Designing games and feedback

[Don]

So one thing I've been thinking is that we all know that hardcore fans are not really all that useful anymore. They're likely the most needy and don't even pay more than anyone else and often have no idea what they're talking about, so a developer should ignore someone like me, for example. But then if not the hardcore, where do you get your feedback from? The casuals? Those are probably guys who will say something like "your game will be much better if everything cost 1/10 as much". While I don't hold the hardcore community in much self esteem, it's awfully hard for me to see any game successful based on the feedback from the majority.

Of course, do you even need feedback? It's not like Miyamoto went to the Internet and asked people if they'd like a Zelda or a Mario game. Why shouldn't individual vision/brilliance be all that's needed? Well, the latest Zelda game isn't going to be shipped with half of the features missing that you got to wait for a patch or a DLC. At least outside of console, it seems like feedback is needed because you usually end up shipping an unfinished product and you're interested in whatever feature that'll likely make more money on the DLC later. But why not just finish the game in the first place? Is game development either so expensive or so inefficient that you can't expect a game to be complete anymore? But I see the Chinese guys come up with interesting mods for games using fairly rudimentary tools that'd definitely be sold for DLC if they're on Steam. I heard games with support for modding like Skyrim generates plenty of quality content by the users. So if people doing this stuff for free and often with limited tools can come up with something, why does it always take forever for the company to do it? If people think your game is too hard or too easy, why not just do both by putting a really hard and really easy mode? Okay I know there are things that turn out to be significantly harder than expected, but if it's something I see 3 guys working on their spare time can do via a mod, then I do expect a professional gaming studio to at least have the capacity.

I'd bet that if you had significant developer tools, a team of modders can do something like Civilization: Beyond Earth from the Civ 5 base game for everything besides the stuff you need manpower for (professional voice over, music, and maybe some of the graphical elements if the modders do not have a guy with that type of skills). Now that doesn't mean BE isn't worth $50 because I have no problem for paying for fan made stuff that's actually good, but I just don't see this 'development takes a long time OMG'. In Civ 5 Gods & Kings one of the big change was to the combat system when things go from 10 HP to 100 HP to allow less of a one hit kill combat system. I've been doing that on the base game by changing the base unit HP parameter from 10 to 25. No it doesn't quite have the same effect since Civ 5 doesn't explain what any of the other parameters do, but the game honestly didn't play that different compared to my local games based on just fiddling with a bunch of barely labeled variable names. I know they don't want you to think the change in combat system was changing a number from 10 to 100, but it's really not that much more complicated than that.

[Julius Seeker]

1. For games with online components, or online accesses, metrics are tracked which give a picture of how players play a game, where they get stuck, etc... A Product Manager can then sort this out and make recommendations to the Designer.

2. Using the words casual and hardcore to describe certain types of gamers isn't really all that useful. The labels do not determine spending habits or a player's actual insight into the flaws of a game; and the labels are also both poorly defined as you will get a different definition from everyone. To me, a hardcore gamer is someone who will play through, and enjoys, extremely flawed games and has amassed knowledge to circumvent those flaws; but to someone else, it is someone who plays the latest Call of Duty for 8+ hours a day. To me, a casual gamer is someone who generally plays for short play sessions; but to someone else it may be a person who is just stupid when it comes to gaming. When discussing more specific terms, the information becomes much more useful.

3. When it comes to releasing really buggy games, it could be the result of a poor QA process, tight deadlines, or a burnt out team. Sometimes a team may decide that certain bugs are edge cases and that a product is acceptable to ship with the bugs in it as they may be edge cases or or non-blockers.

4. There are a lot of poorly balanced games, and that usually results from a poor or rushed review process. A game can be designed and balanced all out on paper, but it isn't going to necessarily play exactly the way as intended on the documentation; stuff like that can be caught in the review process.

5. Game mods typically just adjust xml scripts and art assets. The art assets are usually substandard when compared to the official art, or they're out of place. I'm addition, someone scripting in a mod that does things vastly different, is going to be very messy in order to make certain elements function together in a way that wasn't necessarily intended by the code. That makes it WAY more difficult to iterate. In addition, modern don't really have to worry about a QA or review process, they just toss it out there and wait for the public to find all of the flaws, then release a new version. Although, since mods generally just effect the art and scripting, they're going to be immune from any code bugs.

6. Content DLC releases, these take up resources; and still require a pipeline. In addition, from a product manager standpoint, it makes sense to use DLC - like in the case of Civ - to have a staggered release of content in order to keep players engaged with the brand, and to maximize spending potential. There is a large segment of players who will purchase things just because they are new, and it usually is of benefit not to canabalize that by dumping too much content at once. As far as modern go, there are rarely just three guys making mods, there are often hundreds of small hobby teams, and they grab and borrow from each other.

7. Hard an easy modes work for simple games like fighters, but for games like RPGs, it does mean a lot more work as then there are multiple versions that need to be balanced for different levels of player.

8. There are some fundamental differences in Beyond Earth, such as the questing system, that would require code in order to implement. It's definitely a lot heavier of a change than just a content mod. That said, my issue is not so much that the game hasn't changed enough - I don't believe that; but that the different paths are too similar and lack variety, that the factions are not different enough, and that the quest system has no variety - quests are linked to content placement, which creates many limitations and ultimately means games are always going to play out very similarly when the expectation is for something like Alpha Centauri - a different game based on the faction played.

