I recently read this article on Next Gen and it got me thinking. After I stopped thinking how silly some of those rules were (don’t even get me started on peoples’ complaints about cut scenes), I started to think about what makes a good game. Yeah, I know, broad subject, but I think we can make this generic enough to pull important points from gaming in general, not from specific genres or titles. Fair warning, this is from a game player and armchair designer perspective, so while I believe in it whole heartedly, you have to take what works for you from it.
Let’s start with what the original article covers(for the most part).
Usability. What does that mean in terms of video games? For me, it means I don’t have to think of the interface. I don’t have to try to figure out what the designers of the game were thinking when they created it. I don’t have to remember what the red bar, blue bar, and green bar mean depending because it’s obvious. I don’t have to learn their lingo or that they like shift-right-click to select things. As a matter a fact, there should be multiple ways to do the same thing, because not everyone is going to attempt to do things the same. Blizzard does this really well. I can think of three different ways to cast healing spells in WoW off the top of my head, and I’m sure there are more. That’s what I mean. Make the interface intuitive, allow the user to do things the way they want, not just the way you want. It’s of huge importance and most companies (both in consoles and on PC) don’t get it.
Fun. Ooh, the hated word in any game discussion. I say eff (Note to editor, do we cuss ’round these parts? (Editor’s note: Fuck yes we do) that. Fun is the whole point of a game. Figure out your market and find out if it’s fun to them. Far too many games seem to skip this part. If you’re creating an RTS, don’t create a bulleted feature of a game and expect that to sell, create an experience. Cut features if needed, but create a game that is fun to your target audience. Is Halo 1 the best game ever (to switch genres)? Not hardly, but does it appeal to many different people on many different levels? Yeah. Bungie/Microsoft put a lot of effort into making the game fun. They didn’t add a slew of features that people aren’t going to use, as a matter fact, Halo 1 could easily be considered a streamlined FPS. It wasn’t just about the features or the graphic or so on. It was about the overall package and how the users reacted to it.
There is more to “fun” and a it’s a huge discussion you’ll find starring in flame wars all over the internet, but I don’t think it gets fair shake. The point of arguing about fun in a game shouldn’t be does it have this or that, does it do this right or that wrong, but is it fun? Is Company of Heroes fun? It sure is in multiplayer even with some of the believability lost to balance. Fun is the point of it, not what a tank should really do or what a flame thrower can really do.
Why do I bring up a such an apparently nebulous topic? Because far too many game developers can’t see the forest for the trees. They get lost in the game they’ve spent years making, they can’t see its flaws, see that it’s become bogged down in details, or that so much has been cut out that that it’s not fun anymore. They don’t know how to step back and take an honest look at it. They don’t know because they’re so wrapped up in the game’s development that they’re no longer good judges of the overall product. They need to test that sucker on audiences that aren’t so involved, be that friends, family, small beta tests of local gaming groups, etc. Every single game should be played by people that aren’t involved in the development of it as it gets closer and closer to the end of it’s life cycle. It’s just like working in QA. The best QA guys are the ones that remember what it’s like to be a new user, to be “dumb” in terms of the product they are working on. The best developers are the ones that can step back and objectively evaluate their game or can at least get objective help from the outside. This particular topic could probably be defined how to find the fun in your game, or how to find out if your game isn’t actually fun, but really, that’s far too may words.
Rewards. Yes, every single game should reward you for playing it. For many people it’s weird to think of games like that, but what are games when you break them down? They are reward systems on a scaling platform of difficultly. Yeah, it sounds pretty boring when you put it like that, but let’s step into it further for a moment, then we’ll pull back and see the results. First, why does a person play a game? Well if you’re not a gold farmer it’s to be entertained in one form or another. And how does that entertainment take form? Through rewards. In an RPG, for instance, it might be with the reward of a new companion, new story line, new phat l00tz, etc. In an FPS, it might be with a new gun, or a secret you find stashed behind a wall, or an amazing battle that you feel totally involved in. And so on. The point is that you’re being rewarded in one way or another. And to be fair, different rewards matter to different people, but that goes along with knowing your audience and what they like (for instance, you’ll find most FPS gamers don’t give a rat’s ass about how a gun looks if it’s the best gun in the game).
