design a game for the sake of making a good game

[Don]

Recently I was reading the history of Slam Dunk the manga, which is the highest number sold per volume manga ever, how it stopped at volume 31 because the author decided that was the last best game he could write about. Even though Slam Dunk was practically a license to print money, he decided it wasn't going to continue if it wasn't going to be measure up to itself and walked away. So this got me thinking. How many games are the same? Now games are obviously more commercial in nature due to their scope, and making money is not a sin, but I feel a vast majority of games compromise to put stuff that'd make it sell more. I'd say that you cannot sell for large numbers, certainly not > 1 million, without compromising some *pure* aspects of a game. That is not to say small budget games are any purer (they could be striving for money too, just smaller amounts).

I have never played Katamari Damancy, but I think that'd be the prototypical game designed for pure gaming's sake. It's hard for me to imagine the developer came up with such a whacky concept and say 'this will make us all rich!' But beyond Katamari, what others games are like that? I think ever since game design become a big business thing, games by their nature has to sacrifice for commercial aspect just because it takes way too much money to develop one now, but there are a few games I think that still cares more for delivering an experience than making money.

My list of such games would be:

1. Skies of Arcadia
2. Vagrant Story
3. Xenogears

Skies of Arcadia certainly has plenty of your generic RPG aspect designed to drag out the game, and stuff to make people buy hint books or use the Dreamcast's online service thing. But I think the game has enough vision to consider it as gaming for gaming's sake. I don't know if it's related to the fact that nothing on Dreamcast sold very well so nothing on DC ever had good commercial success. Despite the game's significant shortcomings, I can't imagine you've a world as fun as Skies of Arcadia to explore in, and they only created this world to sell more copies or hint books. I consider the game's plot secondary to the exploration aspect.

Vagrant Story obviously is under some commercial pressure to succeed, as gameplay was extended from about 6 hours to 20 hours to fill in your obligatory "X hours of gameplay" quota on the back of the box. But even though the game added 14 hours of puzzles that involve pushing boxes, I think the game's vision still shows. It is almost like watching a play. When the game ends, everything is still fresh in your mind. There is no convoluted plot to follow. Everyone that shows up is basically important, and there are only a few important guys. It tells the story exactly it needs to. I also consider the gameplay secondary to the environment of this game. I think it's a testament to the game's compactness when you've characters that only show up in about 2 scenes in the ending, and you still know who they are. It's not necessarily because they're memorable, but because the game doesn't waste time with useless stuff so that you end up forgetting why soandso is even here in the first place.

Of course, if Vagrant Story is a game about compactness, Xenogears would be the opposite. Xenogears certainly has a lot of commercial expectations, but I find it hard anyone can actually believe such a long-winded game was going to succeed commercially. The game was painfully too long and convoluted, but it stuck to its longwinded way the whole time. Supposedly the 2nd CD got changed to the 1-hour-of-text-at-a-time format because it'd have taken too long, but I think if they didn't have all these narrated scenes with the cross of Nisan swinging in the background, the whole game would've been ludricously long, like taking 100 hours to finish, which would kill any chance of commercial success. Even though at the end I don't even know who my party members are or why they are with me, you have to respect that the game designers had a vision and they were going to tell their convoluted story no matter what.

[SineSwiper]

Personally, I liked Xenogears' story. And I liked Chrono Cross's story. Maybe I've grown out of "farm boy becomes 'The Chosen One' to save the world from a god" tired RPG formula.

[Kupek]

I have never played Katamari Damancy

You need to fix this, right away. Really, it's just pure fun.

I'll have to nominate Chrono Trigger. It was hyped on launch, and they purposefully assembled a dream team to develop it, but I still get the impression that Square trusted the team and let them do what they wanted. I think this is evident in how many little details the game has, yet how compact it is. If you know what you're doing, you can beat the game in 10 hours. They were allowed to deviate from JRPG gameplay conventions - no random battles, small overworld(s) with painless navigation, and, of course, the New Game+ system plus its added endings.

There's also Cave Story, which I haven't played. But it's actually freeware, and people fall over themselves praising it.

[Zeus]

Tetris. I've played many variations (Super Tetris 3 is my fav) but nothing ever really doesn't anything to it other than some online play. There's nothing else to do really and no reason to do anything else. They've been milking it since the Gameboy with no real innovations at all.

Chrono Cross was such a worthy sequel. If not, I'd agree with Kupek on that one too.

[Don]

I didn't include anything before the PSX era. Back when games didn't cost millions to make it was obviously easier to not worry about the financial bottom line. Street Fighter 2 would be another good example of a game that didn't seem to be designed with commercial success in mind (though certainly all the quasi sequels were)

I'm not particularly interested in whether the game is good or not. I certainly liked Xenogears less than the other two games I mentioned. I don't think I'll enjoy Katamari Damancy. But it's pretty obvious Xenogears had its vision and it's not going to let its sales affect that. They had some crazy story and the game was determined to tell you about it even if it means losing interest of 90% of gamers. Chrono Cross I felt was a pretty standard game whose goal was trying to make as much money as possible and employs all the standard RPG devices to drag out a game to boost sales. Like Kupek mentioned, although Chrono Trigger certainly was successful commercially, there's no part of the game I feel that exists only to help it sell more copies. Every part of the game seems to be there to deliver an enjoyable gaming experience.

I think once the game makers realize that hint book sales account for a huge part of their revenue, that's when you start having more games that only exist to sell more hint books. The increasing cost of game development contributes to this, though.

[Kupek]

I get where you're coming from now. We're far less likely to see games with a clear vision now due to the cost of development. Perhaps Bioshock? I haven't played it, so I can't say for sure if they made any concessions to make it more popular. Portal probably qualifies, but it wasn't a stand-alone game.

As an aside, give Katamari a chance. It's one of the few times where better technology bred new gameplay. While the idea of the game is technically possible on the original PS, the limited resources of that system would not have allowed for its scope. (I don't think the PS could have handled the scale changes due to limited RAM.)

[Zeus]

You don't really make games without the possible commercial success in mind anymore, particularly not with the sheer costs of development. How can you get funding if you don't present a business case with projections, etc.

No game hasn't made concessions in recent memory to try and sell more copies, including:

1) Bioshock - I somehow doubt it was Levine's idea to put a Vita-Chamber every 7 feet
2) Mario Galaxy - it's Mario, it's always made for the masses, hence the relative ease
3) Halo 3 - tired-and-true gameplay (see: Doom) with high-profile cutscenes and a ridiculous marketing campaign?

You want to see games where no concessions are made? Check out flash games and/or the XNA Community or iPoD games that are coming. Heck, the game I'm working on now is made with the specific intent to appeal to a mass market....and I'm just a hobbyist. Other than that, every game not only has concessions but has its design driven by marketing data.

Unless I'm missing the actual point here....

On a side note: hint books are all but dead now. They've really become quite niche and they are dwindling yearly. You don't see nearly as many as we used to although RPGs tend to get the greater proportion of them. But even those will go the way of the dodo soon enough. You can thank online guides and Gamefaqs for that