Golden Xan
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Mallius Odium
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- Mar 30, 2019
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Hey everyone,
When we talk about other games, we usually point out things they've done right, experiences that we enjoyed and that we'd like to see replicated or expanded upon. But there is another facet to that, which are the things we did not like in games. I'll take this opportunity to mention aspects I did not enjoy in other games, things that I'd rather DHS avoid, if possible.
These all are, of course, just my opinion. And some may be obvious and you may have all the intention in the world of doing differently, but I want to mention them anyway, just to make sure.
Assuming the character's opinion
Not rewarding skill when balancing
Excessive randomness
Over time I may add more things in further posts, but I believe these are some of the main aspects that make me not want to play certain games the most. I don't have a reason to believe DHS would do any this, I just wanted to mention them as things that you may try to stay away from, according to your own convictions of course.
I hope this is of good use.
When we talk about other games, we usually point out things they've done right, experiences that we enjoyed and that we'd like to see replicated or expanded upon. But there is another facet to that, which are the things we did not like in games. I'll take this opportunity to mention aspects I did not enjoy in other games, things that I'd rather DHS avoid, if possible.
These all are, of course, just my opinion. And some may be obvious and you may have all the intention in the world of doing differently, but I want to mention them anyway, just to make sure.
Assuming the character's opinion
It often happens in story-driven games where the players control the character's dialogue that, sometimes, characters will assume positions that the player does not agree with. Even if the player has some agency to choose a response on a given situation, it can happen that the character uses an argument or emotional tone that is incompatible with what the player wants.
In Deadhaus, I'd like to be able to clearly know what sort of tone and content of a choice entails, and I'd especially rather not have my character take stances without my permission.
Immersion-breaking contentIt is common to see MMOs add more and more silliness as time goes by and they become more famous, attract more players, and gain more money. People want to express different kinds of feelings and moods, and they like to be able to show off those things with... alternate content, such as rainbow emotes, glittering effects, fluffy mascots, cutesy things and so on. I'd rather see only somberness and horror in Deadhaus than find someone riding a colored creature for gigs.
SubscriptionsThat is certainly not the case with everyone, but I dislike subscriptions. Even if I commonly use something regularly, even daily, I don't like subscribing to things, and I especially dislike those subscriptions in games when they are related to making some unbearable game mechanic more bearable. Subscriptions are like committing a part of your life to something, something that you may not even be using, needing, or wanting. It is an investment of money, personal energy, focus, and maybe more. And you may even forget about it, or be unable to benefit from you, and it will still be leeching you without your knowing. Everything in a game should be designed to be fun, through and through. Fun things make money, there is no need to force it.
Catering to inexperienced players because they cry loudlyObviously, you guys like feedback. All kinds of people have feedback, even the ones who haven't played the game (after its release). The thing is, sometimes people have the same group thinking only because others seem to think the same, or because they themselves don't understand major concepts. When people get together to scream about something, that does not make them necessarily right. Being scared of a small population of needlessly angry people and giving them what they want have damaged some games beyond what they could afford.
Not catering to experienced players who are telling you the main issues with the gameMuch in the same regard, when developers don't listen to their core audience with their major concerns, well-founded ones, games slowly start to lose the players they have conquered and eventually die out. How you're going to filter what is what is a whole other story, but this is something I've also seen happening in other games, and it is saddening.
Balancing things according to personal preferenceWhen playing asymmetric games, it is only natural that some people prefer certain facets of this asymmetry. When the devs like a specific faction or group and they balance the game according to their own personal experience, things can get ugly. This is something that also feels like a slap in the face of whoever likes to play more with the non-favorite classes and factions. It cannot happen.
Stories that never endSome games, movies, books, etc. keep expanding their story in order to keep milking franchises. This is a mistake, and it breaks the legacy that would otherwise be forged. Good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. What is the exception? When they end and start over another story, a meaningful one that has a reason to exist. This is one reason why I liked the Ages concept. The story can begin, develop, and then end in a good conclusion, until the next Age comes in.
Time and energy gatesThis is something we already talked about in the Community Roundtable. Time and energy constraints to try and get people to keep coming back to the game, mobile style, are sickening to the experience of the gamer. And I believe it does not do very good to the developers' soul either.
Depending too much on other people on COOPNaturally, when you play coop you want all players to be necessary and meaningful, but it is not cool to try and find new players to play with and depend on them to execute certain actions or strategies in certain ways in order to continue, because then you can find people who do not play nice and who may want to try and prevent your game from progressing... Unless there are mechanisms to prevent that from happening, or mechanisms that allow you to quit the coop experience without wasting your time (denying the gains, for instance), that would happen, and it's not a good thing to anyone involved.
Being forced into a situation that changes your play styleLots of games have that kind of situation. A mission where you are taken hostage, put on a situation you've never been before, having to fight with whatever it is you can find instead of your regular equipment. While that can be interesting from a challenge or story perspective, it is often done wrongly or done at very inconvenient times when you do not want to have that kind of experience. So, if there is such a thing, it needs to be done carefully and tastefully.
