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Do Gamers Want Simpler Games?
A recent GamePro article sums up a lesson that developers and publishers have been slowly learning over the last few years: gamers don't want as much from games as they say they do. Quoting:
"Conventional gaming wisdom thus far has been 'bigger, better, MORE!' It's something affirmed by the vocal minority on forums, and by the vast majority of critics that praise games for ambition and scale. The problem is, in reality its almost completely wrong. ... How do we know this? Because an increasing number of games incorporate telemetry systems that track our every action. They measure the time we play, they watch where we get stuck, and they broadcast our behavior back to the people that make the games so they can tune the experience accordingly. Every studio I've spoken to that does this, to a fault, says that many of the games they've released are far too big and far too hard for most players' behavior. As a general rule, less than five percent of a game's audience plays a title through to completion. I've had several studios tell me that their general observation is that 'more than 90 percent' of a game's audience will play it for 'just four or five hours.'"
Maybe they should focus on replayability instead of throwing in lots and lots of mindless trash. You can have lots of stuff in your game and make it worth playing, or you can have lots of redundant shit that no one cares about.
The gamer demographic is changing - I'm sure the hardcore want difficult games. Me, I'd like to have fun when I can, without the overwhelming idea that I need to devote my life to the gameplay.
They measure the time we play, they watch where we get stuck, and they broadcast our behavior back to the people that make the games
Whew. At least it's not the government doing this.
Duh.
No, seriously. I'm one of those players that usually play(ed) games to completion. And maybe it's that I'm getting older, thus not longer feeling compelled to "beat" a game, but I haven't felt the urge to actually "complete" a game recently. At some point it becomes repetitive, requiring the same steps to be repeated over and over and over, and it's usually that point where I decide that it's just not worth it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I play many games, and I finish almost none of them. Most games I don't play more than 4-5 hours before I'm done with them for awhile, just like the summary says. But I usually come back to them later, and play about the same amount a few months down the road, and then again a few months down the road. I don't buy a game expecting to finish it, I buy the game to have fun. And I probably WOULDN'T buy the game if all the extra game play wasn't in it. I LIKE huge long complex games. I like difficulty (to a certain extent of course :) ). I don't want games to lose that... even though I might not play it all the way through. And for the games that I DO play all the way through, it makes the sense of accomplishment all that much better. Knowing that I've got a stack of 10 or 15 games lying around that I can go and play through for that rush when I'm bored some day with nothing else to do is great! I can't believe I'm the only one that feels like this too.
Great more dumb games but this time even dumber for the american idol watching masses
Sounds like somebody is tired of paying developers to make 40 hour games, and has decided to select the evidence they want to promote the idea of 3-5 hour games being the new standard.
I DO want more of a game I like. I don't tend to buy games that promise sub-10 hour gameplay.
Ryan Fenton
Unless a game is terrible, I'm one of those 5% that will alway try and finish. I *love* it, pure and simple. I love the satisfaction of finishing something, the sense of completionism. Mind you it can get painful when you have titles like Assassin's Creed (the original) and you end up repeating the same tasks over and over again.
I'm not here to bash on console gamers, hell, I'm a console gamer myself too but I see a trend of (ported) PC games being oversimplified because the console audience is not buying into the "RTS with binding 10.000 keys to individual units" theme. This totally ruins some games and it's not only RTS where this applies. It applies to basically every new PC game comming out that is being ported from a console version.
Even menu's are stripped down so you can barely change any settings, I've ran into games where you couldn't even change the mouse y-ass to inverted or change advanced graphics settings.
Shooters where you don't switch to grenades but just hit the nade key and limited choices of "items" available in RPGs.
Don't even get me started about advanced game manipulation through consoles and/or modding.
... but for an experienced gamer, pretty much everything else out there really can't challenge me.
Demon's Souls has the taste of difficulty you might remember from early 90s titles.
I have a lot of responsibilities as well as interests besides gaming. It has been over 10 years since I could, say, spend a whole weekend diving through a Final Fantasy title. I love the epic game style, 60 hour game? yes please. But please, let me play it in 120 30 minute increments and feel good about it. Even if you can only break it down to as small as 2 hours, that is a healthy compromise. I'm a big, big fan of the idea of serialized/episodic games, especially if I know it will eventually reach a conclusion. It's not about getting the game sooner or whatever, it's about having smaller less intimidating nuggets of joy that each have their own temporary conclusion between instances like a good multi-novel sci-fi series. On top of that, if after a few episodes I find it's awful? I am sick of it? I can save my cash not buying the rest.
Unfortunately I have no idea how long I'll want to stick around for the story in a game these days. I am afraid to start into an arc that's going to strongly draw me in for more than an hour or so, and all too often I opt for a bite-size chunk of far less satisfying gaming because I'm sure I have the time. Even if, ironically, I end up doing that for over 2 hours.
Even if a game is sold all at once, I'd really appreciate if a developer wrote the story in well defined chunks and actually told me the estimated time to completion of the upcoming chunk before I started it so I could plan my time. Just like I plan time to watch movies or tv shows, and I can always find out the times for those.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
I would have thought the studios would consider this a "trade secret" ;-)
On a more serious note: I hope the studios will not reduce their games to cater only for the 90% as most gamers love the possibilities in a game and would probably not buy a "limited" game. (Just like I love a good tool, despite using it only once or twice.)
whatever the game may be, I'd like the games to NOT be annoying.
Though replay-ability and story are crucial, so is not being annoying or restrictive (not just limited to being too "console-y").
for instance, lately, Zynga's games have been annoying...trying to peddle their "wares" so much that it just got to the point that I don't want to play their games.
And also the same goes for the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2. In certain missions, the camera angles are locked so you have to learn re-adapt the controls as it won't move as it will on the screen. (and I'm not including the intro logo videos which you can't skip...legitimately)
Some games, I still play...even though they have been out for years.
Valve for one allows you to skip the intro logo vids, it is customizable, communities exist and it lacks major annoyances.
in that sense, Mass Effect 2 falls into that annoyance category when compared to it's predecessor. For one, it wasn't as "upgradable"/customizable as the first; shields sucked monkey testicles, and it forked too much compared to the first.
5 hrs game play for the average user that if your into it finish in 3 hrs or less and pay $100 for the right to play that game, i dont buy games i can finish in 1 good night. Playing them through again is uh well extremely boring as things are always in the same place and even on higher difficulties it is still roughly the same set of strategies required to finish the game hence it gets boring and boring fast. I want games longer and harder where are the 20-40 hr fps games with the ever increasing monster (difficulty / spawns) vs dimishing ammo.
Where are more games like the good ol days.
All there doing is giving them selves an excuse to rip the customer off even more then what they already do. bah
Um, can't we have both?
Sometimes I enjoy the simplicity (flavored with a little subtle complexity) of Plants vs. Zombies. Sometimes I feel like an epic, convoluted, RTS campaign. Surely there is a market for more complex games and less complex ones. But a long and complex game calls for an investment of time; they have to make it worth it.
If they are only playing four or five hours one couldn't necessarily conclude that the games should be shorter if it's equivocal with the players simply not liking the game enough to continue after putting in that time. Most have better things to do, or better games to play. One could also question the period being measured. I have not finished games from 2008 but I do plan to finish some of them eventually. I finished a few of those games this year after they sat unplayed for quite a while.
I've noticed that most of the games I've completed and recently enjoyed are pretty short (Mirrors Edge, Modern Warfare 2) at least in the single player modes which is the only one I use. The reviews often say "this game is great but too short" but I found the length pretty good. The advantage of having a 5-7 hour game is that the experience is often really solid and even cinematic for the whole time.
The exception is Mass Effect 1/2 which are maybe 40 hours and I played them over a period of a couple of months. Fortunately the Mass Effect games are both well balanced and quite easy, so I never really got stuck, and the story is very deep (for a game) so there's something driving you onwards. Many other games though I stopped playing after about 5-7 hours of gameplay because I just lost interest or I reached a point that was way too hard: GTA4 and Command&Conquer are two examples of that.
So I suppose what I'm saying is, I probably am the sort of gamer the article describes.
90% of the games are utter crap.
Show me someone who hasn't finished mass effect 1.
Have they thought about it? In the past you could play games like "Baldur's Gate" with 200+ hours of gameplay and not get bored and even go through it again a couple of times.
Most longer games tend to artificially extend gameplay by long transports and repetitive tasks. The few that has longer gameplay by really introducing new tasks are really good and worth the time.
I wouldnt want a bad movie be extented over three hours either. If the game suck after a short while, maybe it really isnt that good?
Any EA executives wet dream must be to chop good games up into countless expansions so it can be sold over and over.
HTTP/1.1 400
When the word "Replayability" is brought up, I think of Oblivion. What a brilliant game that was (with a plethora of mods running).
What I do not want to see is another Titan Quest. The mindless, repeating grinding really gets to me.
Generalizing gamers in this way is like generalizing moviegoers. People who play video games are an increasingly diverse group. The phrase "Every gamer wants $X" is either deceit or wishful thinking. Game publishers would love to have their customers bundled into a neat and easily-marketable demographic. However, as many /. arguments over what makes a great game can attest, every person who plays a video games has a different expectation of what the experience should provide.
They want more efficient games. With “efficient” meaning: More fun for less time. Or: If they are shorter and don’t require as much getting into, they should just as much be more intense.
Your question falls to the classical “KISS” fallacy. Simplicity is a oversimplification of the original goal (efficiency). And, being oversimplified, it’s worse, not better, than that goal. :/
Did you ever use software that was “so easy”, that you weren’t able to use it anymore? (At least not without disabling most of your brain.) I get that a lot nowadays.
So you also misunderstood what gamers actually want: To have a just as great experience without investing a lot of time in it. The “just as great” is the key here. Because 1 hour of some level of greatness is only a fraction of 40 hours of that same greatness. You know what I’m trying to say.
Also, even a beginner game designer knows, that if there is no challenge, there is no fun, and there also is no game. So simple is by definition not an ideal in game design. :)
But efficiency... or rather emergence is very much.
Make the UI (or rather the whole game) emergent, and the experience great. That’s it. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Younger gamers demand something more sophisticated, while older gamers don't have the time or energy to play through something built around a punitive system for a bazillion hours.
Well doesn't that smell of BS. I thought it was the other way around. Younger gamers tend to go for the mass-produced crap with low difficulty, low barrier of entry and immediate gratification. It's usually the older, more seasoned players who can appreciate a game for it's depth (of mechanics or storyline) and enjoy it despite having a steep curve.
Ever wondered why Runescape's audience consists mostly of 12 year olds, while Eve Online tends to attract older people? Who the hell wrote this bullshit article?
Make your 40 hour long game if you must... but break them up into 8 episodes of 5 hours each. Make each one "self contained" as much as is practical, even if that means you need to put a "previously.." at the beginning of eps 2 to 8.
And, here's the brilliant part: Charge $15 per episode. Many customers will bork at buying a $120 game, but plenty will happily do that over weeks/months.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I would be happy and say that this means we might see a small comeback of 'real' arcade-style games, instead of XBLA retro cash-ins, but I would be giving both gamers and developers too much credit.
Resolutions that work on todays pc lcd, home media setups.
A smarter AI, we have cores and more cores, RAM and broadband - make it work for the end user.
3d sound fit for a blu ray media room, not some space saving lossy best effort.
Tools to create new worlds and art with. For the fans with Macs, Windows or Linux and time to dream.
The game may only support Windows but let other OS users help, then dual boot to play.
Server options for local low ping hosts or ISP support ect.
Less DRM drama for people who paid for the game.
Get the basics in and then build world size and detail beyond a ps3 or xbox 720p smaller world size 'limits'.
Dont send legal teams after your fans. If they are not profiting from physical media sales ect, let them enjoy and add to the game community.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
They measure the time we play, they watch where we get stuck, and they broadcast our behavior back to the people that make the games so they can tune the experience accordingly.
That's not broadcasting.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Back in the good old days of the Commodore 64, I loved those long single player games, like the Ultima series, Bard's Tale, the AD&D stuff like pool of radiance or whatever. You had the "quick and fun" stuff you could play together with friends who came over to your place (shooters etc.), and when you were alone, you could pop in the Ultima 3 or 4 disk and cartograph out the latest dungeon all night long. I spent weeks on those RPG, exchanging maps of dungeons, location of npc and other info with my friends at school. But now when I have REALLY time to play at the computer, I log on to my MMORPG and play there. When I just have a little bit of time to play a single player game, I want one which I can start, play for five minutes and then quit again. Yes, I enjoyed the Baldur's Gate series a lot, but that was before I started playing MMORPG. These days, I would not start a game like that anymore, because playing online with friends definitely beats playing alone for hours. So for me it's not that I want "simpler" games because long games are too difficult etc., the problem is more that when I really have time to play, I want to spend that time playing with online friends and not alone.
When I want something simple and short I can watch a movie.
Games on the other hand are supposed to be challenging and entertaining for a lot longer than a movie.
In fact, I find that a lot of modern games are too simple and straightforward (especially on consoles) - maybe game producers are adding the wrong type of complexity (i.e. visual eye-candy) instead of concentrating on game mechanics (or maybe they're just targetting the unsophisticated and not very smart audience of young teenagers?)
Then again I'm a long-time gamer (more than 20 years now) so I've "seen it all and done it all" and have become harder to impress with fancy graphics if the game mechanics are shallow.
I think of the exact opposite. I don't like sandbox games at all. If I'm playing a game with a storyline and a quest, I want the gameplay to be tight, focused on the storyline, and with minimum to no distractions or side quests. I play those games for the story, I don't want to wander around lost or go off and do other things- I want the story, and I want a well written plotline engaging and long enough to be worth the game with nothing else tacked on.
When I think replayability, I think Civ. Strategic gameplay instead of tactical and each game plays very different just by altering the starting conditions.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
What I really think is going on is that the huge number of casual gamers are convinced into buying some 'great game' by a friend who's a hardcore gamer, and then realizing a few hours in that they prefer Bejeweled over Halo.
Also, think about the traits that a modern AAA game has: fast-paced, cinematic, action-heavy, gives you a handful of ways to approach a problem (even if those ways are only superficially different). This tends to lead to two approaches: heavily scripted games with numerous weapons, and open-world games with a handful of mission types.
Heavily-scripted games tend to have you run through the environments at a quick pace and never go back, making environment modeling/texturing costs sky-high. Making one of these games last much more than 8 hours would be financially unfeasible.
Once an open world is modeled and the mission types are done, an infinite number of missions can take place there, limited only by voice acting costs and disc space. However, developers realize that doing the same mission type over and over gets boring. In my opinion, they 'realize' this too many hours after the point where the player is already bored.
So, 4-5 hours of play means that the player has already seen 80% of what the game has to offer. This doesn't apply to strategy games or RPGs, which have high replayability or play time respectively. Stopping 5 hours into a 40 hours RPG is against the point, if you care about the story.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I've had several studios tell me that their general observation is that 'more than 90 percent' of a games audience will play it for 'just four or five hours.'"
oh, you mean the wiitards?
If the overwhelming majority of gamers don't finish the game in the first place, how would replayability help? The problem is that people give up anyway, not that they don't start it once more.
If anything, this seems to confirm what I've been saying all along: Forget about replayability, just make it worth playing once. To even think about playing it again, you have to find it worth playing the first time. If people get to the end scene with a sensation of "man, I wish it had at least 5 more hours", they'll tend to replay it anyway. If they gave up in boredom or frustration before even getting to the first contagonist, they won't.
