Re:Gamers never know what's good for them
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
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· Score: 2, Insightful
For example, having instant-save anywhere sounds fun until you have it, at which point you realize there's no challenge to a game. You can just play like an idiot and rewind whenever you make a mistake. At that point you could throw your console controller into a paintmixer and it would eventually "win". Fun = gone.
Yes, it's true! No (Half-Life) game (Max Payne) has (Thief) ever (Advance Wars) let (Starcraft) you (Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory) save (Psychonauts) anywhere (Baldur's Gate) and been any good.
Imagine if there was a game series where you actually could rewind (Prince of Persia) time. It would totally suck and not recieve any critical (Sands of Time) or commerical (Warrior Within) success and would certainly not spawn a third sequel.
Err that's not a counter-example. That's proof that there are plenty of good ideas out there if only people would actually impliment them.
They did a post-mortem in Game Developer where they explained about how they financed the game by MORTAGING THEIR HOUSES. The end of the post-mortem is an apology/thank-you to their spouses and loved ones for putting up with them as they stuggled through a whole lot of uncertainty and near financial ruin. They talk a great deal about the hurdles that they had to overcome while making the game, and the issues they faced with expanding the content and making it work and run on consoles along with getting approval from the console makers and finding a publisher that they could work with and trust.
All of this supports the grandparent's point that there are lots of great game ideas but that actually making a great game takes a huge amount of time and effort and risk. Imagine if the game hadn't done well? The guy would have LOST HIS HOUSE.
Most people are not willing to put their personal lives at risk like this, to say nothing of the sheer quantity of person-hours and attention to detail that it takes to actually take a game from pitch to publication.
The grand parent is exactly right. I work on mobile games. Our company has literally hundreds of great game ideas floating around - we keep a list. The explanations of any one of these ideas takes about half-a-page. The design docs are like 50-100 pages and mobile games are pretty simple creatures. I can only imagine the monstrosities that are console and PC design docs.
What?! $2000 is LOW! I mean, come on! It only includes the cost of the system, TV and speakers!
They totally left out the price of extra controllers ($30 x 3), a router ($50), broadband access ($40/month), wires ($20), home theatre cabinet ($200), couch ($500), foot stool ($80), snacks ($5/day) and house ($100,000-$1,000,000).
I could cost you as much as $102,902.00 to play Xbox 360! And that's assuming that you get a relatively modest house and does not count your monthly expenses. Truly, we are at a crossroads were the gaming community will be divided into the haves and the havenots. It will be a crisis, my friends. A true crisis.
"Simulations"? Awesome! I was worried that I was a slowly weakening pasty-faced desk jockey wasting my life in the cold blue glow of a computer monitor but maybe that's not true.
If this bill passes it will be LEGAL PROOF that I am actually a expertly-trained bad-ass motherfucker.
One of the reasons that they used the gibberish languages in KOTOR was that they sometimes needed to rewrite plot dialogue or other information at the last minute. Very often in these kinds of games, playtesting will require you to change dialogue or instructions for quests in a substantial way very close to the end of production.
If this happened, they'd just change the character into an Alien and give it gibberish to say, thus saving them from having to get back into the studio to spend more money on more recordingsor having to try to re-hire the same voice actor and all that badness.
I would guess that Tho Fan did a similar thing for them in Jade Empire.
The problem is that 95% of deaths are not heroic. They are crappy and random, like "My brother kicked my router" or "I was trying to send a message to Hagar the Destroyer and some guy snuck up on me and killed me" or "I had my inventory open and an Ogre spawned next to me" or "I wandered into the wrong area and was eaten by a grue".
Insane unites, complex commands and unit construction...
When I was a kid, we invented a variation on chess. There were, like, twice as many units, some of them moved using dice, some units could come back to life I think at one point we raided a stratego box for playing peices. We might have even used the Stratego board.
This game was much more complex than chess but it was not a better game.
The legal system is one of the main reasons why I hardly ever leave my bedroom...in my mind having virtually anything to do with offline society these days is suicidal.
LOL!!!11!! So true! I liek 2 spend my time on teh bastion of sanity, reasoned discussion, friendly compassion and OFMG respectful appreciation that is teh Intarnet!11!!!1!one!!1111
You are very bad at reading. If 18% of the movies that are released are rated R it doesn't mean that 18% of the movies that children are allowed to see are rated R. It just means that under 20% of the movies that are released are rated R, which means that 80% of the movies are PG or G.
Now go back and read that but replace R with M, PG with T and G with E.
Except that for some people, playing dressup with their car *is* an important part of the gameplay. Once you understand that, you realize that - for the target audience - NFS:U 2 is actually quite a good game.
Complaining that there is too much focus on the car-look upgrade gamplay in NFSU is like complaining that in The Sims 2 they spent too much time on developing ways for the characters to interact instead of focusing on the core gameplay from the first game which was clearly the peeing mechanics.
Here's the thing. Under your definition, there are about a zillion World Class Game Designers. By which I mean, people like you who have a few good ideas for things they'd like to try.