"Simulated" combatIt is my understanding that Deadhaus wants to be a realistic action game, given fantasy. What we see in MMOs or many other kinds of games is that combat is simulated, animation-wise, to make pretend that the characters are fighting each other. In WoW, that would be your 2 meter character waving his weapon in the air, fighting against a 80 meter opponent who could stomp him without thinking twice, pretending to get hit in the chest, inclining backwards on the "impact". In Dragon's Dogma, that would be a rogue furiously slashing his daggers repeatedly at a monsters leg, the monster's leg is bizarrely vibrating as if it were under heavy damage... and effectively, there is literally nothing happening, it is all numerical. On Wolverine, you can see your character breaking apart in pieces as you get shot. In Batman, the Arkham series, you feel the weight of your attacks (and that of your enemies). This needs to be conveyed, you can't just make pretend.
Ineffective contextual actionsWhen you have buttons that are related to many different actions you can take depending on the circumstance, there needs to be simple ways the players can choose what to do without effort. Mass Effect 3 had that issue in the multiplayer especially, where the Space bar was used to activate objects, take cover, vault, jump, sprint and revive teammates. They've done it so everything could fit on a controller. They've also made people crazy by never addressing the fact that players would often end up having negative experiences because the game would not allow them to do the action they needed and wanted.
Needlessly long events, mechanisms or processesWe are at an age where people don't always have time, and the little time they do have they want to spend in immediate action. While there is surely value in contemplative experiences, such as slowly walking through a beautiful environment, people need to be given the option to not do that and get straight to what they want if they have to.
Bazillion skills that have no way of being usedIn World of Warcraft, in the earlier days at least, you'd keep growing your character and fill a whole bar with icons, each respective to an item, skill, profession or command. You'd go from 1 to = on your keyboard. Then you'd get another bar where you could use Shift+1 to =. Then Alt. Then Ctrl. Then Ctrl and Alt. And even then you'd have extra bars cluttering the screen with things you likely would never even remember to use. I think Deadhaus is going to be very far from that, but I do wanted to point out that having options is good, it's always nice to be able to customize characters the way you want to, but it's not good when options turn out to be simply more ways to do the same things and require you to make mental notes about everything in order to just play a game.
Not rewarding skill when balancing
If some people who are very skilled get to play with a class a certain way and it is making other people suffer, somewhat, when fighting against them, you have to make sure that if you nerf a class, you only do it to the extent that it actually needs to be nerfed (out of an actual imbalance). It is common for people to say that something is overpowered when they don't know how to fight against it or they don't know how to use their own tools. It is unfair to weaken classes and mechanics because some people have mastered them right. People who take the time to get skilled with a certain play style should not be punished for making good use of what they have available, unless this is somehow breaking the game's logic.
Amorphous enemies for no particular reasonThis is something that Iain can probably talk more about. I don't believe everyone agrees with that, but I think Warframe is a game that serves as a good example to the point I'm trying to get across. In Warframe, you have enemies that look like a bizarre mixture of synthetic and organic, deformed and pieced together like Frankenstein's monster, but with pieces from a variety of animals. Even the main characters, the chassis or suits you use, all have weird semi-organic forms with pointy ends that make them look like Kaiju. It is said there is a reason why everything looks the way it does, and you could argue that that game has done so to have its own aesthetics. What I get when I watch the game, or try to play it, is that the developers were trying to come up with something different, something maybe unique, and ended up using their first attempt at an abstract painting. It is sometimes best to make things, monsters or whatever, similar to versions which already exist, or inspired on pre-existing concepts, than to try to innovate so much that you can't innovate at all and create something that is more senseless than anything. Perhaps this is a consideration for some of the more wild Houses out there.
Repetitive minigames that you are forced to go through if you want to get everything the game has to offerIn my Puzzle Types post, I mentioned minigames. Minigames can be fun, when they are not done to the extreme. Elder Scroll's lockpicking or Fallout 3 and New Vegas hacking puzzle minigames are such examples. They are fun, and I often go straight to a locked container or computer to do them, but they get stale after going by them hundreds. Which is why there are mechanisms that allow you to circumvent those minigames after they become repetitive. A tool that helps you get through them more easily, a skill that you get to develop to the point it becomes superfluous, or even a way to skip them entirely.
