I spent some time going playing an old game last week, Gears of War. I'm playing it because back when I first tried it out a few years ago I didn't really know or care for the achievement system, so I'm making up for it now. I also enjoy the Gears of War story, so this is like a refresher. Going through the campaign story again on insane in coop mode has been fun, but what I've noticed the most in the game are wha seems to be painfully bad design choices made regarding the game.
The stuff I'm going to rant about in this post exists in many games. These issues just happen to really bug me as I worked with a friend to replay the game and chase old achievements. Let's start with one of the most painful and annoying ones, cut scenes. In general I'm a fan of the cut scenes. They add to the game, if you're really interested in the story, and can show some excellent computer generated graphic detail. However, if you're playing a portion of the game and have difficulty with it, such as dying over and over again, a mandatory cut scene that you can't skip, you can only play for so long before you want rip you hair out. Unfortunately, in Gears of War playing through on insane difficulty, we ran into this issue quite a bit. This also leads into a second annoying design, checkpoints.
Checkpoints are supposed to be your saving grace, and help a player through their domination of the game's campaign. However, I'm not sure if game designers built the checkpoints based on normal difficulty in play through because when playing certain sections of the game, on its hardest difficulty, it is amazing what little things can ruin your enthusiasm to continue. Again, playing Gears of War with my friend, it seemed we would run into these long stretches of action in the game that were difficult to cope with, and we would end up restarting at the last checkpoint.. Even as we progressed through that section, one of us would die only to find out we had to completely restart the whole segment. Adding to the pain, imagine a long segment preceded by a cut scene, TORTURE!! Yes, definitely, not fun. So, the checkpoints become an issue if there are not enough, or if they are poorly spaced in the game.
Other thoughts for annoying game design can be music. Some games make AMAZING music, for instance Martin O'Donnell of Bungie. I own every Halo soundtrack he's made and I love them all. In fact, I recently came across a website listing tour dates and locations as a traveling symphony (http://www.videogameslive.com/) visits many worldwide locations specifically playing the music from popular games. However, even with these genius music creations, there's the share of experience in gaming with music that may be close to listening to fingernails running down a chalkboard. Granted, the game music may not start out that way, but tack on those annoying un-skippable cut scenes and lack of checkpoints hitting you in the face over and over, and your tolerance for anything will drop like the price of a poorly marketed or unpopular game (aka: Bayonetta, Kane & Lynch 2).
Typically, I think if you follow a game that is in a series, you will see the game designers build off the community feedback and be cognizant of what gamers want out of the next game. However, it is the year 2010 and gaming has been around for over 30 years. We still find games that have nasty annoyances built into them, and we just end up dealing with it. They have colleges now that help focus on game design, but I think in the end its experience...just catching past mistakes and growing from them.
Keep the good games coming!
on the difficulty setting, I would say game developers plan and focus the game's balance towards "normal" or easy difficulty. That is because only like 20% of players actually finish a game. And that is probably on Normal/Easy. The percentage of those who finish on Insane? Next to no one. So, you have to plan and focus on the bigger picture. As they say, you can't please everyone.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, as far as gaming for 30 years, the consumers who play your games has changed DRASTICALLY. Including those of us that played games. The games that I used to be able to tolerate 10, 15, 20 years ago, are maddingly frustrating now. Gamers have been "dumbed down" in many ways. Like take for example, when BioShock came out, I was like "WOW you can't die! wtf?!" BUt this turned out to be a great game design factor. How fucking annoying was it to play Mega Man (a game I know and love)? But I just bought it on XBLA, and dang! that game is HARD and annoying. One checkpoint for the entire level, midway through? And you only have x lives and then you have to start over from SCRATCH!!?
ReplyDeleteThat is how it was. So if you go back to older games I think you will find a trend that they tend to get harder and less forgiving. Kids today and people in general have so little time to spend playing games that if you make them frustrating, or too hard, then you lose your audience very quickly. And then they are not coming back.
Great points Andy, and I like the perspective you bring since you're in the gaming industry. A note I forgot to make in the original post of annoying items in games, is also sometimes around my favorite thing: Achievements. I'm guessing these were created after Alpha staging in a game, but seriously, some of these achievement creators are making it an extremely ridiculous task to complete. For example, reaching level 100 in Gears of War II. I will be participating in the 31XP event this weekend. I probably have 10 hours of play time needed, and I've definitely put in over 200 on that game online already. I can't imagine getting level 100 w/o the massive boosting XP weekends.
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