But that's not what makes a world class game designer. A real world class game designer actually goes out and puts the ideas into action. When you say things like "it's hard to make a game without a team" welcome to part of the job of a game designer: corraling a team!
Ideas are cheap. At our last pitch meeting (where we go over potential game ideas and narrow the focus down to one or two games that we will actually make) we had over 50 ideas any one of which could have made a pretty good or even really great game. We only have time to work on one of those. I guarantee you that every other game company in the world is in the same boat. For every game that they publish they have dozens of really great ideas that they don't have the time or resources to make. So when you come up to them and say "I have some really great ideas" don't be surprised if they kind of laugh at you. They already have too many great ideas. Why would they want more?
Game design is not coming up with great ideas. Game design is taking great ideas and then hitting them until they bleed pages and pages of technical specifications that tell the programmers, artists, sound engineers, writers and QA team exactly what to do to make the game really great. Then going and cutting half of your great ideas due to time constraints. Then going back and rewriting half of what's left so that it'll fit within current hardware limitations. Then testing the ideas on real people and finding out that some of your solutions to problems don't work and fixing them. And doing this over and over again.
Game design, like just about any difficult creative tasks is not about the inspiration that starts it but about the hours of stubborn persistence that gets it done.
It's very exciting that you've worked out the market with your brilliant analysis. Perhaps you should tell this to companies like Gameloft (who made $25million US in 2004) so that they can escape their sinking ship.
Don't mistake a bad product for a bad market. Games are alive and well on cellphones, just not on N-Gage.
Well, the thing is that gaming circles are pretty big thse days. And just about everyone who went to see a movie recently has probably seen Master Chief. There are huge billboards in downtown Toronto with Jak and Rachet on them. Everyone know who Lara Croft is.
I think that Mascots are doing just fine, just that it's different mascots.
In 5 to 10 years you won't care because your biopods will be jacked directly into the matrix and they'll be running full featured Half-Life emulators in there.
I think that it's exiting that you have a direct line to the universe that contains the Platonic Forms of videogames and was wondering if you'd like to come and work for my company to tell me how the games I make are intended to be.
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For example, having instant-save anywhere sounds fun until you have it, at which point you realize there's no challenge to a game. You can just play like an idiot and rewind whenever you make a mistake. At that point you could throw your console controller into a paintmixer and it would eventually "win". Fun = gone.
Yes, it's true! No (Half-Life) game (Max Payne) has (Thief) ever (Advance Wars) let (Starcraft) you (Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory) save (Psychonauts) anywhere (Baldur's Gate) and been any good.
Imagine if there was a game series where you actually could rewind (Prince of Persia) time. It would totally suck and not recieve any critical (Sands of Time) or commerical (Warrior Within) success and would certainly not spawn a third sequel.
Good luck with your paint-mixer AI though.
Counterexample: Alien Hominid.
Err that's not a counter-example. That's proof that there are plenty of good ideas out there if only people would actually impliment them.
They did a post-mortem in Game Developer where they explained about how they financed the game by MORTAGING THEIR HOUSES. The end of the post-mortem is an apology/thank-you to their spouses and loved ones for putting up with them as they stuggled through a whole lot of uncertainty and near financial ruin. They talk a great deal about the hurdles that they had to overcome while making the game, and the issues they faced with expanding the content and making it work and run on consoles along with getting approval from the console makers and finding a publisher that they could work with and trust.
All of this supports the grandparent's point that there are lots of great game ideas but that actually making a great game takes a huge amount of time and effort and risk. Imagine if the game hadn't done well? The guy would have LOST HIS HOUSE.
Most people are not willing to put their personal lives at risk like this, to say nothing of the sheer quantity of person-hours and attention to detail that it takes to actually take a game from pitch to publication.
The grand parent is exactly right. I work on mobile games. Our company has literally hundreds of great game ideas floating around - we keep a list. The explanations of any one of these ideas takes about half-a-page. The design docs are like 50-100 pages and mobile games are pretty simple creatures. I can only imagine the monstrosities that are console and PC design docs.
What?! $2000 is LOW! I mean, come on! It only includes the cost of the system, TV and speakers!
They totally left out the price of extra controllers ($30 x 3), a router ($50), broadband access ($40/month), wires ($20), home theatre cabinet ($200), couch ($500), foot stool ($80), snacks ($5/day) and house ($100,000-$1,000,000).
I could cost you as much as $102,902.00 to play Xbox 360! And that's assuming that you get a relatively modest house and does not count your monthly expenses. Truly, we are at a crossroads were the gaming community will be divided into the haves and the havenots. It will be a crisis, my friends. A true crisis.
"Simulations"? Awesome! I was worried that I was a slowly weakening pasty-faced desk jockey wasting my life in the cold blue glow of a computer monitor but maybe that's not true.
If this bill passes it will be LEGAL PROOF that I am actually a expertly-trained bad-ass motherfucker.
Err, it's E3. This is a week of Marketing Blitz. It happens every year new console or no.
Besides, you don't seriously think that the marketing will stop once launch day hits do you?
"Oh Noes! Sony's CGI was prettier than our CGI! Cancel everything!"
