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Gameplay: the Missing Ingredient In Most Games
An anonymous reader writes "Game designer Tadhg Kelly has an article discussing the direction the games industry has taken over the past several years. Gaming has become more of a business, and in doing so, become more of a science as well. When maximizing revenue is a primary concern, development studios try to reduce successful game designs to individual elements, then naively seek to add those elements to whatever game they're working on, like throwing spices into a stew. Kelly points out that indie developers who are willing to experiment often succeed because they understand something more fundamental about games: fun. Quoting: 'The guy who invented Minecraft (Markus "Notch" Persson) didn't just create a giant virtual world in which you could make stuff, he made it challenging. When Will Wright created the Sims, he didn't just make a game about living in a virtual house. He made it difficult to live successfully. That's why both of those franchises have sold millions of copies. The fun factor is about more than making a game is amusing or full of pretty rewards. If your game is a dynamic system to be mastered and won, then you can go nuts. If you can give the player real fun then you can afford to break some of those format rules, and that's how you get to lead rather than follow the market. If not then be prepared to pay through the nose to acquire and retain players.'"
Gameplay is what happens when you play the game.
Duh.
The article claims that these games are popular because they are hard but it seems that nobody every talks about how challenging they are but instead they always talk about how creative you can be within the game. Both Minecraft and The Sims allow you to be infinitely creative in the way you approach and what you do in the game, and that is what has made these games so popular.
I agree that games need to be challenging, but the way in which making things more difficult is implemented matters a lot. For example, I remember that there was a mod for Battlefield 1942 where you could fly modern airplanes and helicopters which was actually kind of challenging. I got a great kick out of making tricky manouvers in those things. Then EA/DICE release Battlefield Vietnam, where the helicopters were basically auto-hovering and required barely any skill at all to fly around - extremely boring and lame. The earlier mod with the helicopters is a good example of something that's challenging and fun, but they could've also just made it harder by giving the vehicles fewer hitpoints for example, which wouldn't make it any more fun at all.
Can we please stop circle jerking Notch already?
Notch made a great concept and everyone bought into it, with promises of much much more, but after about 6 months the updates just stopped, he was too busy doing everything possible but working on Minecraft until he finally gave up the ghost and let Jeb take over, who is trying to keep promises Notch refused to. Notch made a lot of enemies because he went from working with his community to make the game what he promised it to be to going on vacation constantly. The game is not a shadow of what it was promised to be and he just got extremely lucky to take off as it did.
Notch is not some Indie Diety who knows all about gaming. He is just a guy who got picked out by 4chan to make his game huge, then when he was expected to keep his promises he fled into the night. Several months after this he announced 1.0 and released the beta with minimal changes (He added a bad boss fight at the end and a Livejournal quality poem for "the end of the game").
If you enjoy Minecraft that is great, but please look into the history of it before you start listening to Notch. All he will teach you is to take people's money, break promises and when people call you on it to run and hide among a bunch of ass kissing children.
Most players I know get tired of singleplayer quickly - but once they join a multiplayer server there's a social aspect. Also, Tekkit greatly extends the novelty.
I'm working on an HV solar panel to power my mass fab on one server. Three MVs down, seven more to go! The HV is the most resource-intensive item in IC2, perhaps in any mod. I've got a whole factory dedicated to processing a stream of input from quarries and producing fuel to keep them running, almost entirely automated.
A few of us still believe in the old prophecy. Some day there will be The One, and he will find a way to take grinding out of video games. And the old times will come back. and we will have games like zelda (nes) and metroid again.
I can shed some insight here.
Minecraft and The Sims are not "hard" in the sense that you will fail a lot.
Merely that they are hard meaning you start the game with very little understanding in how it works, and then have to master those systems to do what you want.
As you are placing blocks, you have to deal with resource management, your own life, etc.
A game does not have to be hard to be challenging. Nor does being hard make a game challenging.
My favorite example from recent games is one called Demon Souls. Many people say it is hard, and challenging, yet It has one aspect that I love because it perfectly demonstrates the difference between the two, because it is a perfect example of something that is hard, but not a challenge.
It has what used called an arcade coin-trick. A piece of gameplay put in purely to eat your quarters and lengthen time playing, without adding an equivalent value of fun or different playstyle.
The challenging part of the game is learning each individual enemy, how they fight, how you can react, etc. You develop actual skills as the game goes on and your proficiency goes up.
The coin trick is the death and respawn limit. While you can argue it adds a sense of urgency and being careful to the game, one could have done this without such a harsh penalty (loss of all exp, plus time wasted attempting to regain it only to fail at the end). This is an example of a piece of a game that is hard, but not challenging. It is hard because it punishes failure, without adding much extra fun.