The idea of rewards is much like a rat in a maze. If the rat figures his way out of the maze, he’ll find some cheese at the end. That’s great. But what if the maze has a secret door? If the rat figures that out and makes it through it, he should get a reward there too. And what if behind the secret door is another rat tied up and the rat uses his mighty rat brain to figure out a way to free him? He should get another reward. That is the idea. Everything the player does, that you want him/her to do, should earn them a reward. Remember Dungeon Siege? I loved that game because of it’s amazing engine. Sure, it had detail problems, but the engine itself was pretty cool with never visibly loading areas, and it had these huge lands to explore (I’m an explorer type), with caves to find and secrets to get. Or so I thought. See, near when you first start, if you head off the beaten path a bit, you’ll find a giant bear you can barely manage to defeat and in that cave with him is a suit of armor that gives some cool stats at the time. I was so happy I can’t even tell you. It was a dream come true, but then I went further on; almost every other secret area, caves off the beaten path, areas under waterfalls, they didn’t have any rewards. You didn’t get crap for finding them, other than some more monsters to fight. Hot fucking damn. It was probably the most disappointing thing about the game, besides the last hour of boringness.
Players need to be rewarded, to be trained how to play your game. Take Team Fortress 2, for instance, a game that’s often fun to play on random public servers. That’s almost unheard for multiplayer FPS games. Usually part of the game is finding good servers that are well moderated because otherwise you’ll get jackasses that just aren’t playing the game, but more or less trying to destroy it. That hardly ever happens in TF2. Why? Because you’re rewarded for playing the right way in TF2. You’re rewarded when you build teleporters as an engineer, you’re rewarded when the guy you’re healing as a medic gets kills or simply doesn’t die, you’re rewarded when you complete team objectives and it will say your name in big letter across the top right of everyone’s screen “wzrd defended the capture point!”. It makes people want to play the game the right way, the way that’s fun for everyone and for your own progress.
Rewards are the key. They drive the gameplay, they drive the player and teach everyone how to play your game without forcing them to play it a specific way. Just look at the first 20 levels of WoW. That’s a god damn reward fest.
Other things. Sure, a whole pile of other things go into making a good game, but if you cover those three above, you’ll have a winner. Now sure, it’s often non-trivial to find the fun in a game. Especially as a developer who has been working on a game for 2+ years. Usability is very easy to say, but if you pay attention to software in general, it’s often not so easy to implement. And while rewards seems pretty straight forward, it also requires a lot of work. You can’t just design big boxy levels and expect people to be interested. You have to design engaging levels with rewards, challenges (the reason for rewards), and often spiffy looking architecture to keep people involved.
Two things I purposely didn’t mention. One, graphics. Yes, graphics are important, but they aren’t the end all be all either. You can have mediocre graphics and still have a successful game if meet the first three requirements above. More and more graphics are reaching a bit of a plateau, and while there is still room for improvement, it’s not as important as it was just a few years ago for sales. Two, challenge. I didn’t get into this because rewards are really the point. You shouldn’t have rewards without challenges, but the level of challenges and how they scale should be based on the game, the game players, and the system (auto-aim on the console is a must, not so much on the PC). Third (I love doing that), this doesn’t take account other pressures game development houses often face, like deadlines from publishers. Those can drastically affect a game, shockingly enough.
The biggest thing to remember when designing and developing games for us, the gamers, is that we’re a fickle lot. Follow the rules above, ask around to get objective opinions on your game, and be sure listen to your users and forums. I know, 90% is noise, the other stuff can be very useful. Just ask Verant about Shaman potions(As a launch day EQ player, ZekeDMS agrees wholeheartedly with this). But don’t, and this key, water down your game or try to fit in things that don’t really fit just because random people want it in. You need to try to balance the players visions with yours. Make a game you love, tempered with the will of the people that will be playing it and you’ll create magic in a bottle. And then the magic will torn down by the likes of me and others. I know you can’t wait.