And it seems to me like ultimately too much focus on reserving stuff for the replay is self-defeating. You have the time and budget to put X quests / locations / dialogue lines / etc in the game. If you show the user only a quarter of those on the first run, because essentially for some he's not the right class, for some he took the wrong choice (e.g., in Fallout 3 it's possible to never even discover a quest hub by as little as skipping one side-quest and succeeding on a persuasion check on another), for some he didn't explore enough to find the secret quest giver locations, for some he explored too much (FO3 again, you could skip two thirds of the main quest by just going exploring and stumbling upon the "wrong" location), and some is bonus stuff to be unlocked, essentially what that user sees on the first run is a quarter of the fun. If that puts it below the fun threshold to play it the first time, there'll be no replay to find that extra stuff either.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Maybe if the games were actually worthwhile, people would play them longer than 5 hours...
If you give people worthwhile content, story, character development and so on, I'd suspect they'd play it longer. We've had very little games lately with anything remotely similar.
Don't get me wrong, I like a brainless FPS every now & then as much as the next guy, but I'm craving really meaningful games, like Fallout 1, Arcanum and so on. It's been too long since we've seen similar games. In the meanwhile the industry just pumps out more of the same rebranded shit.
I just finished a multiplayer session with a game called "Warband: Mount&Blade." One of the things I really like about this game is that you can learn everything you need to know about the game in fewer than 30 minutes, however it takes quite a bit of time to become effective in the game.
If you think about it, most of the insanely popular multiplayer games, spare MMOs are like this. Even the MMO realm, one which I'm really not familiar with, there has been somewhat of a push towards a "keep it simple, stupid" philosophy.
Gamers want simpler games?
Really?
I suppose if you define gamer as anyone that ever picks up a game or casually engages themselves in games then maybe. But I'd describe a 'Gamer' as that 5% that generally does finish the games they purchase.
I don't describe someone who plays tennis 4 hours a week as a tennis player; instead I'd call them someone who plays tennis, and it is amazing to me that someone describe a person that plays games 4 hours a week as a 'gamer'.
Of course there is money to be made in dumbing down a product so that the barrier to entry is lower and the gratification gained through playing it is maximized for casual players, but that's how it works with everything. We can see the same effect on numbers through the box office, media, politics, nielsen ratings etc etc etc. Profit is often gained by appealing to the less educated/experienced/skilled in any market (as there are less of those in any market), the more people you can get to purchase your product/believe in your rhetoric/watch the same stories over and over the better a business will do in the short run. But in the long run we see effects that reduce the industry and bureaucracy to the lowest common denominator, which ends up hindering the progression/creativity/design of the field in general.
Gamer's nor game designers won't benefit from a change like this. Just like students and educators/storytellers didn't benefit from reality tv or the sitcom, and just like philosophers and politicians and society didn't benefit from controlling political bases and polarizing rhetoric.
I think you gave your own answer there. The problem isn't with the number of hours per se, but basically with making a 10 hour game and padding it to 60 with 50 hours of dumb repetitive filler or with boss fights that you need to try 20 times to get to the next chunk of actual story.
Not all games are automatically that way just because they're 60 hours long. There are a rare few which can stay reasonably interesting. Unfortunately, a lot do just pad it so they can write a big number on the box.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If you only play a game for 4-5 hours, it's because the game was crap or cheap (i.e. indie, not budget titles) in my opinion. Games should be capable of giving a *LOT* more value for money (in terms of hours entertainment per £/$/Euro) than your average DVD. Any "good" game of mine gets much, much more gameplay than that. It very much depends on the genre, too, and whether you count multiplayer (everyone playing multiplayer on a single-player capable game suggests your AI / missions aren't challenging / interesting / long enough).
My "Altitude" account is sitting at nearly 50 hours gameplay, and that cost me about $10. That's what you have to compete with. And that's only because I've been making myself put it down and sacrificing my normal Counterstrike time. I've had it for about a month or so and racked up 10 times the "ideal length" of a single-player game in that time, just playing casually. I just bought Master of Magic / Orion again from GOG.com - it's about my fourth time of owning it and I still put in more than 4-5 hours just to *TEST* that the GOG.com version didn't crash or do anything stupid. Some of my other recent purchases got 4-5 hours just to test if the game is something I'd enjoy. I expect small indie games to last anything from 2-5 hours (and usually they do *much* better than that), but a "full-price" game should keep me intrigued for much, much, much longer than that.
I can barely even name a full-price single-player game in the last few years that has kept me interested for that amount of time, let alone feel justified enough to stump up the cash for it while it's still new. Half-life 2, I suppose - I was still enjoying that right until the end with only minor bouts of boredom when I got lost once or twice, or had to do repetitive load/save/try to survive this time around. Half-life kept me interested for that amount of time too, and I put in many hours on GTA Vice City & San Andreas (single player). Hell, even the original GTA I burned dozens of hours playing through (and never quite "completed" it). Company of Heroes saw a good few hours until it just got stupidly difficult / boring with vastly unfair missions and although I could probably beat it, it was boring by that point - I'd played for 21.8 hrs according to the Steam stats. Crayon Physics, Gish, World of Goo, hell even Peggle has clocked up dozens and dozens of hours on my Steam account.
Back in the "old" days, I only ever "completed" a single Spectrum game - Nonterraqueous. That was it. And that took the concerted efforts of myself, my brother and father mapping the damn thing on the largest piece of graph paper you've ever seen in your life. We were good at playing it even before we started and it still took longer than 4-5 hours just to do a *single* run through of a silly, old, addictive game. I owned about 250 Spectrum games, probably less than 70% could be "completed" and I completed *1*. It doesn't mean we didn't put in *thousands* of hours into that system though, and that never really had multiplayer at all (Match Day 2, Ace II, Batty, things like that wiled away a few hours or so playing 2-player).
Age of Empires II? God, I was playing that forever. Settlers, the same. And lots of other "big title" games that I got when they became cheaper. 4-5 hours is nothing to a real gamer. It's nothing to my cousins and kids in the school I work at - they have all completed most of their games and are bored with them by the time they are a week old. But apparently we're constrained in gameplay because of the % of players that never complete a game, or just buy it so they can tell their mates they have it first.
That's pretty much covered every major genre but still they are all indie games or old games that are renowned as "classics". The stuff that's churned out now, with its community-metric-based gameplay gets dull after an hour or so because "that's what the majority want" - unless it has decent multiplayer. I can't see any of the games that are out now becoming "clas
... they are drawing the wrong conclusions.
When I was younger I was capable of binge gaming but now that I'm older I have a lot more restraint and I've played so many games that the game has to be astoundingly good for me to keep at it. The problem is that game companies have stopped making really compelling experiences and have focused too much on graphics and not the harder aspect - gameplay.
I'm certain the large audience that doesn't finish their games _will_ eventually if and when they get around to it, I really doubt they would be pleased when they eventually do get around to it and the find out the rest of the game sucks that would reflect well on their next purchase.
I really think gamers tend to space their gaming out more as adults it might take adults years to finish single player games for instance but multiplayer they will play more often.
The truth is game companies have been cutting corners left right and center they need to focus on compelling gameplay, after all that has happened over the last decade I think game developers themselves _don't really understand_ what it is that made their games great, we see umpteen million clones and we see huge entitlement complex's from developers when their game (according to them) "fails" even when it sells a decent amount (over a million).
I really think developers have to take a seriously hard look at themselves - they are the problem, not the gamers themselves.
Mirrors Edge I can agree with, but you enjoyed the single player on MW2? Sheesh.. the multiplayer is definitely fun, but I found the single player way too linear, scripted and contrived feeling for the most part. I used to play a lot of FPSes on PC so I'm not impressed by a lot of the offerings these days.
If you enjoyed the MW2 single player then I really recommend getting the original Battlefield: Bad Company (not BC2, it was almost as bad as MW2), it has a less linear feeling (though of course it's still very linear), and has a great sense of humour.
GTA IV I enjoyed but for the damn "friends" texting you all the time to get you to do stuff. Even when you put your phone on silent mode you still get thumbs down from them every so often in the corner. I'm the type of person that likes to overachieve in games so I can't stand that kinda thing.. in GTA games I've always spent a lot of time just roaming the city and having fun, but I don't like the idea that doing that means that when I want to get back to the story I'll have to start going out on mandates and dates with my friends and gfs just to get all the bonuses back. I find it difficult enough to remember to do stuff with my friends in real life without having to keep up with virtual friends too :/ I didn't even complete the game, it's the first GTA that I didn't bother with all the way through, and then play for a few weeks/months more just having fun with the vehicles and exploring for hidden packages etc.
MGS4 is another game I've stopped playing after a couple of weekends even though I was enjoying it.. it's not so much the length of the game that puts me off, as the length of individual missions. It's not the sort of thing I feel that I can just save halfway through a mission (I can't even remember if you can do this or if you do whether it'll mean you have to re-do portions of the game), so I felt that if I were to play it again I'd need to devote something like a 4 hour session to it..
which is totally what she said
The problem is that the expensive part of the game is usually the engine+art assets. Once you have those, the level design is usually the cheap bit. Making a 5 hour game is still cheaper than a 40 hour game, but not by as much as you'd think...
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How many people who are running it for just 4 or 5 hours a single time are running a legitimate copy?
Could these numbers point to pirates that wouldn't have bought your game anyway?
I do not want less complex games.
Games don't need to be dumber, the average age of a gamer is over 25, we aren't morons so stop treating us like them.
I like a bit of complexity and puzzle solving in my game, I absolutely hate the hand holding and linear corridors of recent games.
Complex does not mean harder or longer it means that it is meant to provide a player with a challenge and after that challenge was defeated a feeling of accomplishment
Anything that could force the player to make hard decisions or challenge them slightly has been removed. Like an inventory system where you had limited space, so you actually have to make difficult choices about what to carry (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. did this to some extent). Near unlimited ammo and and regenerating health have become the Deus Ex Machina of gaming, killing decent game design. At no point do you have to take it easy and plan your moves due to low health, in HL1 if you wasted your rockets you'd find the game difficult if not impossible at some points. Now days, even in HL2 there is an infinite "box-o-rockets" where you engage anything that needs them. Now that's just for game-play, now let me get started on story.
Here's the story line for the next Gears of Duty game.
You are a red meat easting, muscle bound, flag waving all American hero (even if you've got a foreign accent but I'll get to that bit later) needless to say, you are 100% good and pure. Your enemy are the evil Nazi, zombie terrorists who want to blow up the White House with a dirty bomb (sound familiar) so they are unambiguously evil in every fashion. You will fight through a mixture of the standard tile sets (urban, jungle snow, desert) which are quite linear (any illusion of openness is optical) whilst never running out of ammo or health until you get to an unimpressive anti-climax where someone hands you a gun and you kill the ultimate Hitler Zombie Alien with one shot in a cinematic perspective. Further more, simply adding a foreign accent to this archetype does not instantly make them foreign. I cringe when I hear the British soldiers in COD as they are just Yanks with cockney accents. I'm sorry but this just doesn't cut it and why I'm glad they've never tried to use Australian characters (Bioshock again, Australia Day is 26/01 (DD/MM) not 01/26 (MM/DD) no Aussie would ever write dates in a yank format)
Personally I'm sick of it. It's like the publishers don't want me to see anything that could accidentally kick my brain into gear. I remember System Shock 2, you had a love-hate thing with Shodan, the ideas of the many were seductive, you could associate with the logs of the dead crew (Bioshock was a really, really poor copy of SS2's story with the intrigue taken out). Deus Ex where you weren't sure who was on who's side. I've been waiting 10 years for another game that could get my attention and imagination so completely as DX and SS2.
So yes, give me complexity, a deep involving story and some actual challenging game play. Also ramping up the enemies hit points to make things harder is cheap (Bioshock), design better AI.
Standard Disclaimer: this is for PC games and consoles pretending to be PC's. Casual games are a different kettle of fish all together.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
why should a game have a completion. why it should have an ending. and why the hell do we have to see them ?
games used to be played for the entertainment they induced WHILE they were being played. they werent some struggle that we would get rewarded in the end. really, WHAT can you do possibly to reward a player, after forcing him/her to go through a lot of arduous 'challenges' over 30-50 hours average in a game ? have him/her laid ?
increasingly after the mid 90s, games were made to give 'challenges'. some screwed up corporate engineering wisdom that is probably centered around usa (they are very obsessed with 'challenge' and 'success' as a culture) made games more and more synonymous with the words 'challenge' and 'success'. and, the value of the game started to be evaluated around how much 'play time' it offered. culmination of this has been world of warcraft. endles cycle off challenges and successes. an ultimate success (boss) in the end, refreshing every 6-12 months.
games became stuff that subjected the player to arduous work towards interim or ultimate objectives. the enjoyment was considered as progressing through those objectives. the fun while doing that, was discarded and made synonymous with the progression and struggle. also, 'better' graphics, 'cooler' sounds came with the package as additions, with technology. it was thought this was the way.
then wii came. it bitchslapped the exceedingly corporatized and industrialized gaming sector. simple, concentrating on actual continuous play fun rather than progression and objectives, it brought fun back into the games. 5 year olds as well as 80 year olds started gaming, along with the hardcore gamer who was supposed to be toiling his/her life away during progression/challenge runs in between objectives. entire game industry was stupefied, and instantly they started to imitate left and right. even world of warcraft was softened, the grind lessened and game was made more fluid, along with added 'fun' elements which you could experience during the gameplay, instead of interim objectives. all the games and platforms took their share from the new wave. even mass effect 2 was simplified (maybe unnecessarily and maybe too far). the simplicity and actual playtime fun of games were brought back from the indie game circle they have been pushed to.
was it too hard to understand that, people who worked or studied during their weekday time, would not like to repeat the same thing again, in a game, which they were supposedly to have fun ? if you ask me, it doesnt take 2 brain cells. but, it happened. im tying it to the exceedingly vocal minority that is present in gaming crowd on the net, ie 'achievement deranged' crowd, along with the increasingly corporate engineer nature of gaming companies.
games need to be designed with a childish mind, not a corporate engineer mind. for, games are not going to be sold to vendors, or marketed to government officials or corporate bigwigs in order to strike juicy deals. games are going to be sold to the man in the street for entertainment. its about human nature. its about human nature that comes into being while wearing pajamas at 20.00 in the still of one's own living room. you cant understand it in a corporate environment with a corporate mind.
well, anyway, here we are now; wii bitchslapped the industry, and they all jumped in the bandwagon. we will see how many of them will succeed in understanding.
Read radical news here
Yah umm, screw oblivion.
The first time I tried to kill the council of mages (or whatever they are called) and failed (they are invincible!) I dropped the game and gave up.
Open world my arse.
Oblivion is far too SIMPLE. Combat is simple, the storyline is linear and simple, and the promised "multiple paths" are only in terms of limited scripted events. Ooh I can be an evil bad ass if I do what the brotherhood of assassins (or again, whatever they are called, its been awhile) says I do. SCREW THAT. What if I want to jack all of them up? Oh can't do that, not in the script.
Fooie.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
i want all quake players united! but not in fucking QL they have castrated MG which makes it almost impossible for noobs to learn to aim properly...
but we don't really need other/new games... except you are a casual gamer who consumes all kind of crap..
I don't want games simplified or made more complex just because some developer(s) want a large user base. I want prices to not be fixed at some number just because it's what people are willing to spend.
I have no problem paying $60 for a *good* game, but I'd buy more games if they were cheaper upon release (I probably average 3 or 4 new console games a year).
I'm on the fence about in-game ads. As long as they don't get in my way of playing and enjoying the game, I'm mostly OK with it. The issue I have is that I don't want to still have to pay the same amount as a game without ads. I know I'd rather pay less if I saw some Mountain Dew ads on a virtual billboard or heard them on the radio of a car I'm stealing in GTA. Perhaps the next Assassin's Creed could have the merchants and townsfolk talk about how great their new pair of running shoes are - and maybe I'll have the pleasure of breaking their legs and killing them as an interrogation mission.
