You know not all games are created equally…and neither are all game companies. Some have the best and brightest talent to pool from and a large amount of money and resources to develop games with. Let’s face it if Call of Duty or Halo didn’t have the benefit of time, great people, programmers, and of course huge sums of money to back them would they have really been as good as they are?
Some companies out there are small and do not have the resources to produce triple A titles like Gears of War for example. But both big and small companies have one thing that can control the destiny of the game they are developing, choice. Choice is everything in game-design, and by what I mean is that a few design decisions can really make a game soar to new heights such as Assassins Creed which started out as a Prince of Persia title. Assassins Creed is the end result of Ubisoft trying to get away from Prince of Persia and create something new and that spun into new game design choices that has elevated it into a celebrated franchise.
But sometimes choice can also have terrible consequences and in the end this once proud game turns into a nightmare for the consumer. All this is because of a few simple game design choices. Lets take the game FUEL, an open world sandbox style racer that has the largest playable area ever at 5000 square miles to traverse through. Now Fuel was developed by ASOBO game studios which was made up of the former Kalisto Entertainment who created Nightmare Creatures. Fuel has three design choices that really in all honesty kept from being a huge hit, one of which is the archaic design choice of having to place first in the career races. Second or Third means nothing as you have to place first or you start the race all over.
The biggest problem with that is many racing games like Dirt 2 and Need for Speed have gone out-of-the-way to allow you to progress even if you don’t come in first place. Progression is important and nobody wants to play the same race over and over again, considering some of Fuel’s races can last up to 20 minutes. You earn stars in Fuel which is how you can unlock new areas of the map to race in. Which brings me back to this design choice of limited progression. You see Fuel allows you to earn stars but only in career races. You choose to race under Rookie, Normal, and Pro. You earn one star for completing the race on each difficulty. The problem is that in order to unlock every zone in the map you have to race on the hardest or Pro difficulty. This earns you 3 stars. So it’s pointless to play on the lower difficulty levels that you choose before a race. Because once you complete the race on the hardest difficulty the bottom two are blackened out, Pro difficulty gives you the total amount of stars.
These two simple but incredibly flawed game design choices really hampered the entire experience of the game. In Fuel there are challenges which earn you fuel or the currency of the game but no stars and other things of the sort. If you could earn stars all the time like modern shooters have perks and unlocks this would have made the game a greater success. Another fatal design choice in my mind that Asobo did was simply not allowing you to use vehicles you purchase in any race you want. The game forces you to use vehicles in a class, the problem with a game that touts 75 plus vehicles to unlock when you play some races the CPU controlled racers often at times have better vehicles than you do.So while you may have 30 plus cars and or other vehicles unlocked you will still be limited to what the design choice allows.
Any open world game that closes its borders in my opinion is bad. Had Asobo did this differently it is no doubt in my mind that we the gaming community would be playing Fuel 2 by now. Not to mention the almost always prevalent “Rubberbanding” that really needs to be removed from games all together, causing winning a race on the Pro difficulty incredibly hard and frustrating.
When developers are designing games “Choice” is everything. Think about it, how many games over the years have you played and thought man if only they would have done this or that then this would be so much better. Gamers out there may not know how to make game but we sure know what makes a game worthwhile or not. Something we see while playing and thinking how could they not see that this design choice just made this so much less fun to play.
Yes developers are gamers, and so is everybody that works on them, but I think they forget where they come from. They get paid to make the games now, where prior they paid for the games just like you and me. Developers should really take stock in the consumer and ask us our opinion. Also they should look to successful games and ask what makes that such a great game, and can we somehow incorporate some of those designs. Just as God of War borrowed heavily from Devil May Cry, both of which are successful franchise but Bayonetta took it even a step further and again was a successful game when it was released. Incorporating the next step into a game which we see a lot with running and hitting cover thanks to Gears of War as an example, isn’t stealing but simply that is the next step in the game world to make it more dynamic because games that come out without it are generally looked down upon.
That was all design choice and for Gears of War, Mass Effect, Army of Two, and others cover mechanics we can thank the makers of Dynasty Warriors. Omega Force created third person cover mechanics with the game WINBACK and it was the first game to do so back on the N64 days. So making a simple choice in games can really create some incredible franchises. We continue to purchase them and play them because the developers really knew how to handle the various game mechanics in a way that was both rewarding and well executed. Other game companies continue to create games and make design choices during the development of a game that can and will negatively impact the game, and such can even ruin companies because that’s how much is at stake.
I leave the developer with this.
Remember gamers want a game that they feel like it’s not a chore to play, it should be fun and reasonably difficult, with progression that makes sense. We don’t want the developer making something that makes us frustrated, angry, upset and willing to say ‘screw it’ and take it back to our local video game store and trade it in. So if your game has some “questionable design choices” well don’t abandon it because it didn’t sell just fix it with updates and or DLC and then tell us about it because we just might give your game another go.
