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Is Crowdsourcing the Next Big Thing In Game Design?
An anonymous reader writes "We've all heard about user-generated content for games that have fixed toolsets — but this interesting piece on Develop has got me thinking about the idea of games production being opened to a community before development finishes. A new iPhone game (Aztec Odyssey) did that with its soundtrack; could someone do it with the game's art assets? Or level design? A great comment under the story says that LittleBigPlanet would have been more interesting if it was just shipped as a toolset with no pre-built levels. I'm inclined to agree!"
Some of the best CTF maps for Unreal Tournament were and still are community made.
That said, you can't rely on community content to pick up your game. Epic, I'm speaking to you.
They released UT3 for the PC as a console port, complete with giant text that covers your screen when you hit DOMINATING etc.
But worst of all they butchered the UI (you have to disconnect and click 3 times now before you get back to the server browser-- no more server browsing and loading up the data files for a map you don't have while you keep playing in the current game. This is not complicated stuff, in fact it's so easy they got it right 10 years ago with UT99) and refused to fix the list of 100 or so bugs that were game breaking issues for the pros. Simple stuff like making team communication easier.
It's quite clear what went wrong, they left the bugs in there and didn't bother with correctly porting the game to the PC. The PC gaming crowd is a no-BS sort of group. It's awfully hard to get lots of great content from your userbase for your console players to game on when the only people that can actually make maps are the PC gamers who are underwhelmed by the craptastic game you pushed out. It's pretty sad when the game you made 10 years ago is STILL better than what you came out with (many liked ut2k4, just talking about UT3 here).