Mass Effect? 40 hours? Easy? Deep? What the fuck are you smoking?!
My problem isn't the complexity of a game--I can and do enjoy very complex games. But I simply won't realistically put more than 20 hours into a game, and more realistically, 10-15 max. My favorite--and finished--games have all been short and relatively intense, like Riddick or Portal, or Call of Duty MW2's campaign. I'll go longer if the game has fresh humor all the way through; I even finished the remake of Bard's Tale, which was otherwise a total grind. It was just so damned funny that it made it worth it. Ditto the Penny Arcade games.
The one exception, for me, is an exceptionally fun multiplayer game. That I'll play for 50+ hours, at least over time. But it's not quite the same experience, at least usually.
I still buy most A-list games, because I enjoy the time I do put in. But I wish I could get some of that thrill of resolution in more of them. As it is, it's like watching 1/3 of a movie--fine if it's a really good movie, but still kind of unsatisfying.
How is the weather on your planet?
Because games have becoming shorter and shorter. Have they become cheaper?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You could even change the medium from PCs and consoles to something like TV. Or maybe have large, public TVs with rows of seats and reasonably priced food and beverages to enjoy while watching.
That is SURE to improve the quality of the entertainment!
A movie has a running length of 120 minutes, but everybody leaves at 115 minutes when the credits start rolling. Conclusion: People want movies to be shorter.
Eh, no. They just don't want to sit through 5 minutes of credits.
People watch commercial TV. Conclusion: People want to watch ads every 5 minutes and overlayed on the program.
Eh no. That is just what people have to put up with.
Statistics and user figures are very easy to misinterpret. Would you take the vcr action recordings of someone watching a porn movie and apply them on how to make a regular movie?
So why apply the actions of a console beat-em-up to a RPG?
There are some games that are big for the sake of being big. Some beat-em-up is coming out, that was reviewed as having even more characters as before. So if I don't play all of their piss-poor story lines, I haven't finished the game? What if a path through an RPG doesn't appeal to me? I never bother with the evil path. Does that mean I am recorded as only playing through half of the game? I enjoyed F1 games in the past, but only with one did I do a complete realistic season (Grand Prix Legends). What if I don't do the game on nightmare mode or for that matter easy mode? What if I cheat to go straight to nightmare mode (another reason consoles suck donkey balls, locked difficulties)?
Yes of course there are people who look at an RPG and complain it takes 60 hours. So? Then that game is not for them. Because if you shorten it to 5 hours you ruin it for all your customers who love a 60 hour game.
Here is a simple sales man trick. Concentrate on selling to people who are buying. People who are not buying will always find another reason not to. But people who are buying, need only 1 to become part of them.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Sure, it was great fun. I just finished it last week actually. Yes, completely linear and contrived, but that's OK - there's enough scope for some minimal strategy and skill, whilst still being scripted enough to give you the cinematic Bond feel. The snowmobile mission in particular was awesome. But if MW2 had been 5x as long, I'd probably not have been able to finish it - too intense for too long, and besides they'd have run out of ideas.
This analysis is wrong. Lies, damn lies, and statistics. Complexity, game length, and difficulty are not the problems. Good tutorials, a learning stage in the game, and consistent smooth increase of difficulty are what are often missing. The best game reward that will keep players coming back for more is the growing realization that "hey, I'm getting good at this!" They cannot have that reward unless there is something to get good at! Look at the most successful game franchises, consistent money makers for the developers and publishers over the years. Go ye and do likewise and ye shall be rich and famous. The "vocal minority on the forums" is of concern. All of us have seen games become focused on a tiny minority of the players. All too many games. There may be 5% of the players involved in PvP, but the entire game gets rebalanced for PvP, the ordinary casual PvE players and new players completely forgotten. Completely forgotten until sales evaporate and the casual players pack it in and leave; and by then it is often too late to ever restore the player base. All of us can fill pages with examples and anecdotes of the downfall and demise of this or that game.
It can be a 40 hour playthrough, at least, depending on whether you go after every little side mission (and... organise your weapons / armour). 'Easy' depends on the difficulty you set and how you play your games usually. The story's pretty entertaining and the depth of the lore in the game could make it seem deep, I suppose.
I don't want more "simpler" games.
I want to see some diversity - games these days seem so skewed towards 14 year old male teenagers when the real demographics are far wider reaching.
There are many classic games that are fun for more than 4 hours, and are repetitive: pacman, tetris, that card game that comes with Windows...
I have a folder full of ROM images of arcade games from the past 40 years on my computer, and can play Galaga and Robotron 2084 to my heart's content.
I see people crouched over their smartphones all the time with their thumbs a-twitch, playing simple games they are addicted to.
I think gaming companies are asking themselves, what gets them better profits, years of development on long, complex games that might interest a small group of high-level players, or whomp out some simple, fun games that can get a large market hooked. I am betting churning out the smaller games is a better market right now.
So these so-called "game designers" from TFA see that people don't bother finishing the games.
So... do they say "hey, maybe our games suck bigtime!" or "hey! maybe we should make games that are not repetitive ad-nauseam and become dull after 5hours" or hey "our games are so predictable that gamers see the end of the history miles away"??
No!! They say "it's obvious that gamers want shorter, simpler games". Yeah right
But then, deeper in TFA, we start to see the real reasons:
"it seems that games will become increasingly modular in order to accommodate different tastes. Currently, Microsoft's development guidelines tell developers and publishers that the optimum time to release DLC is "within the first 30 days" of a game's release"
They want to milk the cow more!! They want you to pay $60bucks for a shitty, incomplete game, and then pay some more for some lame excuse of DLC that should have been included in the game from the 1st time.
So essentially what you want is D&D? No single player game is going to allow you to do what you want where you want because unfortunately the AI isn't all that advanced and won't be in the foreseeable future. If you want an open ended game where you can do anything, grab a bag of dice, a dungeonmasters guide and start creating some characters!
Monstar L
I am not aware of any games or companies that openy admit that they are tracking users' habits and phoning home.
Phoning home in secret would be a violation of EU data privacy directive and German laws too.
Which games are we talking about?
I enjoy games that give some form of replayability the most. Age of Empires II, Diablo II, etc. They don't have to be multiplayer, I have never logged onto Battle.net to paly diablo, and I've still played it for at least 100+ hours. Multiplayer just adds to the replayability, as it makes every match unique and different. If It's an RPG style game, make the leveling system fast so you don't have to grind for 5 hours just to get 1 more stat point, and make each class' playstyle different to add even more to the replay factor. The best example I can think of is the DotA leveling system, although it's taken to an extreme. you can gain a level in 2-3 mins, it has over 90 classes/heroes, and each of them play VERY differently, and the fact that it's multiplayer makes it playable over and over and over again. Take that class/leveling system, slow it down and add some complexity and put it in an RPG and I'll be in heaven. In a single player RPG, give me a level system that's similar, maybe a level per hour, with 5-10 different classes that all require different strats (Diablo II does this best IMO), not make the fighter/mage/rogue all have different skills that do the same things with different visuals. Most RPGs just have too bland a story for it to be decent in that respect, and they don't even make the gameplay interesting. I'll admit, I don't think RTS and multi palyer is what the OP was talking about though.
it's the same with all Bethesda games unfortunately, as well as all the other "huge open world" type games I know. It begins with the environment being indestructible even for the strongest of weapons (in Fallout 3 you cannot even blow up a simple door or even a window with all your firepower/explosives). The more "visual" realism they add, the more disappointing it is when the characters and environment do not react in a realistic way. These games aren't RPGs or Adventure games, they are effectively very constrained "jump and run" type games.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I don't want simpler games. I want games as complex & rich as they were back in 1995, i.e. Master of Magic.
There is a war going on for your mind.
It's true that absolute openness is, at least right now, impossible. But there have been many games that have given the players much more freedom, like the original Fallouts. Meanwhile Oblivion and Fallout 3 are open only in the sense that you can go where you like and complete quests in random order. Even if you do get a choice from time to time, it has no real consequences.
May the source be with you.
Only because you manage to make them interesting over and over. The games you mention do not have a linear, follow-and-succeed path, which is the case with most contemporary games. For most games today there is only one sensible or fast way to succeed. There is such a thing as a best practice. Thus repeating the game is usually fairly unentertaining, because you simply repeat the steps you already did. They are scripted to the point where you basically play through a movie.
Recreating this freeform, every-game-a-new-challenge modes of the past is not easy with today's complexity in games. It's pretty tough to create such open games while at the same time managing balance.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ugh, at least suggest a good table top RPG. The D&D rule set is terrible.
Play GURPS. The rule set is far more sensible and is about as complex or non as you want it to be and the game can be whatever you want it to be just by adding in another genre's handbook. Want an invasion of robots with lasers in your fantasy world? Buy the Robots hand book and maybe a couple of Sci-Fi ones and off you go. Want your bad-ass warrior to be able to cast a fire ball? Just make your character that way as there are no restrictive classes to tell you how to make your character.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
The thing is that the vocal minority calling for games to be harder are people who would identify themselves as 'Gamers'.
The next thing is that 'Gamers' are not a majority of the people who will buy games or subscribe to MMOs.
Once upon a time, it was different; the MMO genre is a great example. WoW an even better example. When WoW was released it was aimed squarely at gamers. As WoW has expanded and become more popular the majority of people who 'play' it are not people who would identify themselves as 'Gamers'. In fact, I don't think that the majority of people who 'play' WoW today are playing a game at all; its a social club. It has games in it but the 'game world' is not in and of itself 'a game'; its a shared environment where human beings can interact with one another and play games together.
If we watch the progression of WoW (and for you 'Gamers' out there I don't mean 'raid progression') we can see the Blizzard are not ignorant of this. In fact I'd hazard a guess that Blizzard are actively trying to deter 'Gamers' and attract 'Socialisers'.
The other observation I'd like to make is regarding 'difficulty'. There is a massive difference between 'challenging' and 'annoying'. Many game makers have a hard time with this one. Many players have a hard time seeing the difference as well. It is very easy to think you've made something challenging when all you have really done is make it irritating. It is true that it is challenging to get through irritating game play but to characterise that as truly challenging in a *game* would be missing the point. Although sometimes I wonder if thats a cultural thing.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
The most recent example of a very short but good/immersive game was Metro 2033. Steam tells me I played a total of 10 hours to finish it, it was good but I'll probably never touch it again (not even to unlock the pointless achievements). Now, how many people will regularly pay 40-50 Euros for 10 hours of gameplay and how relevant are those people for the market? I suspect that games such as Mount & Blade and Torchlight, which are obviously low budget, will be more profitable for developers in the long run and appeal to a larger audience (due to the lower price) and it's only the (expensive) marketing that helps sell the 40-50 Euro games. Steam has been flooded with low budget games recently, perhaps you should ask them what they think...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Just reduce the price accordingly. Don't charge me $60 for something that has a quarter of the content.
I'd tell a UDP joke, but you may not get it. I'd tell a TCP joke, but I'd have to keep repeating it until you got it.
Gamers don't want 'shorter games' or 'longer games' ... They only want FUN games.
I play the whole range of games from 15 minute long (After Burner Climax) to 100+ hour (Oblivion). The games I've spent the most time on are the most fun. Sometimes that means replaying the game a few times, and somethings it just means the game has that much content.
Developers need to stop focusing on statistics like game length and work on making the game compelling to play for longer.
After Burner Climax is an example of this. It's a game that can be 'beaten' in 15 minutes, but as you hit different goals, you unlock changes to the game... More planes, more continues, auto-fire, infinite ammo, damage reduction, etc. So instead of playing it once and saying "Well, that's enough of that" like I normally would, I played it for probably 4 or 5 hours and eventually unlocked everything and got every trophy. Oblivion was different. I only played it twice (on PC, then console), but the second time I did every quest. I spent about 60 hours on the PC (and did about 1/2 the quests) and then 100+ hours on the console and did everything available.
The only thing these games have in common is that they are fun.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
No, really
The reason people generally state that they want that much gameplay is because the games cost so frikkin much.
You want to make games with 3-4 hours of gameplay, fine, but don't expect people to pay more than $3-5 for it.
-Styopa
I don't have much time to play games. Matter of fact, my monthly budget is pretty much zero hours.
Yet, _if_ I sit down and play a game, I want to do it right.
When I still had time, barring Doom 1 & 2, I played through every single FPS which I ever played on hardest mode without losing a single health point (notable exception: in Doom 3, you exit an escalator and breathe some kind of gas. You need to switch off the gas outlet and do not have a hazmat suit at that point. Sucks. -- Also, I never made it through Half Life proper as there is one section where a squad of enemies is outside a warehouse and I could never kill _all_ enemies without losing health. I lost the savegame and as I spent more than a week on that one part where you fall trough the ground (not the large pipe; later), I never could get myself to start from scratch).
In Secret of Mana, I have several perfect savegames. In Chrono Trigger, I have 1 1/2 perfect save games. In Zelda 3, I have countless perfect savegames.
But take any random new-ish Zelda title. In Twilight Princess, to get all heart containers, you need to fish. I suck at that, but I made myself go through it. I even walked around looking for golden bugs for ages.
But the newest Zelda on DS, Spirit Tracks? You need to play for ages _after_ you beat the game, trying to get treasures so you can get all train parts. Same for ship parts in the Zelda before that.
And _that_ is what annoys me. If you create a way to collect all of X, do not make collecting X a goal in and as of itself. At least not if you force your paying customers to sit through hours and hours of monotonous, braindead _work_ to truly finish a game.
I would rather play a good game twice than slave away at finishing it once.
It was quite easy to me on normal difficulty. I didn't even try to find the difficulty settings.
Depth is relative, for a hybrid shooter-rpg it was adequate. For a plain shooter it was deep.
For a plain rpg it was shallow.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
If I get a game, I really want to give it a chance. But the majority of games are just real bad. The 4-5 hours is the time I play a game before I decide that it's a really bad game never to be played again. Of course even bad games have their followers that insist on playing it till the end.
The number of casual gamers has skyrocketed, and most people who aren't tainted by the geekgenes don't care enough to get really into a game: they just want some minor distraction and a quick feeling of accomplishment. Which is what makes WoW thrive, and most casual games are built around the same model of quick successive accomplishments with a perceived level of challenge that really isn't there.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
6 to 15 hours is the sweet spot for me. The Mario games are great examples of the right amount of challenge and time invested into the game.
I used to LOVE the Zelda games, back when i could figure them out and finish one of them from start to finish in 10 hours. The newest one on the Wii though I never got all the way through. The puzzles were more challenging than I wanted, there was too much travelling, and the game was WAY too long.
I want puzzles, but i don't want to spend an hour having to figure them out or wandering back and forth across the level trying to find something the developer hid under a rock just to make the game last longer.
I'm currently playing Dante's Inferno and its a good mix of mindless hack and slash and mindlessly easy puzzles.
90% of the gamers play the games less than 4 to 5 hours, because even AAA titles nowadays are not so good. Fancy graphics and all, but stupid repetitive gameplay. It's as simple as that. Take for example Mass Effect 2. I've bought it, because it got fantastic reviews. Unfortunately, so far it has only been about shooting aliens in completely linear levels. Hopefully that changes later in the game, but I see no advancement in comparison to Mass Effect 1. Dragon Age origins is much better in that respect, but even this title seems shallow in comparison to Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2. And don't get me wrong, I'm mentioning these games as an example to show that even excellent titles have a hard time matching their predecessors and seem to get shallower (apart from fancy graphics). Don't let me go into the details what's wrong with titles like MWF2 and Battlefield 2, which are arguably complete crap in comparison to what Bioware and Bethesda produce.