One of the reasons that they used the gibberish languages in KOTOR was that they sometimes needed to rewrite plot dialogue or other information at the last minute. Very often in these kinds of games, playtesting will require you to change dialogue or instructions for quests in a substantial way very close to the end of production.
If this happened, they'd just change the character into an Alien and give it gibberish to say, thus saving them from having to get back into the studio to spend more money on more recordingsor having to try to re-hire the same voice actor and all that badness.
I would guess that Tho Fan did a similar thing for them in Jade Empire.
Ugh, if he talks about "kicking ass and taking names" again this year or something equally inane, I swear, I am going to throw something at him.
Don't do it! He'll kick your ass and take your name!
The problem is that 95% of deaths are not heroic. They are crappy and random, like "My brother kicked my router" or "I was trying to send a message to Hagar the Destroyer and some guy snuck up on me and killed me" or "I had my inventory open and an Ogre spawned next to me" or "I wandered into the wrong area and was eaten by a grue".
What, they managed to fit the whole thing in one picture?
Hilariously, they didn't.
And if only, IF ONLY, the prices on video games would drop over time. Then, my friends, we would live in paradise.
Insane unites, complex commands and unit construction...
When I was a kid, we invented a variation on chess. There were, like, twice as many units, some of them moved using dice, some units could come back to life I think at one point we raided a stratego box for playing peices. We might have even used the Stratego board.
This game was much more complex than chess but it was not a better game.
The legal system is one of the main reasons why I hardly ever leave my bedroom...in my mind having virtually anything to do with offline society these days is suicidal.
LOL!!!11!! So true! I liek 2 spend my time on teh bastion of sanity, reasoned discussion, friendly compassion and OFMG respectful appreciation that is teh Intarnet!11!!!1!one!!1111
You are very bad at reading. If 18% of the movies that are released are rated R it doesn't mean that 18% of the movies that children are allowed to see are rated R. It just means that under 20% of the movies that are released are rated R, which means that 80% of the movies are PG or G.
Now go back and read that but replace R with M, PG with T and G with E.
Except that for some people, playing dressup with their car *is* an important part of the gameplay. Once you understand that, you realize that - for the target audience - NFS:U 2 is actually quite a good game.
Complaining that there is too much focus on the car-look upgrade gamplay in NFSU is like complaining that in The Sims 2 they spent too much time on developing ways for the characters to interact instead of focusing on the core gameplay from the first game which was clearly the peeing mechanics.
Here's the thing. Under your definition, there are about a zillion World Class Game Designers. By which I mean, people like you who have a few good ideas for things they'd like to try.
But that's not what makes a world class game designer. A real world class game designer actually goes out and puts the ideas into action. When you say things like "it's hard to make a game without a team" welcome to part of the job of a game designer: corraling a team!
Ideas are cheap. At our last pitch meeting (where we go over potential game ideas and narrow the focus down to one or two games that we will actually make) we had over 50 ideas any one of which could have made a pretty good or even really great game. We only have time to work on one of those. I guarantee you that every other game company in the world is in the same boat. For every game that they publish they have dozens of really great ideas that they don't have the time or resources to make. So when you come up to them and say "I have some really great ideas" don't be surprised if they kind of laugh at you. They already have too many great ideas. Why would they want more?
Game design is not coming up with great ideas. Game design is taking great ideas and then hitting them until they bleed pages and pages of technical specifications that tell the programmers, artists, sound engineers, writers and QA team exactly what to do to make the game really great. Then going and cutting half of your great ideas due to time constraints. Then going back and rewriting half of what's left so that it'll fit within current hardware limitations. Then testing the ideas on real people and finding out that some of your solutions to problems don't work and fixing them. And doing this over and over again.
Game design, like just about any difficult creative tasks is not about the inspiration that starts it but about the hours of stubborn persistence that gets it done.
It's very exciting that you've worked out the market with your brilliant analysis. Perhaps you should tell this to companies like Gameloft (who made $25million US in 2004) so that they can escape their sinking ship.
Don't mistake a bad product for a bad market. Games are alive and well on cellphones, just not on N-Gage.
And despite thousands of testimonials like yours, the "Sony PlayStation 2: It's fun to fix!" campaign never really took off.
Well, the thing is that gaming circles are pretty big thse days. And just about everyone who went to see a movie recently has probably seen Master Chief. There are huge billboards in downtown Toronto with Jak and Rachet on them. Everyone know who Lara Croft is.
I think that Mascots are doing just fine, just that it's different mascots.
Errm they did. You just need to snag the collector's edition and you can have a zergling as a pet.
Please, yes! And while you're at it, make some scheduling software for so that I can claim that it's my PDA and I need it at meetings.
In 5 to 10 years you won't care because your biopods will be jacked directly into the matrix and they'll be running full featured Half-Life emulators in there.
Unless you count the iQue. But they're not terribly likely to do it here, they've already worked out that they can sell the classics one at a time.
What's next is a lawfirm called Mofo.
I think that it's exiting that you have a direct line to the universe that contains the Platonic Forms of videogames and was wondering if you'd like to come and work for my company to tell me how the games I make are intended to be.