down by the differences in the engine when I actually play the game itself.

Re:If the cutscene can't be skipped, I will not pl

[Kalriath]

Here's looking at you, Black & White/Black & White 2. I hate that when you install it on a PC, it forces you to go through the tutorial (and rubs it in by making the dialogue sound like you can skip it when you really can't) and all cutscenes are compulsory.

In-game transport time!

[Archimonde]

For the sweet mother of baby jesus, why in WoW in some cases you have to spend 25 minutes(!) flying from one location to another and in the meantime you can't do nothing but look at the same boring scenery you already looked 100 times before?

I never played a game which has so obvious and cheap timesinks as WoW. Non-skippable cutscenes and nag screens are nothing compared to this rip-off.

Re:If the cutscene can't be skipped, I will not pl

[Lord Bitman]

Install the fucking update. The patch fixing this flaw was released a week after the game, wasn't it?
Or you could remember that Black & White is dumb.

Re:If the cutscene can't be skipped, I will not pl

[Kalriath]

No, there's no update that fixes that. All versions of the game have done that.

I think the reason is best answered by "EA" as a few other games with the EA tag do it too.