Another reason for the decline of game quality are undoubtedly the consoles. Sorry, I have nothing against consoles but I have to say that. There were times where it would have been impossible to publish a game like Dragon Age orgins with loading screens instead of a vast, open landscape to explore, but with consoles apparently people got used to such backwards concepts. Anyway, it's pretty stupid to judge from the fact that most people don't play through the games that they want to have even dumber ones...
Yeah, people want simpler games. That's exactly why Dwarf Fortress is so addictive.
Technoli
...but I wish did...
- A modern-day IndyCar Series console game, similar to F1 2009. This is a personal request, and will be at the top of my list until one is made.
- A real successor to the one-shot, one-kill FPS Rainbow Six 3. There may be one, but I bought Vegas and it sucked. Too much plot, and you could "recover" from wounds. I want a simple, straightforward tactical shooter with everything as realistic as possible - AI, damage, etc. No plot, no characters.
- Wing Commander Privateer 3
- A martial arts game that takes into account all of the motion-capture features of the Wii controls.
- Stunts 2. This list is remake-heavy, but that game rocked and really needs an update. Why? You can design your own tracks.
- The next SimCity 2000. The original SC was too simple, and subsequent versions were too complicated. Unlike my previous requests, this is not so much a remake as a request for a game with similar gameplay. Not as basic as the theme park games - something with some teeth. A SimPolitics? A SimCorporation? Complicated topics, but not a complicated interface.
- A classic battlefield general game without the point-and-click. In other words, give me the same restrictions the real generals had. Maps are inaccurate, weather is unpredictable, subordinates make mistakes, messages get lost.
- An astronaut simulator. Connect the LEM to the command module. Go on a spacewalk to fix the heat tiles. Land the shuttle without crashing. Won't be edge-of-your-seat, but can be very educational.
These are just a few. What's interesting to me is that they're all simulations of something real (ok, except for Privateer, but that's real in my head). I think we've really gotten away from that in recent years. How many played Flight Simulator when you were younger?
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
In my opinion, I don't believe we need simpler games. If anything they could stand to be a bit more complex. Most, if not all games now I find too simple. Go from point a to point b and kill c. I don't mind a long game if it's good enough to keep my attention long enough to finish it. A problem I see now is all these companies have grand scale ideas and aspirations, but then fail to meet them by the time it's released. Theirs either not enough content, or the content is cheap and repetitive missions/quests that feel copy and pasted. I know a big problem with that is still the technology they have to work with. A.I. is still relatively simple, physics and design have still only advanced so far (largely due to the limitations of today's hardware and not the concepts themselves). Give me a game I can be challenged by and sometimes a little frustrated at, feel triumphant when I overcome said challenges and generally enjoy playing.. and I'll feel good about paying 70$ for it. If it's good enough I don't care if it takes 40+ hours to complete.
What are you smoking? Do you sit and play those games for more than 4 hours? Seriously? Pacman??? Those games are 2... MAYBE 3 hour games, MAX.
Simpler means more than just the goals of the game, although you are 100% correct. Space Invaders was the same kind of simple. I constantly get frustrated with new games that require entirely too many key combinations, codes, memorization, etc. to make playing somewhat casually impossible.
I still love to play TFC over TF2 because it is simpler, I can focus on the game play instead of the interface. I still enjoy AOE3 because they simplified it over AOE2, making it less of a burden to advance, and beat the crap out of the other guys. Simcity 3 kicks Simcity 4's ass because it was simpler. The Half-Life series got simpler in movement control as it progressed, which made it better (no more fancy jump/duck combinations). Even Portal keeps it very simple in concept, so you can focus on one thing: figuring out how to get from point A to point B using physics. The older first person shooters were like this, Duke 3D, Redneck Rampage, etc. Simple, fun, with some humor to boot.
My recent favorite is Bioshock, which is simple enough to learn fast, yet open enough that you aren't being forced to follow a specific script to get to the goal. The "hack" feature is simple and easy enough to master. The features have *very* good depth, but are simple enough in concept so you don't spend hours figuring it out, and you have infinite combinations of plasmids you can arm. Like HL, the underlying story is also quite good (and simple), with the Ayn Rand dystopia overtones.
Lots of us 40+ guys still love to play games a few times a week but don't want to have to memorize overly complex key controls and poorly written plots. We do have day jobs and games are supposed to be fun, not work. We also have credit cards and don't mind spending the bucks if the games deliver.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I would suggest they stick more to the Blizzard style, like the methods used with Diablo, and Diablo 2. D1 was a relatively quick 16-20 hours if you trolled every square inch of the map to the end. D2 was much bigger than D1, but didn't suffer from the larger scope. There were almost no useless 'side quests' as everything was focused on the main story in some way. They did none of the 'go here and collect # of X and return to Y'. There have been very few games that I've finished over the last 10 years due to either a weak/no story line, or the game trying to be to open-ended, or simply because they sucked. They focus so much on creating huge environments, that it gets more than a little tedious to go through it all. By the time you've hit a quater of it, you pretty much have nothing left to discover except for some new scenery.
That said, I've run across a few exceptions. Half Life 2 (great story line). I've played it a few times through. I also recently started playing Dragon Age (Bioware). It's got a pretty hefty amount of those side quests, but they tend to resolve themselves without you doing much to work for them. I don't mind them accepting them and if they get solved great, and if not, no worries). The map layouts tend to allow you to resolve them just as part of your normal progression through the map and I've noticed that many tend to showcase certain uses for skills that you might not have considered (haven't cracked the manual). On the plus side, it allows a fairly free story line, with your choice of what order you want to solve the major plot points, and what side you want to be on, so they get points for that as well. They also ditched the huge world map environments that I was used to seeing in Sacred, and trips between them are without all the tedious 'hiking'. When you get to specific 'areas', the maps expand to a much larger sub-areas that are again broken down by more sub-areas that aren't shown unless you opt, or are forced to go there.
That is another important part to my way of thinking. If they try too hard to be 'free and open' as far as story line, you end up lost as to what to do or where to go next because the game provides no direction other than 'talk to blahblah' and that typically prompts a "Who the hell is 'blahblah and why can't I find him/her?". Dragon Age fortunately has a strong enough story line that even paying a minimal amount of attention will get you there and they clearly mark the target of a particular question on the map, although they don't show you how to get there.
Haven't finished this one yet, although it's been good enough for me to stop 3/4ths of the way through and create a new character out of curiosity and that's saying a lot. About my only major complaint is that it tries almost too hard for a story line, and ends up being a little heavy on dialogue. Fortunately you can just skip it with the escape key.
I have to wonder if a lot of these studios every play the entire finished product from start to finish. I suspect if they had a little more perspective of the entire game, we wouldn't see such a high failure rate in regards to games not being finished. I suspect they play their little component areas or specific parts of the project and think it's great, but rolled into the rest of it, they dont' realize just how tedious, boring, repetitive, or how difficult the entire game can get.
Since we all seem to posting what we want...
I want multiplayer games. CS is still my number 1 game, although I plan on giving Mechwarrior a crack.
The last one player game I played was Fallout3, finished it on goody-to-shoe and never bothered again. And I love that game.
Multiplay has the random human element; even in CS on good ol' dust2, people do wierd things. Games AI will never match the entertainment value of chatty, bored online players, although an epic story/graphic can match that of a decent movie.
Wait! Whats a sig?
Er, that's the whole point of this article - people don't just want whizz-bang graphics and huge, lush environments. They say they do, then they don't play the games when they get it. Playability and fun are more important.
...including game players.
Because the majority of players suck doesn't mean you should dumb down your games.
On the contrary, who do you think "bad" players ask for advice of what good game they should get?
Their real gamers friends, the game reviewers, etc.
What attracts semi-casual players to games is how much hype there is about them, and that is simply a factor of how good it is for real players and reviewers.
So now, as a game producer, you can either build up reputation spending tons of money on marketing (special events at E3/TGS works well, and they're not that expensive), or simply make a good game.
The sad part is that game producers are focusing on the first method nowadays.
Maybe what this shows is that games companies should focus more on properly marketing their games. Everyone likes something different from their gaming experience, the problem we often have as gamers is finding games that match what we want, and the main reason for that has to be the fact that they're marketed as widely as possible. That and a shift away from lengthy demos is bound to result in a good portion of your audience being disappointed. If you then make the games simpler and the storylines linear, but continue to market it to everyone, you're going to see the reverse (the people who like linear games will play longer but the people who like sandbox will lose interest), it won't tell you anything meaningful.
Sorry, I haven't read any of the above inspiteful commentary.
here's my take.
Most good games are too long.
80 bucks Australian for a game, I'd really like to know I've done it at 40 hours or less.
Here's the big name games I've played through, and thought the length was about right
DOOM
Terra nova (several times - actually this is due to be played again)
System Shock (the original-I'd play this again if Barry gives me the CD back)
Warcraft 2 (bit dull now)
C&C
Mechwarriors- 2 and 4 (was there a 3?)
HalfLife was brilliant except the last mission was stupidly hard and I gave up and I won't play it again
Syndicate was brilliant, the last mission was stupidly hard but I did it once, and I'll play it again but ignore the last msiiosn
UFO - I've played a couple of times quite a long way through, without really getting to the end. Quite happy to do it again from scratch, the early msiisons are much more fun.
Biggest playability award goes to Gunship 2000 - in squad mode, or railroad tycoon.
The story line of the game might run for 40, 60 or 80 hours, but the new content is experienced in 5. That is why people quit.
After 5 hours, I have experienced the new combat mechanics, weapons, graphics, classes, etc. And guess what? It's the same game I played last year. At that point I lose interest in mastering it and quit. Been there, done that.
The story line of most games, though often not a total waste of time, aren't strong enough on their own to entice me to keep going through repetitive battle after repetitive battle. Especially when I already did it ad nauseum in the previous clone in that genre.
I don't want simpler games. I want something I can truly sink my teeth into. It's just that I'm almost always disappointed.
Question everything?
I can't play a game for longer than 20 minutes. That's why I love my Wii.
I've been playing Tunnels of Doom like crazy lately because of its simplicity. You can get the emulator here.
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People don't necessarily want games that are easier to win; they just want games that are easier to play. Gratuitous complexity is a fundamental design flaw: if the player isn't doing something interesting within five minutes of starting a new game, something is wrong. Similarly, if the player hasn't mastered all of the basic mechanics -i.e. every mechanic necessary to complete the game's main plot- within one hour, something is wrong. This does not mean that the game should be easy, only that the player should be able to do what's needed. It's still up to them to pull it off.
I like short games when I don't have much free time. That's why I play internet flash games for free. There's a lot of poop out there, but there are some good ones that you can spend a lot of time on like Quadradius and Fantastic Contraption.
I like complex games when I have the time (i.e. when my wife let's me). That's why I play Final Fantasy, Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls.
Then there's Half-life. Great story, but generally too linear, too easy and too short. I'm not in love with episodes. I'll wait until all the episodes are out and play them all at once.
Console gaming *need* to make the games much more simple than on the PC, because the pad is a very poor control scheme.
Games around the PC are built around the keyboard. So you have games with 9 weapons... thats interesting, if these weapons are really different, you activate these weapons with the number keys 1...9. Games built around the console, often have limits to 4 weapons. You activate these weapons (or skills, powers) with the digital direction pad.
See? the interface change the shape of the game, and games for consoles *need* to be simpler.
There are some gaming bussines (probably less than 10 companys), where the cost to make a PC version is marginal, maybe "null". So It just make sense to re-release the console game to the PC world. Wen this conversion is made, you end with games with 4 powers, and a TV fov. The migration effort don't include re-recreating the game around a keyboard and a mouse.
Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? Often is a bad thing. Wen the HUD is not modified, the hud has a "rosseta" aparecen (N, S, E, W) that you will use with the keyboard (1, 2, 3, 4). Is a very bad thing wen the migration effort is given to the lower bidder, and the keys assignation is "random" (like F1, F2, F3, F4 to change powers... ). Is a good thing wen the original PC design is exausted and was not all that fun.
I think the "streamlined" version of a FPS game that consoles have invented is fun. I like the sprint, the cover,.. there are good things on that streamlining. What I also like, is the deep of our games. Morrowind is 1000 million times better than Red Faction :Guerrilla, and 9000 times better than FUEL. Ultima 7 is 89999 times better than Last Stand.
So... streamlining? yes, deep? yes. Most games are good wen have decent design and deep. Games that have not deep, have not long playability, never teach you something, never make you feel something that will stay with you, etc.
Do gamers want simpler games?
What are we calling a gamer here? is the casuals that play PvZ and don't know Vectorial Turret Defense?. Are we calling gamers to the 80 millions that play FarmVille? the 15 millions that play Club Penguin?, the 8 millions that play WoW? the 40.000 that play Nexuiz? the 3200 that play Tremulous? are these people gamers? Are gamers the 250 millions that play or have played Windows Solitary?
Since gaming is something bigger and bigger, there are a group of people that is now playing videogames, that don't think as gaming like a hobby (or his hobby), or something to dedicate money. Bussines men must care about these people. but are you a bussines men? do you sell videogames? I don't sell videogames, so I don't have to care for the 80 million FarmVille players.
Do Gamers Want Simpler Games?
Some do, others not, others can't even called gamers. Somethimes even what you ask for is not what you need. is not a simple question you are asking a simple answer.
-Woof woof woof!
Casual gamers have helped the game industry grow significantly. But, at the same time, I worry they are undermining game design as the industry focuses on them. Wii, iPhone, most XBL and PSN games are all about light games that often bring in good profits. But, rich complex game play seems to be a rare thing.
I've recently gone back (again) to play System Shock 1 & 2 (10 to 15 years old now, but the mod community has helped keep them alive). They don't look so pretty anymore, but I'm drawn in deeply by the complexity. I just spent a few hours last night playing Overworld Zero (a parody RPG within SS2) which I hadn't put much time into in previous playthroughs. I'm close to beating it now!
Honestly, I'm not that worried. There are a lot of light games out these days, but there are still some harder and more complex ones (Fallout 3, Bioshock, Dead Space, Demon's Souls ... some of my recent favorites and they sold well too). There are just more games for everyone now. I like some of the light games too.
I agree with the starting conditions thing. I find that games these days not only removed features that changes the game in the middle (such as the removal of random disasters in the SimCity games). But they are also removing the random stuff for starting non-campaign games. Tiberium Sun and SimCity had a random level generator. Sins of a Solar Empire has a random level generator, but the biggest map it creates is pretty small. StarCraft had skirmish levels that where realistic, now RTS levels look like bicycle wheels. It seems to be all about the next 'tournament' or ladder game.
GET RID OF SAVE POINTS. I don't know how to say that more clearly. I want to be able to save at any time, for any reason. Dump the entire contents of memory to disk if needed - the consoles only contain 512MB of RAM anyway. It's absolutely ridiculous that you can't die in Final Fantasy XIII, but that you have to go to a save point to quit. I suffered two power outages and lost hours of playing because one never needs to worry about dying in that game, but you have to walk all the way across Pulse just to find a save point.
*cough* Star Wars Galaxy Online *cough*
Word. When I try to play a game like Oblivion, it's like one of those conversations: "...so, what should we do?" "I don't know, what do you want to do?" "I was hoping you would have something in mind..."