[Don]

If you look at say the config for the difficulty setting on Civ 5 it's almost all numbers other than a few thing that modifies the AI behavior. I also question whether a lot of the stuff in gaming was ever tested. I'm not convinced anyone ever played Civ 5 straight up on Deity and can say with a straight face that this mode is balanced. You either need to be improbably lucky or you need to exploit game mecahnics that devs usually don't even know about (because they end up getting fixed later) to even be able to win some of the time. I remember there are some story encounters in SWTOR where you pretty much just walked in and then immediately died when the cutscene is over, and I have a hard time believing that was ever tested with an appropriate level character because then it'd be obvious that the boss was tuned at way too hard.

In terms of mods they're generally lacking on the graphical asset for obvous reason but plenty of people swear it's the gameplay that matters not the graphics, and at any rate there are a lot of game where people can put up with subpar graphical assets if the gameplay is indeed good. After all it's not like you're replacing the existing assets with stick figures. A game like EQ2 where they give you the tools to design your own dungeon certainly has user created content that is considered playable. I know there's overhead and whatnot but I just don't get the excuse of 'making game needs a lot of money' when a bunch of guys working on their own time with often very bad tools can do just fine minus the stuff you absolutely have to throw money at. It shouldn't take 2 years and a $30 DLC to change unit HPs from 10 to 100 in Civ 5 and call that a major revamp of the combat system.

[Zeus]

The smartest thing for a developer is to get a pulse on their fans. I don't care if you have 300 people working on a game, you have hierarchies, politics, and cultures in place which do not allow for more than a certain number of people to get their voices heard. And even if you do have a proper, open environment, there's always the enemy you can never, ever defeat: groupthink. If you're smart enough to understand that and want to understand your fans better and get ideas in there that could escape even a large development team, you do whatever you can, whenever you can.

For a company like Nintendo which is further handicapped by it's very traditional Japanese culture (you get talked to, not discussed with), an almost absence of presence at trade shows/cons which allows them to understand their audience (you even been to one of their booths and you know it's people without any influence whatsoever running it) and long, long history of completely misunderstanding their audience (the patheticness of the Nintendo World store, these silly shortages with their Limited Editions and Amiibos, etc.) and it's nice that they're trying and there may be a snowball's chance in hell of maybe something getting through to them.

[Don]

I think it's only important to know what your fans think if you're not thorough. I mean, should Nintendo really care what most people think about Mario Kart? Of course Mario Kart is a fairly understood product so you don't have to sift through the inevitable junk. The problem is getting a pulse from your fans is that indeed most of your fans have no idea what the heck they're talking about. It seems to me somewhere along the line either QA or bureaucracy or something made games no longer complete. I'm not talking about fairly subtle things. I'm talking about encounters like in SWTOR (though hardly limited to that) where you have a high chance of immediately dying after the cutscene is over, but when it comes to feedback it obviously devolves into a bunch of guys saying, "This game sucks who programmed this?" and the opposite "L2P noob". Further I think a lot of devs feel insulted if you're telling them that they suck and you'll often see a response along the lines of 'L2P'.

I think the problem is that most devs are both egoistical and lazy. It's also the whole issue where people say 'brain over brawn' because it can be proven very easily most people don't have brawn (here brawn can just be excellence in whatever field you're talking about, e.g. if you don't have 300 APM you lack the brawn to play Starcraft 2) but it's harder to prove you don't have the brains. That is there's almost no way I can actually believe I am the best player in whatever genre I'm designing (because there probably is a guy who can beat me very easily out there), but I can easily convince myself that I know more about this genre than anyone else. When Blizzard made Diablo 3 they said they designed Inferno mode as the hardest thing they can think of it and then doubled everything. How does this even make sense? Well clearly the Diablo 3 designers know they're not the best Diablo 3 players in the world but they figure they clearly know this game better than anyone else so 'double of impossible' was totally legit. Of course it later turned out that Inferno was not really playable without exploiting game mechanics and even that was kind of hard. I'm guessing devs are supposed to be valued for their brain and that playing testing is supposed to be left for the grunts, but at some point you got to actually play your game. If people tell you this mechanic doesn't work you can't just say, 'but I thought about it in detail and there's no way it wouldn't work' without playing it, because a lot of things just don't work as you planned.

Heroes of Might and Magic 4 had an 'impossible' setting and only 1 campaign was beatable on the impossible setting, as all the other one you can't even take your first town with your starting army no matter how much time you loaded and you don't have any extra troops to build because that's before getting your first town. Again, I can't believe anyone actually tested this setting unless it is literally intended to be impossible, and if someone did tested it, it certainly cannot be a dev. I can see a grunt reporting 'I can't even beat the first battle to take the first town' and the dev figured that guy just sucked and it was all okay. It should not be up to the fans to tell devs on things that never remotely worked. Sure, if you want to poll the population on whether this encounter should be decreased by 10% in difficulty so that it is now more accessible to 20% more people maybe it wouldn't hurt to ask, but most issues that people really care about are far more than just tweaking a few numbers. FF14 had pretty much unplayable lag built into the game unless you're a masochist and again this isn't something you can ask people about it because you're only going to get back responses like 'fire the guy who came up with this' and those are 100% legitmate reaction to the game.