27
2008
10 Things Videogame Developers Are Doing Wrong
I love videogames, and I can’t think of a single person who doesn’t (unless we’re including Jack Thompson, but whether or not he qualifies as a person is another matter entirely). That said, I can’t help but spot glaring problems with the way the games industry works at the moment. I can’t imagine why people haven’t spotted these flaws and corrected them already, so here they are in all their splendour. There’s some unsavory language ahead, mind. You have been warned.
Let the good times roll.
1. Trying to shoehorn the Tutorial into the game’s narrative
Don’t, alright? If your character is supposed to be the world’s foremost expert on weaponry and close-range combat, then he or she probably doesn’t need a refresher course. Even if you have been retired for yay-many years… I mean, there’s a reason the Sinister Organisation have dragged you out of retirement, and it isn’t to make you learn all the shit you already know.
Solution: The tutorial should always be optional, e.g. Half-Life, Civilization IV.
2. Releasing a demo which is the first x minutes of the game
This goes almost hand-in-hand with Offense #1, as demos that pull this kind of shit more often than not stick the entire sodding tutorial in at the same time. The first few minutes of a game is never Grade A material. In story-driven games it’s usually expository rubbish, and the player is only going to have to suffer through it all over again if they choose to purchase the full game, which may cause them to question the value of the product they’ve just bought.
Solution: Either draw on later areas of the game for the demo (e.g. demos for Simon the Sorcerer, Heavenly Sword) or come up with some exclusive content especially made for the demo (e.g. demos for ATR: All Terrain Racing, Mashed).
3. Breaking the fourth wall over and over and over and over and over
If an NPC is telling me how to Z-lock on an object, if an expository character is giving me details on how to use the controller during “mission-critical” exposition, if a signpost reminds me that I can save at any time by pressing Start and selecting “Save Game”, then you’re Doing It Wrong. How can I immerse myself in your game when your characters aren’t even immersed themselves?
Solution: Either have unobtrusive messages appear on-screen (e.g. Grand Theft Auto 3, The Sims), or keep instructional gubbins in the manual (e.g. The Settlers).
4. Sacrificing gameplay for the story
This incorporates a number of offenses. Invisible barriers, for instance - if you don’t want your character to go off in one direction, don’t give them that direction. The same counts for knee-high fences and easily scalable trees that your uber-athletic character is somehow unable to traverse. It also includes sti8cking in ridiculously long cutscenes that give a shitload of exposition and push the story along but don’t do anything for the gamer - if the player hasn’t had to press a button on the controller in more than two minutes, your cutscene is too long.
Solution: Make your barriers convincing, or remove them. Alternatively write a novel instead, as videogames are not an ideal storytelling medium.
5. Sacrificing story for the gameplay
Developers have a horrible habit of building a game engine or coming up with some really cool Proof Of Concept stuff and then, when they decide they want to build a full-scale game out of it, trying to shoehorn a really shitty story in there. Take Gears of War, for instance. I really like the play mechanics of the game, but the plot is the most trite, generic, cliched mess of a scifi-war story I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter. If it were a novel, it’d be a trashy paperback published for a pittance and sold in airport book stores for $5. If it were a movie (and in a couple of years it will be, a New Line Cinema snatched up the rights last year) it’s be a straight to DVD affair so bad it’d make Starship Troopers 2 look positively glowing in comparison.
The reason Offenses 4 and 5 happen is because game developers are not, at their core, storytellers. They’re programmers and idea men, and more often than not these are the sort of people who come up with a story that they think sounds cool but in reality is a load of bollocks. Even when they bring in writers who have supposed experience at writing these sort of stories, they can only write about what they have to work with. If what they have to work with is “shitty generic aliens invade Earth with their shitty generic beetle faces and shitty generic weaponry” then their writing isn’t exactly going to glow.
Solution: Come up with an idea and just make a fucking game out of it. Don’t try to shoehorn a story in, just make the game fun. I mean, come on. Tetris didn’t have a story.
6. Genre-straddling and Sequelitis
Time was, you could come up with a game idea, knock together a Proof Of Concept and have it published, all in time for tea. Now if you come up with an idea you write a Design Document. You run it by various people and even on the off-chance that they like it you’re not on track yet. The Marketing Department, in all their glory, have to look at it and if they can’t find one iota of a concept in there that they can somehow market to some pre-determined hypothetical number of imaginary people then the game doesn’t happen. It’s as simple as that. I find it hard to imagine that a game as fun as Boom Blox, for instance, would have even made it out of EA’s doors were it not for Steven Spielberg’s name appearing on the cover. No, these days the Big Studios seem to be all about making Carbon-Copy FPS titles and sequels to already established brands. There’s no room for innovation, no breathing space for fresh ideas. The industry has become this incestuous mess of developers copying ideas off of other developers who have in turn copied their idea off of another developer who…. well, you get the picture. As everyone knows, if there isn’t enough variety in the genepool then the species dies out.
Solution: Start funding the development of unique, different titles.
7. Bitchfighting
On the rare occasion that a company doesn’t commit Offense 6 and a new idea is born, other companies are keen to jump on the bandwagon and milk that cow for all its worth. Guitar Hero developers Harmonix left the brand after Guitar Hero: Rock the 80s, and went off to develop Rock Band with MTV Games and EA. The problem is that when Activision knocked out Guitar Hero III on every system going (developed by a company who have made little else but Tony Hawk games for the past decade), the guitar for the PS3 version wasn’t compatible with the PS3 version of Rock Band. Harmonix wrote a patch, but Activision cock-blocked its release, basically saying “If you want to use our controller, you have to pay us royalties! MUahahaha!” In theory this is a sensible argument until you realise that cock-blockery like this doesn’t help to build the music-rhythm genre, but instead serves to make it more diluted.