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
If I overload my crave of junk food because my mom fed me only with macrobiotic food, I will end up retching after a week of eating only junk food and I will wish to eat again some healthy food
You crave, you overload, you get tired, you wish your past back. You are simple, you crave complexities, you get tired of complexities, you want simplicity. It is a very predictable pattern
Another clear example of these taste swings are seen in the fashion industry: What is hot today, it gets old later. New concept becomes cool, that concepts get overused and it gets boring, and the old stuff becomes cool again. But it is not that simplistic either, because the retro stuff that today's youngsters are wearing is not really exactly what my mother used to use in the sixties.
Very similarly remember how games were developed, from a pixelated plumber (or even better, we can go even further back from two lines and a bouncing pixel) with no story line whatsoever to super realistic games like Crysis, maybe we are just reaching saturation. The simplistic retrogaming is becoming much more attractive than ever... and the swinging will go on and on from one side to another, if we learn the rhythm of the taste swinging we can control humanity itself (and basically a money making machine).
Heh. I can vision all kinds of scenarios, invasions, whatever without buying any kind of book, thanks.
If it's so "generic universal", then why the need for all kinds of different books?
I can play Pac-Man for at more than 4 hours on one credit, so I fail to see how it is a 2 or maybe 3 hour game.
As far as I'm concerned, Oblivion and Fallout 3 don't have a lot of replayability, but they do have a hell of a lot of continuous play time (playability?). While you can go back and create a whole new character, play it again and have a different experience, I find that simply continuing through with one character and doing everything is much more fun. I still haven't finished Oblivion, but only have 1 character which I have so far accumulated 111hrs. of gameplay with (according to Xfire). In Fallout 3, I have almost the same, 104hrs. with one character. In Fallout I have finished the main quest but I am far from finishing the game, or it's DLC. In neither game have I even scratched the surface of the mods available. Both are absolutely fantastic games and as far as I'm concerned they only have 2 problems: graphics and stability (the console versions just aren't the same though - the mods really do make the game so much better).
I've gotten back into Chess lately, and I agree. The gameplay never changes, but there's a whole world of strategy and tactics in there to discover, and it's seriously good brain exercise. It's also nice not having to worry about DLC to buy the new Warlock piece that can move in a Q shape just to compete, or Ubisoft's restrictive DRM making your chess board not work if it's not sitting on a certain kind of table. Now if I only I didn't suck so much. :)
--Obyron
I think the balance was pretty good on the first ME. There were just enough side quests around to keep you slightly levelled ahead of where you needed to be at most points in the story, so if you were finding a particular section difficult you could usually go find something else to do and come back with a few new skills - you'd rarely be so powerful that you could crush all before you, but it would take the frustration out of some encounters. I haven't played the sequel yet, but I heard they removed this, that there are very few sidequests, which I guess means your skill needs to be pretty much on a par with the people who playtested this for it to feel challenging without being frustrating - what are the chances of that being the case?
...is how long they are. Some games might have a beautiful engine, but the contents and scripts run out quick. Once you figure out how the scripts work and the content work you get bored, and stop playing, unless you get fed new and exciting content.
MMOs, Facebook et al solve the last part by letting it be social.
Games like Fallout III and Oblivion didn't. It's a huge world, but it still feels limited because after a while you've seen all the possibilities, and everything you get is new variants of the old stuff.
It doesn't necessarily follow that they want the games to be shorter or simpler, or to cut back on the flash visuals. A well balanced game that's playable and fun can still be lengthy and complex and visually stunning, it just means they can't cut corners, which is probably their real issue.
Do they know what demographic their players are? Spoiled whiny kids who have to have a new game every week, sure. I'd say most adults play them to completion.
If fewer than 10% of the gaming public plays a game through the first time, what good is replayability?
"As a general rule, less than five percent of a game's audience plays a title through to completion. I've had several studios tell me that their general observation is that 'more than 90 percent' of a game's audience will play it for 'just four or five hours.'"
I call bullshit. First of all, define gamer. I would argue that anyone that plays for just 4-5 hours, and doesn't play a game to completion ain't much of a gamer. Second, what kind of games are being talked about? If I play a good game, like say Mass Effect 2, I play it from start to end, because, you know it is a good game and I am hooked. It's the game where your WOW guild goes "WTF?" and your like "Sry ME2, my bad!". If on the other hand the game is crap, and no fun to play, then I will usually measure the play time in a few hours yes. If on the other hand the game is good, but frustrating because of bad mechanics or buggy, it may take longer for me to get fed up and and say screw it... many hours later. However much of that depends on the length of the game, Some games are 40-60 hours playing time, others are 5-7 hours. Others can be measured in minutes, and others like the all powerful WOW that eats up so much time NEVER ENDS, and I would be surprised if it ever did. Blizzard would have to have all the money available in the world by then (perhaps shortly after the release of SC2). A whole bunch of games, are also multiplayer, which is the whole point, and many people buy them for that specific purpose and have little or no intention of playing the single player to its end. Sometimes this is because the single player part that is included is so horrible. You can also lump most FPS and Sport games into this category. Also I am not sure I know any adult or youth gamers that would spend 70$ on a title, play it for 5 hours and throw it away...
SO I really fail to see how they are quantifying these numbers and attributing anything to it. In short, it is a meaningless number that should not be used to influance anything, let alone game design.
Recreating this freeform, every-game-a-new-challenge modes of the past is not easy with today's complexity in games. It's pretty tough to create such open games while at the same time managing balance.
That's what multiplayer games are for.
I've played Fallout 1 and Fallout 3 (and a bit of Fallout 2). The only way Fallout 1 is more "open-ended" than 3 is because there's simply a lot less story. People say a few lines, hinting at a quest, and then you decide what to do. In 3, the quests play out over multiple stages in such a way that they are effectively, as you say, scripted (and you get a very convenient quest tracker, explaining what the quest expects of you). But the option to act like an asshole and just shoot people who ask for help and take their shit is just as available as it ever was. I'm really at a loss thinking of what it is you supposedly can't do in 3 that you could in the others.
Property is theft.
They are just dumber and lazier than they have ever been.
If its more complicated than MafiaWars it will make their heads explode.
For those 10%, it does have some good.
Because pre-made, easily plugged in game elements can be extremely convenient if your GM planning time is limited.
There are many classic games that are fun for more than 4 hours, and are repetitive: pacman, tetris, that card game that comes with Windows...
Some of us never found Pacman or Tetris to be that fun; 5 minutes and I get bored.
The problem is that the expensive part of the game is usually the engine+art assets. Once you have those, the level design is usually the cheap bit.
What do you mean by this? As I understand it, more levels need more art.
after all that has happened over the last decade I think game developers themselves _don't really understand_ what it is that made their games great
Do you understand what makes a game great? And can you explain it, or is it still a case of "I know it when I see it"?
I want games like
Castle Crashers... straight forward Button Mashers
Heavenly Sword... More or less a Button masher with amazing graphics
I Also want games like
Dragon Age... Huge story line 100's of hrs of original game play
Batman... Game plays out like a Movie
Important items... Fun OR Story.
Graphics are all over the place... Key, but less important then former.
Ahh GURPS, the linux of PnP RPGs.
We do want more complicated games like Dwarf Fortress, Ultima Online and DnD to be developed with modern graphics and online interaction. Stop casualization of modern games, you greedy people!
OK, so I am probably one of the few that doesn't play an FPS for the solo missions, as I strictly play MW and MW2 for the online multiplayer deathmatch scenarios, its just my flavor. The only 2 games I have actually completed as of late are Dragonage: Origins and FF XIII, Dragonage was a bit long but I created several different characters until I found the moveset and story line that I liked. FFXIII was fun in that it was linear and honestly doesn't take to incredibly long to beat. The only gripe I have for FFXIII is the leveling system. You can't even max out your characters until AFTER you beat the game. Now I did find that story intriguing as well and it definately was fun to beat but after I was done, i just have no urge to grind on the same monsters over and over just to get a few trophies or achievements depending on your system of choice. So in turn it depends on your style of gaming I am a console gamer who enjoys FPS for the online multiplayer deathmatches, and RPG's for the intriguing storylines and gameplay.
Because an increasing number of games incorporate telemetry systems that track our every action. They measure the time we play, they watch where we get stuck, and they broadcast our behavior back to the people that make the games so they can tune the experience accordingly.
And they suckered us right into their testing scheme. I love unlocking achievements.
I'm still trying to finish Final Fantasy XI!
What if I want to jack all of them up? Oh can't do that, not in the script.
Fooie.
Yes you can. None of those people were invulnerable. You just didn't make a good attempt.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
In reality my favorite games (of AWLLLL TIEEMMMM) are Half-life, Starcraft, Chrono Trigger and Final fantasy III (For SNES, its like FFVI or something)... in no particular order. Sure Half-Life & Starcraft may be comparably "simple" but they are extremely complex when you consider the plot, story, balance, and fluid game-play they provide (something that many modern games fail to achieve). Now I want ONE person out here to tell me that Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy are "Simple".
The challenge isn't simpler games, its making new games that don't completely fail in one of the fundamental sectors of decent gaming. You can have a game with great plot and story but if you can't play it worth a damn it will suck. You can have a very fluid game with great story (Halo 1) but if it lacks modern twists (Multiplayer online) then it doesn't fair up.
I want Frozen Bubble!
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
NO.
Games are already over-simplified. Please don't completely kill games.
I don't have access to The Escapist's website at the moment to get the exact quote, but in his review of Portal, Yahtzee said something to the tune of - The only bad thing I can say about this game is that it's short, which actually isn't so bad since that means I can finish it and move on to all of the other games that I want to play.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Yeah, but even there you are only going to be able to do what the DM allows you to do.
"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything."
The truth is, I don't necessarily want games to be shorter. What I do want, though, is a shorter learning curve for initial functions of the game. I no longer have the patience to learn clunky interfaces, or deal with reconfiguring controls. I want, for the most part, a game to have the following: first-person, semi-linear storyline, quick pickup, either good multiplayer with skippable single player or EXTREMELY immersive single-player with a good storyline. That's pretty much it.
When I work 12 hours a day, and I come home, and I've got to do 3 hours of crap at home, that leaves me with 1 or 2 hours a night at most to play games. So I can choose to try out a game, which requires me to spend an hour fucking with the controls, or I can go watch a movie. I'm a life-long diehard gamer, started with an Atari, and I just finished building my new uber gaming rig for BFBC2 Eyefinity, but I have to say that I get frustrated with games easily these days due to my sheer lack of time.
You can't hold down a job and play video games for 10 hours a day, it's just not workable. Games like MW2 and BFBC2 grab my attention more easily today than anything else, because the control scheme is roughly identical to every other FPS imaginable, going back to grand-daddy Quake and Doom, so I have 0 learning curve. Top that off with the fact I can skip the mostly pointless single-player and go straight to the multi-player gaming. If I have 30 minutes to play games, that's 2 matches of MW2 HC TDM or 1 good match of SQDM on BFBC2. 30 minutes isn't even enough time to wipe my ass in any decent RPG.
Oddly, I find myself going back to older RPGs when I play them, because designers then were limited to more simplistic systems by the hardware they had to work with. While the time commitment is high in the long run, I can play in short burst, the controls are simple, and the storylines in older games are MUCH MUCH better than in newer games. I've spent more hours lately playing through the Geneforge series and the original IceWind Dale, Baldur's Gate, NWN trifecta than playing FF13 or whatever have you random console RPG.
I would pay THIRTY dollars for a good 10-hour game more often than I would pay forty for a good 40-hour game. Why? Because I have a much higher chance of getting to see the ending of the 10-hour game and feeling fulfilled with it.
Here's a better question - would you rather spend 40 hours of your time playing and finishing four good 10-hour games, or would you rather just play one good 40-hour game?
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Nethack
Second dungeon level. I see a fountain. Decide to drink from it to see if I could get a wish. Become surrounded by snakes.
Decided what my next step would be.
I had started with the Sleep spell, so I could make all the snakes fell asleep and then kill them with the help of my pet
I also had a scroll of Scare Monster so I could make them go away and climb to the previous level to recover health (I was low on health).
Or I could engrave the E-word and forced the snakes to not attack me for a few turns and wait to on that spot to heal back my health and in the meanwhile let my pet take care of them. The problem is that I only had a Magic Marker to engrave, and I didn't want to waste charges
I decided to play it safe and use the scroll of Scare Monster to run away because I wasn't sure I could cast Sleep on all the snakes before they killed me.
That being said, I heard that the game gets a little repetive the further you go down the dungeon.
Although one of the best games I played last year was I Wanna Be The Guy, which is pretty much linear (you can decide the order you take the paths, but you have to take them all), but it nailed that "One more try" feeling (especially when the try usually takes 1 or 2 seconds...).
Right now I've been playing a game that uses the same engine called I Wanna Be The Fangame except that music doesn't work on WINE, so it's not as fun to play as the original.
Okay seriously I've just run out of pointless things to say.
wait! This implies that not everybody wants the same kind of game! boggle!
why do you think WoW is so easy these days? and bigger than ever. Well, actually they are losing a TON of subs, but anyway my first point stands.
That's how I felt about NES Track&Field 100m dash. It was fun pounding the A button for the first 20-30m, but I never seemed to get past 60m. But one day I found a cheat code and I was about to finish it
woo hoo!
accurately define good according to a criteria and seek it out.
I love sandbox game. I don't care about replayability. I am not going to replay FO3. Way to long. But I love that I can choose what to do, when to do it and how. I don't mind if it is going to take me a year to finish the game (since I only play 2-3 hours per week). However, FO3 is pretty easy. You can wander or follow the quests. The difficulty is with dealing with the bad guys. Since you can save and reload it's not tough. Because of my play style I love the save and reload anytime I want.
Ug.
Gurp takes the magic out of the game by letting you buy everything.
Perhaps if you bought a roll on a table and every five rolls you got to pick a skill.
Many Gurps campaigns I've seen are short, suffer from "character rebuilditis" (i.e. yes, my starting character was good, but now I've got a new one that's "better").
A "tossed together" D&D game can easily run a year.
Now, I don't know about this modern 4e stuff- it seems more like a boardgame than an RPG.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
In fallout 3 I got to 270 hours and would have kept going (was trying to break 1mega caps) but the fucking game kept crashing every 5 minutes.
So I gave up.
Fuck.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Speaking of D&D, Baldur's Gate pulled this off really well. They did a damned fine job of allowing you to kill pretty much whatever you want, if you could suffer the consequences and it wouldn't ABSOLUTELY RUIN THE STORYLINE. I can only think of a fistful of people that this would apply to, usually those who would overpower you in a heartbeat anyway if you played through the story without cheating.
That said, you could go wander around and do whatever, or go back to the main quest and events would pull you through to the same conclusion because of your relative uniqueness in the world, good or evil. It wasn't so much AI as accounting for "what would happen if you killed this guy?"
Perception is the thin dividing line between reality and fiction.
I don't play that much, but I'm 55 hours (ridiculous -- I DO have better things to do) into Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii. The last time I played a Zelda game it was gold on the NES; I could beat the first part/quest of the game in about an hour. I'm only still on this 55 hour business out of sheer stubbornness. I did like Fable at around 10 hours though.
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
Simple != Easy
Complex != Difficult
Tetris, Simple yet Difficult with difficulty scaling over time (levels get faster but game play doesn't change)
Rubix Cube, Simple yet Difficult, difficultly scales with random configurations but plataues (as some point further randomization doesn't increase difficultly).
World of Warcraft Complex but Easy (Difficultly is actually the interaction of players, not the actual game mechanics, e.g. Raiding is an excercise in managing people, the actual mechanics doesn't really get any more complex then a 5 man instance. If people know what to do raids are painless, when people are disorganized, they get harder.)