So with this in mind, you can see why minecraft and the sims can be considered challenging in that they engage the mind and thought, without being hard.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
Chess. The graphics aren't great but it's still just about the ultimate game of champions. Beaten only by Gravity Power on the Amiga.
There is no music - home taping killed it.
An MMORPG needs to be crafted in such a way that the players feel challenged, but never actually like they are losing. They need to always be progressing to greater things, higher levels, better gear. And never going backwards.
Contrast to, say, EVE Online. How many players do you think ragequit forever after spending their fortune on an utterly awesome ship, only to then lose it all due to a mistake or sheer bad luck?
Yes, I said it: nowadays, the CPU and GPU are too powerful, and game designers are hell-bent on 3D and other graphical gimmicks, instead of focusing on gameplay. That's why you'll find much more creative ideas among Android and iOS games. Yes, there's a ton of copy-cat games on the Androis marketplace, but there are a lot of interesting gems.
Most of the games I play nowadays are 5-10 years old, or they are Android games. It's why I also installed BlueStacks on my PC:
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
It depends on how the game is designed. A game that doesn't have checkpoints can still have situations that can't be passed without using trial and error. Demon Souls has several bosses like that. It even has one situation where you need to kill a character who doesn't attack you and sits vaguely near the boss room, before the boss will die. Congratulations on figuring that out first time around except by luck. It's also quite possible to survive to a boss and then find you don't have the equipment needed to defeat it reasonably, so you have no option but to die. That is not rewarding cautious gameplay, that's screwing the player over no matter how cautious he is.
Demon Souls also has two endings, but you're probably not going to see both of them without going to Youtube, because they depend on one decision made at the very end of the game, but since you can't save and reload your game there's no way to try again with the other decision.
I read something about games a while back (I don't remember where) in regards to risk versus reward. As you say, there is a balance to be struck to make a game challenging but not unfair or mindless.
Doom did this well where you would come into a pitch black room with a weapon sitting right in the middle, in the only lit section. Obviously it's a trap, but is it worth springing that trap for the weapon? Smash TV is another game that I think of as a good example, with the prizes appearing everywhere but the hordes of enemies are too.
I would argue that a lack of checkpoints rewards cautious and skilled game play rather than "punishing failure" but that's just me. If a game gives you a checkpoint every 5 minutes there's absolutely no reason not to brute force your way through a problem by throwing corpse after corpse at it.
I won't play an action game unless I can save anywhere, at any time. After every successful jump or shot, if need be. You can see how much tastes differ here: I have no interest in repitition.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The pinnacle of game design is the old arcade game Robotron 2084. Here's why:
- Put in a quarter, game starts. No bullshit story, no waiting 5 minutes for the game to let me do something. Gimme gimme now.
- Everything is constantly flashing colors. You never saw an 4-bit indexed RRRGGGBB pallette worked so hard. I love that. Fuck realism. Reality sucks.
- Objective is simple but has an element of depth to it. Shoot anything that moves except humans.
- This game has two joysticks, one for movement and one for fire. You have unlimited ammunition and can shoot many fast-moving missiles in any direction. Instantly. I don't have to turn around to shoot backwards. Yes.
- The balance is that you have anywhere from 10 to 100 enemies surrounding you trying to run into you and/or shoot you. So you get to blow up a lot of things. You HAVE to blow up a lot of things.
- So the game is HARD. The unlimited ammo does not help you as much as you think. You are constantly needing to move and keep one step ahead of everything.
- Because there are many things attacking you, and shooting at you, you will die a lot. So you HAVE to rescue the humans to earn extra lives.
- A multiplier is at work when you rescue humans. So the first is 1000, 2000, etc. up to 5000. Starts over when you die. Gives you a LOT of incentive to not just shoot absolutely everything that moves, but keep maneuvering through this always changing morass of robots trying to kill you and humans needing to be saved. Also, due to this, you are always forced to evaluate whether it's better to try to rescue a human or simply let them go. But you must keep an eye on your lives.
It's really the most engaging game I've ever played. Nothing else comes close to it.
It's true that once you've "killed" the boss and been told that he won't die, you can leave, but you'll have used up your resources in fighting the boss (particularly healing items, also weapon/armor damage to some extent) and you have to go back to grind for some more of them. Same effect--you need to use trial and error to win the fight, but you can't just restore from a save from before the fight to do the trial and error.
Also, the fact that you can't save means that any sane player would be very reluctant to kill non-hostile NPCs during the process of trial and error--for all you know, killing the NPC could permanently affect your game, and you can't just think "well, I'll kill the NPC and see if it lets me defeat the boss, if not I'll restore from a save from before I killed the NPC".
Gee, I wonder why people play them then...
Maybe it's because sandboxes, lego and dollshouses have emergent gameplay which can be really fun!