Fetch & errand questsMissions where you talk to one guy for the first time and he wants you to go the jungle and kill 10 bears to bring him back their teeth. Then he asks you to bring the teeth to someone else. You talk to that someone else and they tell you to get them 15 feathers of the ducks at the lake of duckers. You get the feathers and he sends you to someone else. That other person sends you to the other side of the world to pick some rock and then back. They may have a reason to want those things, but you should not have anything to do with that. Fetch quests have lost their impactful presence as people began to get more creative in their quest design, but it is something still present to this day. You want to quests interesting? Make fetch quests that always have a caveat to them. Kill the 10 bears, but turns out they were transformed people. Go get the duck's feather, but find out that the ducks were protected by a sea monster. And sometimes, don't have any caveat, have a mission be something simple, to keep it varied. Better yet, make all quests be unique and meaningful, or just so much fun that you could do them over and over again hundreds of times.
Nothing to do with your accumulated resourcesIn various games, you need resources, such as money, to be able to get better equipment and expand your capabilities. As such, getting resources is something you'll have to focus on doing at some point. But there usually comes a time when you have done so much in the game that you have billions of every resource you may need and you suddenly could buy the entire game's world if you wanted to. There needs to be a late-game money or resource sink in those cases. Something that is perhaps expensive, but that you can do to further improve your characters when there is nothing else to spend those resources on. If the resources are too scarce, it will make acquiring them a pain throughout the game, as farming is generally not a fun process. If they are too many and you can easily gain everything you need, it soon becomes superfluous.
Unrealistic movements and momentumThere was a time in which this was considered too complex to handle. Today, it is not. When characters in older games went left to right really fast, they would twitch like a dizzy cockroach in place, making absurd movements that have no semblance to reality or even sense of momentum. Many games have countered that with minor adjustments of acceleration and deceleration. It is important to have at least some degree of concern with this, lest your character feels artificial in the world.
Body blockingNaturally, I understand that having characters passing through one another is not the best thing for immersion, but it is even worse when you have people sitting at a doorway preventing others from getting past them. Or when they are a large character and they stand on top of a smaller one, preventing others from interacting with the smaller one. If there is any way of doing that, some people will do it, and it will be a bad experience to all other players. There needs to be mechanisms to circumvent that.
Gratuitous violenceI realize this is a horror game, and I like gore, destruction and violence in most games, but there is often a purpose to that violence. In DooM, you have violence because it is a deep relationship that your character has with the demons. In Evil Within, you have violence because that contributes to the sense of despair. In GTA, you have violence to show how people are desensitized to actual violence. But some games have violence just because, or to an extreme that feels like they are trying to appeal to something that has little to do with experience. There are different forms of violence, and having guts everywhere because they look cool is not one of them.
Difficulty levels that decrease your own capabilitiesNormally, difficulty levels make things harder not by making the enemies more resourceful or smart per se, but actually making the player weaker, increasing the quantity of enemies or making the enemies generally stronger. This is an artificial way of increasing difficulty. Difficulty levels should either add more enemy types, add mechanics that make acting more difficult, or make enemies more competent, by reacting better, using better strategies, coordinating, etc., not by having X% more health and damage.
Simulated damage outputThe best example I have of this is any Call of Duty game. In CoD, enemies don't have to take aim and shoot at you accurately to hit you. All they do is calculate whether or not the player is within their sight, and if so, if they are aware of the player. If they are aware and the player is within sight and range, they "roll a die" to determine whether or not the shots will hit the player. The way this is calculated is so inadequate that you can often see the bullets flying from the tip of their guns in your direction even when the weapons are not aiming to you. When that happens, you could almost imagine that the world is a textureless environment and the enemies are floating balls that somewhat randomly determine whether they are hurting you or not in a given moment. All immersion is gone by realizing how botty everything is. The same can be said of For Honor, where bots have pre-programmed defensive capabilities, instead of reactions, and as such they will always be able to defend against certain strikes even if they are not technically meant to do that. This is a poor way of handling enemies. AIs need to be as close to real opponents as possible.
Not trying to help a minority facing technical difficultiesWhether the issues are due to incompatibilities, poor programming, or anything else related to the development of your game, no game developer should ever neglect the issues of players who play their game and who ask for help. I have ceased supporting and buying games from various companies due to their outright neglect when it comes to players facing issues, even if they are uncommon and only happening to a minority. Trying to blame the player for the issues they are facing is a practice that has become more and more common these days and it ruins the developer's (and publishers') reputation, as well as making the players experience worse.
EDIT:Excessive randomness
I have mentioned this before. There are games that use randomness to try and prolong your quest to achieve items of the highest rarity and quality. Randomness can be used to good effect in a properly made procedural generation, but randomness should not be used when it involves rewarding the players, or when determining damage. To some extent, in order to simulate real-life circumstances, you can use it, but the danger lies in pushing it farther and farther from actual chance and making it a die roll. Computers don't know how to roll die, don't know how to calculate randomness. 90% chance of something happening may not be enough for it to ever happen in a game, yet it would naturally happen in the real world.
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Over time I may add more things in further posts, but I believe these are some of the main aspects that make me not want to play certain games the most. I don't have a reason to believe DHS would do any this, I just wanted to mention them as things that you may try to stay away from, according to your own convictions of course.
I hope this is of good use.
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