Eve Online Complex and Hard. It seems easy on the surface but any player that has put in more then 3 months into the game will tell you the suprising complexity and difficulty once you get out into low-sec and null-sec.
I think we all need to dust off our grammar and vocab and really start realizing that difficult, hard, simple, easy, complex, challenging all have different meanings. My day job is difficult but not hard. Super Mario Bros. is a simple game but can get pretty damn hard at times. /EndRambling
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
The only time that I don't finish games is because the plot/mechanics are so crap and dumbed down for teh console kiddiez(redding is teh hard) e.g. Oblivious, or because the game is so open that I get sidetracked doing other things which, generally, can be helpful later in the main plotline e.g. Daggerfall, Morrowind, X2: The Threat, X3: Reunion, X3: Terran Conflict.
Then there are the games that really have no end, e.g. MANY 4X strategy games(the above fall into this category as well really as they're sandbox games). Well, I suppose that technically they do have an ending but they're just games that I'll replay over and over, e.g. Civilization series, Space Empires series, etc.
Also, I replay various roguelikes quite frequently and even just restarting if the RNG is being exceptionally obtuse.
As a matter of fact I DO prefer more complex open sandbox games v. moron games like bejeweled and the like, although I do occasionally get bogged down in solitaire. Simple games are for simple minds, as these people probably don't even read anything of moderate difficulty through completion, although admittedly they do comprise a LARGE portion of the population and virtually every console kiddie. (I had early consoles, then my interest kind of died off, then I came back for a while with PSX & PS2, but more recent consoles just don't have anything that interests me enough to buy one other than a handheld for playing on the go and which usually have older classic titles, e.g. Chronocross.
I agree with you there. Stalker also had some annoying crap where if you ignored the wide open road ahead of you and decided to turn 90 and head off towards the faraway hills, you immediately ran into intense radiation zones suspiciously placed between unclimbable hills and large bandit camps.
I think the main problem I have with this is that it belies the promise the game made when you bought it. 'Action! Adventure! Advanced AI! A Free Open World Where YOU Are The Hero!'
Free and open my arse.
Everyday, politicians in the real world lie to people and tell them that they're free and they live in a free world where everyone has the same opportunities. Bullshit. They're prisoners of an economy, free only to compete ever more ruthlessly amongst themselves while small groups of power elites sell the planet from under them. So when I buy a game promising freedom and heroics - I WANT THAT!.
I don't want to be treated like a fucking errand boy ('Clear the rats out of that cellar, newbie.'). I don't want handholding help messages, I don't want the developer's assuming that I'm an idiot adolescent, I don't want North American culture influencing my heroics, I don't want to be forced to conform and I don't want to be punished for noncompliance.
Why the fucking hell can't game developers understand that?
I've play a lot of computer games over the past 25 years. Most games suck. Of the ones that don't suck, most are only kind of good, and can't hold the average player's interest for more than four hours because they get boring and repetitive.
Some really good games, like the Half-Life series, can keep you playing to the end. Some other good games, like Dragon Age, may keep you playing for quite awhile, but maybe not for 40-60 hours.
However, looking at the success of MMOs gives the lie to these statistics. Millions of people have spent hundreds of hours playing the same game, and paying a monthly fee to do so. I assume it's because they are still interested in whatever it offers them. But many other MMOs have failed than succeeded. Again, I assume because they weren't interesting enough to keep people playing.
I recently paid $5 for a little game called Trine. It gave me a good 5 hours of play, which I greatly enjoyed, and I was done. I feel good about that purchase, and I bet it didn't cost $40 million to produce. Honestly, I don't think I would have wanted to play it for 20 hours.
I'd love to see more really good, short games, as long as I don't have to pay $30-60 for them.
You're overreacting a hair with your rebuttal. Consider this: In Morrowind you could kill anyone, even if it broke the entire game. You could go do basically what ever you wanted. Hell, I didn't even touch the main quest until after many hours of just dicking around.
Oblivion is horribly closed in and simplified, a trend that has sadly taken off with RPGs. Instead of living worlds like Morrowind and Baldur's Gate, we've instead got tightly directed experiences like Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins. It's a shitty trend and one I'd love to see come to and end, however gamers these days tend to not go for the old style RPGs. They consider them to be too clunky and without the constant carrot on a stick style of modern gameplay, most gamers these days get horribly lost and confused.
Thank god for those crazy Russians and the progressively more and more awesome games they're putting out.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some artifacts to go scan down.
and realize that 'Gamers' isn't really a demographic with any meaning anymore. That's a good thing.
Who doesn't play some sort of game on the computer?
Some people who like game want simple one, some complex ones, some puzzles, some with explosive, some with a little of everything.
I like some simple games, and some complex games.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sorry to hurt your nostalgia (and I agree, D2 was a brilliant game), but most D2 quests were grab X [, Y [, Z]] [and bring them to A], or kill X, or go to X.
The thing I hated about Oblivion was that when I leveled up a couple of times and went out to finally kick the asses of a bunch of bandits, they had all mysteriously leveled up too. Even the goddamn wolves had been collecting XP and turning into timber wolves.
(That and the giant scary flaming vagina portals to the evil land of blood. Was it designed by a bunch of gay men?)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
True flibbidyfloo, guess I'll claim the last 20 years and yes most of the games sucked. They did not live up to their hype or even their specs. I do not want to see good short games, really. I don't mind paying $60 or more either. But I do want to make sure I am getting a game I will really like. So, what is my game acquisition strategy these days? 1. Let the game be out long enough for the "new" to wear off. 2. Check in to the forums, see what the players are complaining about. Pay particular attention to the tech issues forums. It may be best to wait for a high patch level before considering the game again. 3. If the game is any good at all there should be some game play or play through videos on YouTube to watch. These will tell you more than all the hype and pro reviews. Read player reviews on metacritic and similar sites. 4. The ultimate degeneracy. The ultimate lazy. The game doesn't look worth buying, but watching someone else play it turns out to be entertaining. Spend some hours watching someone else do all the work while chugging cokes and snorting popcorn! And call it a day! Oh, yes. I agree the Indie game developers sometimes produce really good games for a low low price. So I keep an eye on ImpulseDriven and hang around gog.com for good deals on old classics.
I am sorry, but DX:IW is the very definition of a bad game. It is quite literary the "Highlander 2" of video games.
It can't be the Highlander 2 of video games, there can be only one Highlander 2!
And I think you meant literally. I've never heard Highlander 2 referred to as literary...even amongst fans.
[UID-HeinzIntel]
I have never played Pacman or solitaire for that long. Tetris I think I did once...and then I stopped. Haven't played Tetris for more than a few minutes at a time. It's not interesting.
I think the reason people rag on Oblivion is because they compare it to Marrowind (SP). There you could kill anyone you wanted. The thing about the elder scroll games is the worlds gets smaller each release, daggerfall was absolutely huge (and glichy) when it came out. Each release seems to take stuff away, flying was available, kill anyone and just get the message "You cannot complete the main mission" if you killed a key character.
If on the otherhand you compare it to other games you often find it is actually a pretty good game. Really if you compare it to Final Fantasy where you pretty much can't even attack the mage council, you have a couple of objects you can equip, and an upgrade to copper ring is the silver ring, and have to follow a very liniar path, can't invent spells, have limited skills, and must fight in a limited turned based system with over half of your team as a bunch of loosers than can't even join in, oblivion rocks.
All of these people that "hate" oblivion because it is not Marrowind should go get Marrowind and play it again, I have it and enjoy it from time to time. It is not that oblivion sucks, it is that our expectations for a bigger better world like daggerfall was not presented. I was hoping they would expand it and you could travel to other areas (not some stupid island teleporter), but it still stands on it's own.
Their telemetry system doesn't tell them how the player feels at any given time. The player could be excited, frustrated, or bored during certain segments.
Their system doesn't include the proper context to understand the results they're shown.
I will complete a game if it doesn't suck. I have been a gamer for 26 years.
If the developers have made the title too difficult to play or make a heavy rewards system that requires extra time or skill to earn, 90% of players won't bother.
I have stopped many a game simply because the experience wasn't rewarding for me.
Others, I have stopped playing because they make me physically ill. The "Cryostasis" I got free from EVGA is one such title. I can't play more than 15 minutes at a time because I get ill watching the game, but that's more the engine than the content.
I recently just finished playing "Splinter Cell: Conviction" and it was a bit short. About five hours if I remember correctly. Coincidence? I don't think so. The game is short yes, but the other content like the co-op campaign and the deniable ops maps are there to pick up the slack when I am hungry for more. I would love to have a trilogy of stories each at 5 hours in an episodic format. I was left wanting more after the SP campaign in "Conviction" was finished. I am ready for more. Why can't they release great story games in episodic format?
Complete all the episodes at once and release them a month at a time and charge less for them than the complete game.
I certainly don't want a simpler game. But I do want a game which doesn't require a huge time investment to enjoy all the features or the extra content.
If the publishers would understand that episodic releases are going to be better for their business, everyone would be happy.
They could have charged $39.99 for the SP campaign in "Conviction". Then they could have tacked on $5 more for the deniable ops. For the co-op campaign and multiplayer, $10 more.
Then they could have released another 2 or 3 SP campaigns or co-op campains for $15 apiece. That breaks the content into smaller chunks easier for consumption by everyone. Most are left wanting more. Then the extra campaign content is there for those who want more.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Some games feel like I do need a simple mode for to get through. I generally pick easy when a difficulty option is presented because I know the less time it takes the more realistic it is that I will see the ending.
That being said, I've been able to thoroughly enjoy dragon age. I think I'm about 70% through the game and it has a lot of complicated stuff but it's also simple enough to keep pushing through the story. I haven't been able to get into the trap/poison/herbalism stuff. I started to play around with it, but I need my AI guys to automatically do that stuff and there doesn't seem to be enough tactic slots at the point I'm at for me to program them. It seems like the required resources aren't as available as I would have expected either. But maybe I'm just doing it wrong.
I find as I get older that I don't have as much time to play games at a sitting, and I often go weeks or months between sessions with a game. I find that I spend a LOT more time and money on something like Rock Band, where I can play for as long as I want, quit, and come back later and resume with no problem. But I do still enjoy games like Oblivion, it's just that I only really play it for a week or two a year when I know I don't have much going on and have time to refamiliarize myself with the story and the controls and such. I've found in the last few years that some of the games I enjoyed the most were ruined by overcomplication. Take Burnout, the racing game, as an example - Takedown and Revenge were great games. Closed course racing, lots of fast, furious fun. Then came Paradise, and they made it into an "open world" game where instead of just driving the course and racing, you had to start trying to read a map and find your way around during the race. More freedom, less fun. The same thing happened after the first couple SSX (snowboarding) games - the third one tried to be a sandbox game, and it lost its focus on the stuff that was fun - the racing. JRjr
Actually no, the majority of quests weren't "Get X and return it ot "Y". Any quests to get item 'X' were all related to the major plot points like the Horadric Cube (required to create the key to get into the Durance of Hate). None of them were optional side quests. There were no quests to kill X number of anything other than the 4 prime evils which were the entire purpose of the game. It was linear in the sense that to get to a new area, you had to destroy the 'Act' boss, but every one of the was a key plot character like Andariel, the Travincal Council, etc.
I can recall very few (read one hand) non-essential quests, and most of those were in the beginning to get you into the game and to show you the basic game mechanics to come. Each Act had a boss that had to be destroyed to proceed to the next Act, but that was the only real item you had to go back, and only due to the fact the portal to the next act would spawn in town.
Morrowwind wasn't really as big as it seemed. the game might have had 200 caves to explore, but really all it had was 5 caves copied and pasted 200 times. That's only huge and immersive if copying and pasting my comment here 200 times somehow makes it huge and insightful. It doesn't.
More isn't better. I'll take 5 unique locations over 50 copied and pasted ones any day.
"The thing is, we're not playing it wrong. What's happening is that studios are starting to look at the way they make games and concede that they're making them wrong."
"So expect this; more games that reward that "dicking around" and celebrate emergent game modes, and more games that accommodate the hardcore based on behavior, rather than assumption."
Mostly I agree with you, but just to play silly:
That's easy. Elite. I don't even think it can be "won" as such.
Daikatana. Hey, was curious, you know?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I was one of the players that explored a little too much off the bat and ended up missing the entire GNR (radio station) mission of downtown D.C. The mission was still on my map, even AFTER beating the entirety of the game (without expansions). So what did I do after I beat the game and installed the expansion to keep playing and leveling? Went straight to that mission and beat it for my newly found collection of the Fat Man. So, I was still able to play everything I had missed with a level 20-something instead of less than 10 and almost every weapon in the game. The game was incredibly open and allowed you do to do what you want when you want as there were no "rails" whatsoever.
If you missed something, it is because you didn't want to play that part.
If I had mod points I'd give you a +insightful, but I don't, so I'll give you a post instead. I think you make a good point - games are often marketed on their genre and their technical feature set, but there's not much press attention given to "is this game an RPG with a focus on puzzles" vs "focus on action / grinding / leveling / item collection". You don't see "Best sandbox game of its generation - but if you like story then ignore it". Maybe in the depths of a review, but the company's own marketing department should be trying harder to let their audience know exactly what kind of game to expect.
Maybe it's something to do with the fact that even in the games industry, marketing people are often fairly generic (like 'managers' are) and tend to have little domain knowledge compared to their general 'marketing' knowledge.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Personally I used to play a lot of the longer games (mostly strategy types) but lately I've gotten into games that have a lot of shorter sections like Plants versus Zombies or World of Goo. That's due to two things. First is it's easy to play a section when I have a little bit of time and there is a certain amount of replayability since you can change your strategy. Secondly I was running low on disk space for a long while. That meant I couldn't put one of the large games on the system. Now that I've added a new HD I'll probably be putting on some of the larger games again like Supreme Commander and Age of Empires 3. I would love to say I'll be putting Command and Conquer 4 on the system but based on what I'm hearing about the game I don't think I'll be buying it even though I played all of the previous games in the series. Som at least for me, both short and long games are great. Which one I go for depends on how much time I have. I'll definitely be looking at Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 when they become available. Both games will take a long time to finish, but they are also broken up into short sections that probably won't take more than an hour or two to finish. That seems to be the best approach since it allows the player to maintain their progress in the game while allowing them to quit at just about any point.
The same thing we do every night, Pinky: Try to take over the world!
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Something tells me their definition of "game audience" is what's at fault here.
May the Maths Be with you!
Given that there is a bit of overlap between certain obsessive traits and geeks, it would make sense to me that a significant percentage of gamers will tend to play games in "unorthodox" ways, like only playing a couple of levels, never finishing the game, etc. I tend to have a bit of obsessive tendencies (some asperger traits, like obsessiveness and hyperfocus, with only subtle social challenges). I'll get into the zone and learn every nuance of a level. Playing the same track over and over in a racing game is far more relaxing to me than having to deal with 100 different tracks. I do the same thing with FPS's by learning every nuance of a few maps. It's not that I can't finish the game if I want, but it definitely feels more like "work" when I do, which is the exact opposite of what I want from a game. I'd imagine that there are quite a few people out there that enjoy getting really good at a smaller portion of the game than they do shifting to new environments. I've always felt that with the current trend towards more and more content, that whoever they are making games for, it's not me. The upside is that I can usually live with getting just the demo.
A "tossed together" D&D game can easily run a year.
Maybe not everyone wants to spend a year playing a 'tossed together' game?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
It depends on the quality. Dragon Quest VIII is an excellent 80+ hour game. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is an awesome 15+ hour game. Sonic 2 is a perfect 2 hour game. After Burner Climax is a great 15 minute game.