The way Harmonix want to do it, you can use any guitar controller to play any guitar-themed game. The way Activision want to do it, you have to own a separate guitar controller for each game put out by a different company. With Rock Band 2, Guitar Hero IV and Konami’s Rock Revolution on the way, that’s a theoretical three guitars you’ll have to own. Consider that each of these games will also incorporate a proprietary drum-kit, and that each of these drumkits varies radically in design, and that’s a lot of fake plastic instruments.
Solution: Work together to sustain the genre you”ve created. Fighting like this only causes problems and will ultimately lead to consumers abandoning such a genre for fear of having Too Many Fucking Guitar Controllers.
8. Bullshitting about product (a.k.a. “Peter Molyneux Syndrome”)
This includes putting out screenshots that look far too good to be actual in-game footage (a.k.a “bullshot“), heavily promoting or playing up a feature of your game-in-progress that will never make it into the game, or trying to spin the news about your decision to exclude a feature to make it seem credible. In Peter Molyneux’s defense, he’s not intentionally out to piss people off - he’s just enthusiastic about his projects and it’s a shame that they seldom live up to his grand expectations. But Sony, though? They told us that the controller for the PS3 could have Tilt functionality or Rumble, but not both - the rumble would interfere with the Tilt, they said. A year later and bam! We have the DualShock3, a PlayStation 3 controller which features (gasp!) both Tilt and Rumble! What an age we live in. They also said that Microsoft’s tiered business model for the Xbox 360 - namely, putting out vastly differing “Core” and “Pro” models - wouldn’t work, and then they did the same thing themselves several years later. Tch.
Solution: Stop being such a bunch of Goddamn liars.
9. Knowingly putting out an unfinished or defective product
Oh man, where do I begin? How about citing any number of games published by Electronic Arts, who seem unwilling or, perhaps, unable to actually finish their games on time? Or how about Microsoft, with their fabled 33% failure rate on the Xbox 360? I could mention Nintendo’s glaring omission of a backlight on the first iteration of the Game Boy Advance, which is a bit of a curious exclusion when you consider that the Japanese were treated to a model of the Game Boy Pocket which featured just such a backlight not three years prior.
Similarly to this, don’t promise patches that ultimately never arrive. Worms developers Team 17 are perhaps the worst offenders on this front - we’re still waiting for a patch for Worms Forts: Under Siege, let alone fixes to the numerous glitches and bugs still present in the Xbox Live Arcade version of Worms.
Solution: Either finish the product on time or push back the release date. Don’t worry, we’ll wait.
10. Fucking over Europe & Australia
It may surprise you to learn that one of the deciding factors in my move from the UK to the US was that game publishers actually give a shit about American gamers, while those in Europe tend to get the short end of the stick. Nintendo of Europe are the worst offenders here: To date Super Smash Bros Brawl still hasn’t been released in European territories despite having been released in the US back in March. It took them three fucking years to get Animal Crossing out on the Game Cube. And despite advertising the product in several magazines and pre-orders being made available on online retailers such as Play.com, WarioWare: Twisted! never received a European release at all. For shame.
Solution: Europe is a pretty big place, and there are a lot of consumers there. Try to remember this.
I agree with a lot of this, with a few differences of opinion.
As for story, hire a good writer to put the story in the game, then have them work together with the developers to meld it into an awesome story.
I think we might be agreeing here, but a tutorial in game is good, but I like them in the form of several actions you must perform early on with the required actions/commands popping up on screen as opposed to someone telling you. A game could also include a more intense tutorial in addition for newer gamers.
Wait… so we’re made of stories but now we’re encouraging people not to write them? Hmm, actually, that’s an excellent idea. If we capitalise on the story market, we can sell our stories to people for ten times their market value!
Joking aside, I think you can tell decent stories via videogames (I mean, that’s basically what the entire adventure game genre is about) but you have to get decent writers in to do it, and have them on the same page as the programmers (so you don’t get a game that can’t support its story or vice-versa). I mean, you talk about making sure you’re immersed in the game world but without a decent story, there is no game world. I’ve never really considered myself immersed in the game world of Tetris as it’s a puzzle game - that’s like saying you find yourself immersed in the world of Uno when you play that.
Videogames are a better medium to tell a story in than films, theoretically (as they’re longer and thus have greater room for character and plot development). The problem is that most games makers are completely clueless when it comes to that area. It’s an evolving medium though so you’d hope that they’ll be some progress on this front, in the next twenty years or so.
I agree, but the Adventure Game genre has suffered a severe recession in the past 15 years and most of the big studios don’t want to touch the genre anymore (in a way I blame Doom, but then I remember how awesome Doom is and I realise I can’t stay mad at it forever). Games like the new Sam & Max titles are still trickling out, but Telltale are hardly a big studio, are they? And they don’t sell quite as well as some of the mindless shooters that EA and UbiSoft are churning out.
When you’re playing Tetris, you’re mind is focused on one thing and one thing only - the game. When you’re playing a game like Resident Evil 4, your mind should be focused on the game and the story, and the environment you inhabit. If an easily climbable wall blocks your way because the Developer didn’t really want to go to that far down the path, you’re immediately pulled out of the game world. I mean, I could climb over some of the “unscalable” barriers in RE4, but Leon S. Kennedy can’t? A trained agent apparently good enough to merit being assigned the dangerous task of rescuing the President’s daughter can’t hippedy-hop over a small fence, or climb over a stack o’ wood? That there just doesn’t compute.