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I'm sure open ended exploration can be quite enjoyable, but what I dislike about Oblivion's design is that iirc the level up bonuses to attributes are randomized, and of course there are specific ways to level a character to open up / max out most of the skills & attributes etc. I can accept random enemy encounters (Final Fantasy series for e.g.), random treasure in chests ... but when an *rpg* game, where you build characters, throws virtual dice to help determine stats that can get really frustrating if I just want to focus on building up the party properly. I actually prefer the simpler format of Diablo, Fate etc. where every level up you get a fixed number of points to distribute among stats, no need to wonder if I should try replaying a level due to OCD about getting the best stat roll :)
I've played Nethack for countless hours over the years and always return to it. I've ascended about 5 times, i think. Every time I come back to it, i fall in love with it all over again.
I can't think of another game that has affected me like that
How do we know this? Because an increasing number of games incorporate telemetry systems that track our every action. They measure the time we play, they watch where we get stuck, and they broadcast our behavior back to the people that make the games so they can tune the experience accordingly.
This, believe it or not is one of the things that prevents me from buying a Wii.
My main reason to buy a Wii would be getting Megaman 10 and Dr. Mario so I'll probably need to plug it into the net, but it bothers me that it tracks and logs every thing it can about me, from the hours I play and time of day to how log I spend playing a level.
How come nobody complains about it?
This is a Wii so the arguments of "If you are doing nothing wrong..." is fucking retarded, I just don't want Nintendo to probe it's cold fingers into me without my consent.
So I vote with my wallet by not playing their games.
Also, am I the only one who is offended if a game makes itself easier because a player has troubles with it? Perhaps as an opt-in option it would be ok but if a player sucks at a game let him get better at it dammit.
You know what is lacking in modern games? challenge.
But... the future refused to change.
So let me get this straight. You haven't finished many games cause the story is weak. Yet you don't like a heavy story cause you just skip through it. So what is it exactly that you want? Your saying you like the story in Dragon Age cause you can pay minimal attention to it and still know what to do, so do you just want a giant arrow in front of you at all times pointing you in the right direction?
Maybe you're just getting older, your tastes are changing, and your response has nothing at all to do with the games industry. Or maybe you're buying crummy games, I suppose that's a possibility too.
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On the contrary, an increasing amount of games relies on emergent behavior, which is just a few steps away from a real AI, especially since the current trend in hardware is towards massively parallel systems which are a perfect match for AI. I think that the first real strong AIs are just around the corner.
I remember reading the Dungeonmaster guides for a few games, and the one feature they all had in common was a lengthy section about how to force the players to do as the Dungeon Master wanted. Understandable, since nobody likes to see their carefully drawn plots be disrupted, but also completely undermining the "total freedom" always toted about pen and paper RPGs.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
No, the parent indicated a good story is key, while pointing out that you can also go too far trying to push the story (too much dialogue) when it's not needed to follow the story or doesn't add to the main plot story. So much so that it gets in the way of gameplay.
You simply have to find a good balance.
Good gameplay isn't all black and white, but some happy median somewhere in between.
Really? I've been playing FPS since Wolfenstein, and I thought that the switch to move grenades onto their own key was a stroke of brilliance.
Grenades in FPS aren't used like other weapons, and having to switch to them like they were another weapon and then use some complex grenade interface meant that I generally never used them at all in old games.
Having them on their own key meant I could use them to supplement shooting with a gun, which made them fun/easier to use and meant I actually used them.
I'm inclined to agree with the article.
Fallout 3 was, in many respects, among the best games I've played, in my favorite genre. Yet as much as I enjoyed it, I felt frustrated while playing, because there's too much stuff, and insofar as I'm invested in playing the game, I feel as if I'm somehow obligated to find and use everything in the game. This is fun for a while, but eventually, when you're searching for the 28th Nuka-Cola Quantum or 97th Nirnroot, it gets painfully frustrating -- at least, until you get your next quest reward.
CRPGs suffer from Chekhov's Gun, that is, every element that appears in them is expected to be meaningful. So, you create a game with dozens of distinct types of gun, or medieval weapon, or what have you, and it's expected that you're going to collect and use each one at some point.
Another favorite game of mine was Portal, which was a short game, which basically taught you how to play the game, had a final confrontation, then ended. There weren't really any extraneous elements. That's one direction to go in.
Another direction is the path followed by Neverwinter Nights 1: the initial campaign basically demonstrated the elements of the toolset, which the community used to recreate classic D&D modules and to create new ones, generally on the short side.
While I agree about Oblivion, it really is hard to make a game "open ended" without risking having the player completely fuck his game up. Take Divine Divinity for example. Great game, fun as hell IMHO, but you have to be VERY careful when it comes to unique items, because you can sell or lose quest items and make quests pretty much unwinnable.
So considering it would be pretty much impossible to have a sandbox style RPG with perfect freedom due to the fact that like DD you could completely bone your game beyond any chance of winning, and to try to figure every possible combo so as to insure that doesn't happen would probably take a decade for any decently sized RPG, you really ought to cut the game designers a little slack. even in the GTA games, which are known for letting you go nuts, they wouldn't let you have control during the cutscenes or interact with important NPCs. Why? Because it would have been too easy to blow away or screw over the ones providing jobs and thus leaving you "trapped" unable to advance in the game.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Maybe they rented it. And didn't enjoy it enough to buy it or rent it again.
I'm really at a loss thinking of what it is you supposedly can't do in 3 that you could in the others.
You can't influence the outcome of the world, except for the most basic "you were bad"/"you were good" sort of way. In 1&2, you'd travel from location to location, and influence the outcome of a storyline for each locale. The choices you made would occasionally affect other locations, but for the most part they were independent, allowing player the freedom to do the right or wrong thing as they pleased. The stories for each location are compelling and unique. The end of game wrap-up was a reward, showing you how you changed each location, and the future of each place based on your actions.
With 3, all the locations were pretty much generic. There were not a lot of sub-missions comparitively speaking, and nothing really affected anything. 3 added absolutely nothing new to the world of Fallout. In 1, we were introduced to the Super-Mutants and their origin. In 2, the Enclave made its appearance, and we learned of their origins and motivations. What did 3 add? Zip. Zilch. Nada.
All in all, the writing in 3 was weak tea compared to 1&2. I've played 1&2 many, many times and still enjoy going back through playing the games from time to time. In contrast, 3 went to Gamestop as soon as I was finished running through it and the DLC a couple of times. Bethesda would be wise to hire the guys formerly of Troika to write for them. I liked 3, but it's the weakest of the trio. I hope Bethesda doesn't continue to mire the world in mediocrity with New Vegas.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
By "didn't make a good enough attempt" did you mean "did not optimize one's character specifically for killing them"? Many "X special NPC is killable" situations rely on things like having just the right item handy or using some exploit, or being very high level [and having level scaling NPCs turned off], or the like. At least in Fallout3, if I wanted to walk into a town and level it, I could [u]try[/u] -- and barring only ammunition constraints and kiting distance, I pretty much could clear-cut most friendly towns if I wanted to. (I never have wanted to.)
I have not finished Zelda: Twilight Princess yet. I'm a couple chapters in, I've met the princess, been in the shadow realm a few times, and CANNOT bear to pick it up again.
The game is fun to play as far as micro-encounters go.
I still like hitting monsters and solving puzzles.
However, I have no damn clue what I'm supposed to be doing plot-wise or quest-wise, because it's been months since I last played it, or perhaps I missed what that one NPC told me to go do. I'm un-eager to muddle through re-starting the game, but I've forgotten enough major plot points (or objectives) that I've been really frustrated the few times I tried to continue.
I like having quest logs (even ones like in Oblivion which are somewhat obscure sometimes) and lists of objectives that I can open and review if I need to. Being able to re-watch (as well as skip ;)) cutscenes from chapter beginnings / ends or transitions would do a TON to help me understand What i'm supposed to do and Why.
If you like D2 you'd probably like Sacred Gold. I picked up it and Divine Divinity from GOG, and while I find DD to be quite enjoyable it does suffer from that "Where the hell do I find foo?" problem, whereas Scred, while having tons of side quests you can do or ignore, has a really nice quest logbook which not only keeps up with conversations but also gives you a general picture of the area the quest is located at and marks the map.
And I have to totally agree about games not feeling like designers actually played them. The only thing I REALLY hated ( and I am FAR from alone) about DD is the first dungeon sucked, so what did they do for the sequel? Design an even suckier dungeon, twice as large! Arrrgh!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"I've had several studios tell me that their general observation is that 'more than 90 percent' of a game's audience will play it for 'just four or five hours.'
Other "studies" have shown that a game's player base often consists of up to 90% or more people playing pirated copies (Look up World of Goo stats). This would correlate with the quote above. I remember when I used to copy tons of games (now I copy none); I would go through them play a bit, then move on to the next one. There'd be that rare game that held my interest, but really, when you own too many games, it's pretty damn hard to invest much time in any single one of them.
Now, I invest tons of time into fewer games. I played Fallout 3 almost exclusively for 9 months. Then moved on to GTA IV which was already bargain priced and 2 years old by the time I got to it.
and some people don't like to play games at all.
and some folks don't like role-playing games.
My point is that even a casually tossed together D&D game has legs. Some D&D games where the GM invests a little effort are over a decade old.
I'm not talking about those "canned" campaigns sold like TV shows by WOC. I'm talking about custom games with their own worlds, language, culture, etc.
D&D is archtypical.
The half dozen to dozen GURPS games I have known of were short. Months in duration.
Same for Champions where you can "buy" what you want. We had one person who had a new character every session. There was no investment in a character since a new one was 99% if not more powerful than the existing one.
Due to the 'level' and 'experience' nature of D&D and the restricted number of archtypes, you invest in characters who become extremely rich over time.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
No single player game is going to allow you to do what you want where you want because unfortunately the AI isn't all that advanced and won't be in the foreseeable future.
Arcanum was quite a nice game, with really lots of possibilities. One consequence was that there were so many events, side-quests... that it was possible to forget the main plot. You could actually interact with most NPCs and your stats would influence the whole conversation. Guards/bystanders would react if you started damaging public property or breaking into someone's house. Most objects could be destroyed, and you could also wipe NPCs - or turn them undead, if you wanted to. There was also the technology vs magic theme, characters options, and the period where the story takes place (industrial revolution-ish). The AI itself was good (IMO), but on most computers you would start to see lags when too many NPCs were involved in a fight.
I believe there was recently a patch from the community that fixed many bugs, items and quests. Might be worth checking out.
Still, I agree with you on this point:
If you want an open ended game where you can do anything, grab a bag of dice, a dungeonmasters guide and start creating some characters!
Fallout 3 had one of the most vivid and lively environments available in an open world game. Without mentioning the great main storyline, even most of the side quests were interesting and the inhabited places felt alive and lived-in.
As for character-environment interactions, you could touch and pick up almost any piece of crap lying around -- from a single discarded cigarette to an abandoned finance clipboard. Sure it might have been nice to blow up a door here and there, but most of those many, many doors didn't lead anywhere or if they did, their opening was part of a legitimate plot -- asking for every door in a giant city/map to be openable and to lead somewhere is unrealistic considering today's technology.
Just look at Red Faction Guerrilla: it was awesome to be able to break just about everything and enter almost anywhere, but resource considerations made it so the map was rather sparsely populated -- the day that allows a GTA4-type map to be entirely destructible would indeed be a sweet one.
Because without those books you'd be essentially building your own game from the ground up which would take an incredible amount of time and work. GURPS gives the GM a loose framework from which to make his or her's own game. Every RPG provides this frame work, GURPS is just looser and infinitely more versatile as the rules are less focused on one specific vision of the "world" and it incorporates a huge number of themes that the GM can mix and match.
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If I'm playing a game with a storyline and a quest, I want the gameplay to be tight, focused on the storyline, and with minimum to no distractions or side quests. I play those games for the story, I don't want to wander around lost or go off and do other things- I want the story, and I want a well written plotline engaging and long enough to be worth the game with nothing else tacked on.
I won't disagree with your interest in well-written stories, but the thing about side quests and unmarked quests is that they are optional. I can understand your stance perfectly, but I like a game to have optional exploration -- a lot of it. You can play Fallout 3 from Vault 101 to Megaton to GNR to RC to the Jefferson Memorial to Vault 112 and keep going until the game is over, but you'll miss out on chatting with Harold, finding Rockopolis, rigging an election in a shack, and so much more.
I look for storylines mainly in RPGs and for an RPG to work, I need to have some space with my character that isn't in the "tunnel of events" that so ofter describes how I feel about the main quest line. Video games tell stories in which you have limited control over your character, which presents a unique dilemma: you might pick a profession, allot personality traits, select gear, make limited decisions that reflect on your personality in largely insignificant ways, but, in the end, you're going to end up fighting the same final boss and saving the world. The more is taken up by the main quest, the more events for your character are scripted, and more and more of the decisions you have to make can only take you in the one direction.
Side quests and exploration free you from that problem, even if just a little. You can succeed, or you can fail. You can be a hero, or a bastard. Since they don't affect the ability to complete the game, they create more room to play your character and interact with the in-game world. I don't consider such things distractions. In my mind, being able to wander into towns that have things going on that aren't tied to some destiny of mine makes the story all the better.
I agree with your points but would like to add my own. I like to be able to play games with a storyline/plot but there are often weeks (even months) between times that i play. So take the classic SCUMM games, if you dont remember a particular clue in a particular conversation you're SOL because characters dont usually repeat their clues after they've told you once (got stuck on this on Monkey Island 1 - because i forgot the guy in the prison cell had mentioned a cake his aunt had baked or something.)
My other big issue is games that get too hard and/or have locked areas you can't get to without remembering and mastering insane complex moves. Basically skateboarding/snowboarding/fighting/golfing/other sporty games. Maybe i'd just like to casually play on all the courses and get some basic points / achievments but i cant because i have to "unlock" half the game that i paid for to be able to play it. Couldnt they leave the courses/areas open but make the acievements require high levels of skill in them all (e.g. collect all the gold stars that are in really high up spots).
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
What a coincidence. I want a browser that doesn't freeze when I open the Frozen Bubble website - or any website, for that matter - in another tab.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I don't mean to sound insulting but what it sounds like is you're dealing with bad and /or lazy GMs. In offering GMs more flexibility they do up the amount of work required to get a game running properly, but it's worth it in terms of providing a better experience to both player and GM by not micro managing every aspect of the game, often in nonsensical ways, and in providing a rule set that is organized both to be as complex as the GM wants it to be and organized in a fairly logical manner. Plus, if a GM really needs a game world provided to them there are game world modules they can buy and then trick out themselves should they desire.
Due to the 'level' and 'experience' nature of D&D and the restricted number of archtypes, you invest in characters who become extremely rich over time.
I would say that in D&D, all you ever have is an archetype. On top of that, while everyone should play what they like, I personally loath these abstract constraints. They ruin character immersion for me.
As for your comment above:
"Gurp takes the magic out of the game by letting you buy everything.
Perhaps if you bought a roll on a table and every five rolls you got to pick a skill."
I don't understand how character points take the magic out of a game. In fact, what you seem to describing, leaving character development completely up to luck, seems like a great way to have a completely unfocused character having skill sets completely out of wack with what the player wants (plus this is not what D&D does at all either).
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I think it has less to do with the quality of the game and more to do with our society/culture. We have so much to do and so little time. It is hard to find the time to play a game, and when you do you play it when you can. Then the next big games comes out that they want and they buy that and play that.
I personally don't have a problem playing games to the end. There are tons of great ones out there. I just wouldn't blame the game designers for people quitting before beating it. I think that is just how people are these days. Maybe put a little ritalin in the water supply and everyone would be beating everything.
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Telemetry data is great for telling you what players actually do within your game. However, it will tell you nothing at all about what they think of your game, except in the most indirect manner. It will only tell you what the player did, not why.
If someone plays a game for 5 hours, that is about enough time to fully familiarize yourself with the interface and the controls, and to sample the game play. If you think about it, 5 hours is also about the amount of time that a TV viewer will give to a tv series they are interested in to decide if he likes it or not.
In addition, if a user stops playing a game, the telemetry will show that the user has stopped playing (by the obvious indicator of no further telemetry from that particular user). It will not say if he stopped playing because the game was too difficult, the only indicator will be if the telemetry can tell you he had to replay the last section they were in a few times in a row unsuccessfully. But if your 60 hours of content were just really goddamn boring, then the only way you can find out if the problem was specific to your game is to compare it to other games that the user in question plays. However, last time I checked Activision does not share its user info with EA, or Ubisoft. Or vice versa.
END COMMUNICATION
I like my games to last as long as possible such as my favorite RPGs. It always makes me sad when I know I'm almost done the game and I always want to play more but developers tend to not release DLC expansions. I beat every game that I own unless it was a horrible, horrible game (think shadow the hedgehog). I'll go through every level from beginning to end, corner to corner and explore the world thoroughly completing every quest that I possibly can without using strategy guides or cheat codes. If a game will last me less than 60hrs, then I won't dish out the full price of a game for it but wait until the price is more or less $20 or less. I won't ever buy used games (gotta support my fav publishers somehow), and am happy to spend 100+hrs on a single RPG like Star Ocean for example. It's games like those that make me wish that the gameplay lasted 500+hrs and then some! In my entire life of gaming, I have only seen one person cheat to get from one place to the next and hate long games, and that person has anxiety issues. I doubt that only 5% of gamers complete games and point fingers at developers wanting to make cheaper games and sell it for the same price.
It seems I've had a bad run of flash games lately that exemplified a problem present in many games. You might have ten different weapons, each with their own time-consuming upgrade path or whatever, but only a couple are actually useful. Improper balance causes two problems. First, I have to use trial and error to determine what weapon the designers liked in this game. Second, the game becomes either too easy because I have the good weapon, or impossible because I'm not using a good weapon. In other words, strategy is useless, because it's either unnecessary or there's only one valid one (which, again, is determined through trial and error). Older games demonstrated this latter principle by having the boss who's immune to everything except his one weakness, which was only to get people to use the otherwise worthless POS weapon taking up space in your inventory.
The solution isn't to simplify games. That just takes out the trial and error, which makes it less annoying, but equally boring. The solution is to balance perfectly. This is very hard. Sadly, the universe tolerates a lot of mediocrity, so the mediocre game developers will continue to screw this up and make mediocre games. Alternatively, they'll screw it up by adding useless pseudo-variation, like two rapid firing weapons with slightly different damage/reload times, but identical damage per second against high HP enemies. At which point players pick their weapon based on the graphics and animations.
+1, Huge
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"gamers want simpler games" - Over generalization
There are multiple types of gamers, and ALOT of them like complex games!
What are the most popular games? World of Warcraft - that game is certainly not simple?
My favorite game at the moment is Heroes of Newerth because it is complex! There is so much variety in the heroes that each game is unique.
This article to me sounds like statistics for Casual gamers only.
I wish the X-hour game value meme would go die under the flabby buttocks of the marketing drone that spawned it. It's wholly irrelevant to perception of a game's value. A short, good game can entertain for hundreds of hours, as players will be receptive to experimenting in the game. Puzzle games are probably the pinnacle of this concept, but games like Cave Story (and Metroid-vania platformers generally), Portal (and many explorative action-adventure games), and Morrowind also stand out in this regard. Any of them can be completed on their respective "normal" modes in just a few hours by a semi-competent gamer who's insistent on just completing them, but these games go out of their way to encourage experimentation, exploration, and improvisation, so many players decide to play these kinds of games at least twice (and often come back for good OR bad sequels).
Incidentally, the length of a bad game is even more meaningless. Most players won't bother sitting through a bad game. This goes double for games that start good and end up awful -- those would usually benefit from cutting off early and leaving the audience hanging -- sequel!
I think of the exact opposite. I don't like sandbox games at all. If I'm playing a game with a storyline and a quest, I want the gameplay to be tight, focused on the storyline, and with minimum to no distractions or side quests. I play those games for the story, I don't want to wander around lost or go off and do other things- I want the story, and I want a well written plotline engaging and long enough to be worth the game with nothing else tacked on.
So I am not going to buy any of the games you buy and you are not going to buy any of the games I buy. Stories on rails bore me to tears. I gave up on Final Fantasy XIII in disgust 20 hours in. If I want that I will watch a movie. As the GP noted (where are the mods) Oblivion is my idea of a near-perfect game.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
plus this is not what D&D does at all either
To be fair, D&D used to do this: You rolled your dice and maybe your DM let you pick a dump stat or drop the lowest die or whatever. People stopped doing it because they pointed out that if you were just average, you were going to live out an average life, tilling the soil and letting the above average guys slay the dragons and save the world.
I'm sure open ended exploration can be quite enjoyable, but what I dislike about Oblivion's design is that iirc the level up bonuses to attributes are randomized
Incorrect. The levelups in Oblivion are completely deterministic, although the rules can seem a little subtle. See here.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Maybe 4-5 hours is how long it takes for the average player to notice or learn that the game is phoning home, and block that shit.
That's pretty much why I've all but given up on video games. Almost nothing is marketed towards what I like to play. Give me a great puzzle game like Portal or Machinarium and I'll be a happy camper. But rarely do I see any of those kind of games advertised, it's usually the next big realistic FPS or some overblown action game.
Hey, I don't mind it if you insult GURPS GM's. There are so many tho that I'd peg the game system first.
I do not play AD&D 3 or 4.
Sometimes by limiting choices, you bring out the real differences much more distinctly.
While Baltar and Aurelia are both clerics with similar abilities, yet one is a drunken lush, driven half made by torture, given to bragging at the hands of the secret police while the other is a prophet of god, ruler of a bucolic domain of peasants and religious warriors, who loves gourmet food. The game is in the story. The game is in the GM finding the buttons to push, or the moral issues to explore. And in providing an environment for the players to wander around in going where their impulse or sustained desire takes them.
Siri the elven thief is nothing like the obnoxious Caw brothers.
Skills are picked up exactly randomly because life demands them- sort of how you pick up skills in real life after you finish college. If you need to learn to sail- maybe your character has it in them-- but maybe they don't have the willpower to finish it and wander off halfway through training. Sort of like how people really behave (as opposed to how they would like to behave).
If you think all you ever have is an archetype, then you are missing the magic of D&D.
I can understand that-- WOC just keeps cranking out new games and slapping "D&D" on them-- but they really are not any more.
I knew Gurps GMS I thought were good. I played in a multi GM "Champions" game that lasted over a year. But that was it. Nothing sustained.
Which is okay if you want to keep trying new experiences I suppose. I always wanted the depth that takes time to develop.
Until the players really buy into the world and their characters, they can never be so terrified of a plotline that they call an early close because they are too tense to continue that week.
There is a freshness to new campaigns tho and some get good stories out of them. Short isn't necessarily bad. It's just short.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Developers would love to make simpler games that sell for the same price as a good detailed games. Remember most games sell to a "market pricepoint" not to an amount based on developement costs.
-Eric
What I haven't finished Never winter nights 2, Baldurs gate etc.
But note that the difference between long and simplistic is very important. You can't just produce short crap.
I have and is still playing World of warcraft but it is combining the two worlds. There is no rush to reach 80. But when you reach 80 you can get your short action playing for 1 hour or even less. But you can return over and over.
Actually, of the above mentioned examples, Pacman has a "linear, follow-and-succeed path". But it's really hard to learn and master it.
Prosp long and liver.
IMHO most games are too long. It's probably because it takes time to make a good story, create all the graphics, sound etc. It would seem a shame to just entertain the gamer for a few hours and would be a waste of money. I think there's a solution on the way already - episodes & DLC. If you create all of the above but only release a small piece of it the game price could drop making more people try out the game and if you do play it through you'd probably want more. I prefer to play the game and wanting to play more instead of buying a game a never completing it. It probably depends if the gaming industry wants to take the chance that people won't buy more content because they tried it and didn't like it. Though I think it would balance out fine since you only need to make less content if you're unsure and you'd probably sell more games if it's initial costs is cheap because people can afford to give it a try. But who knows ? :)
I've only managed a single playthrough, and I honestly don't know how considering how often the fucking game crashes. My patience for big games wanes each time I have to replay through something I've already been through simply because the developers couldn't be bothered to fix their mistakes.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
f I'm playing a game with a storyline and a quest, I want the gameplay to be tight, focused on the storyline,
well, I think that both sandboxes and rails have their place, I think that for me the supreme example of how I hate a tight storyline rail was when I played hitman 2, there was a level that I played in that game that drove me nuts because you had to assassinate this official who was having a meeting and the only way to do it was to go into a watchtower and snipe- snipe from the bushes, and his head blows off followed by him getting in a limo and taking off- run up with a rifle and gun down every single guard and the official, after everyone has been killed cut to him getting in a limo and taking off- there was zero room for movement. Those kinds of restrictions make a game no fun since half of playing a game is restriction and half is free will, if you don't balance the 2 and lean too far in either direction then a game tends to lose a lot of enjoyability.
Couldnt they leave the courses/areas open but make the acievements require high levels of skill in them all (e.g. collect all the gold stars that are in really high up spots).
Actually, this is a gripe that I have with pretty much all modern games, compared with 'classic' games. Back in my day, when it snowed uphill both ways and kids kept off my lawn, the only thing stopping you from getting somewhere in a game was whether or not you could actually GET there, within the game mechanics. Back then I imagine that if you'd gotten to the extra life on Sonic stage 1, and been told "I'm sorry, you don't have enough Chaos Points to collect that extra life, you need 9200 or more!" then you'd have said "What the FUCK is this SHIT?" and thrown the cartridge in the bin.
Now you're expected to accept it when the game says "No, you can't race on track 3 until you've come #1 on track 1 fifteen times while whistling the national anthem backwards and masturbating a skunk." Apparently those fifteen laps of skunk masturbation comprise half of the "90 HOURS OF GAMEPLAY!!!!!!!!" that are advertised.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I also recently started playing Dragon Age (Bioware). . . . On the plus side, it allows a fairly free story line, with your choice of what order you want to solve the major plot points, and what side you want to be on
What?! Where's the option to join up with the darkspawn? I must have missed it. :(
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Am I in the minority then? I tend to pick a game and play it to death, then pick another one and do the same thing. The games I spend less than five hours on are the ones that I end up disliking in the long run.
I LOVE 60-hour games, because my fifty or sixty bucks gets me several weeks of entertainment. If games get shortened and simplified, their prices should reflect that, but we all know they won't. I'll end up paying fifty or sixty bucks for a couple of days, instead of weeks.
Hey, I don't mind it if you insult GURPS GM's. There are so many tho that I'd peg the game system first.
I was insulting your GURPS GMs. The ones I've played with have had no problem running a fun and lengthy campaign, thank you. Well the good ones anyays...
I do not play AD&D 3 or 4.
It's fine you enjoy using the old rules but I find the older the D&D rule set is the less logically it's laid out. Armor class starting at 9 for basic humans? THAC0? Hit points? So I'm to believe that my level 18 character can take 20 hits from a battle axe? Or did the battle axe just nick him 20 times and he bled out? Maybe he was nicked 19 times with no effect to his well being (what are the odds of that?) and the last hit actually hit him square? Armor that makes weapons miss rather than reduce damage like real armor (never mind the fact that real armor would actually make you easier to hit due to encumbrance)? How about the fact that my magic user can never effectively learn how to use an axe without duel classing and having to take on a shit ton of other baggage. I just want him to practice using an axe when the party makes camp for the night! Clerics can't use pointed weapons?! Religious people are some of the most violent people in history, why would they not use pointed weapons!? It just goes on and on...
Sometimes by limiting choices, you bring out the real differences much more distinctly.
I would go the other way and say that by not restricting characters, players get the characters they want rather then their own spin on an archetype. All of the characters you describe below your comment could just as easily be made in GURPS.
Skills are picked up exactly randomly because life demands them- sort of how you pick up skills in real life after you finish college. If you need to learn to sail- maybe your character has it in them-- but maybe they don't have the willpower to finish it and wander off halfway through training. Sort of like how people really behave (as opposed to how they would like to behave).
If skills were picked up randomly in real life there'd be a ton of people who would know how to shoot and maintain a flame thrower, fly a jet plane or build a nuclear reactor for no reason at all. Most important skills individuals posses to any real degree of sufficiency are intentionally learned and practiced. I know how to drive because I watched others do it and payed attention, went to driving school, and then practiced a whole bunch. From there I got even better by using said skill regularly. All of this was done intentionaly.
Me choosing for my character to learn "axe wielding" is me role-playing my character as practicing using an axe while the party is camped for the night or perhaps some other likely scenario. My character randomly picking up "singing" as a skill even though my character, as I've created him, has no interest in singing, just makes no sense at all.
Also, I don't know why you keep bringing up Champions, I certainly never mentioned it as an alternative to D&D. If I want a super hero game I'll plug in the GURPS Supers book with a Modern Tech book and then throw in PSI, Robots, Aliens, Sci-Fi, or whatever else I can think of for added flair that fits my vision for my campaign. I've heard bad things about the Champions rule set and so have never tried it.
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Champions, like GURPS is a system where you buy your character with points.
I get it, you don't like D&D.
The rest of the my point, you are not getting my because you are not really listening or perhaps just have an alien perspective.
So I'll quit here.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I get your points, I just don't think they're very good and explained why.
Then again, you've mounted your high horse and road off into the sunset, so what do I know, right?
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You can't influence the outcome of the world, except for the most basic "you were bad"/"you were good" sort of way. In 1&2, you'd travel from location to location, and influence the outcome of a storyline for each locale.
Huh? In 3, you can literally blow up the biggest city in the game!
Bethesda would be wise to hire the guys formerly of Troika to write for them.
There's no way one could possibly disagree with this statement. A Bethesda game with Troika writers would be killer.
I hope Bethesda doesn't continue to mire the world in mediocrity with New Vegas.
Bethesda isn't making New Vegas. It's being made by Obsidian Entertainment, which is apparently the reincarnation of Black Isle Studios. Chris Avellone is Lead Designer. So, uh, you should probably be excited. ;)
Property is theft.
Just look at Spore. It had incredible software behind it. Brilliant ideas. Endless potential. But they dumbed everything down so much to appeal to the "main stream audience" that the actual gameplay was incredibly repetitive and boring with zero depth at all. The game didn't exactly bomb but it wasn't the "second Sims" that EA had wanted. Game companies, stop designing games for the people who will play them once or twice and then give up. They DON'T LIKE GAMES.
Even though not every gamer traverses every aspect of the game, each gamer has their own style and enjoys different challenges. So between maybe 10 different gamers, each taking on a specific portion of the game, they will have beaten it. As a gamer I would prefer the different options a more complex game has to offer than a more linear gameplay.
Huh? In 3, you can literally blow up the biggest city in the game!
Yeah, but it's still there. You can still finish your missions. The change is a minor cosmetic one.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
No high horse. Just tired of frakkin with you.
Nothing new was being said.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Yeah, because me mentioning the fact that 2nd edition D&D is about as logically laid out as some metaphor that suggests illogical layout was something I had mentioned before. Oh wait, it wasn't.
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