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How many people really enjoy reading game designs of upcoming games?
Azrile
Member Posts: 2,582
I play WOW as my main game, but I almost always play every MMO that is released and I love spending time reading development notes for future games. in fact, dissecting the rulesets for games and finding issues that might have, or cool solutions they have for other games problems is probably as much fun for me as actually playing games. Over the years, I have gotten pretty good at seeing something in writing and being able to say ´that just isn´t going to work´-
Anyone else actually love getting into the gritty details of new game development?
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I really love being involved (meaning, at the very least someone developing the game is listening to my comments, and ideally I'd want to be a consulting designer for the project) in the design phase of a game that's actually a type of game I would like to play. It's really energizing and cheering to be involved in designing a good game.
On the other hand, there have been so many times I've opened up a thread about a new game design, read two sentences, went "Ew, this design has jumped the shark from the very beginning." and closed the thread again. -_- It's depressing.
Yeah, honestly I do this all the time. There are certain rules that are never going to work again in a ´big´ MMO. My biggest one is FFA PVP without consequences. UO was amazing back in the day, but it survived despite FFA PVP, not because of it. No game can grow if it needs ´sheep´. Any game that uses FFA PVP needs to also have very VERY harsh penalties to players who are PKs or else make death fairly meaningless ( like MOBAs).
The other big one is skill-based games that aren´t very aware of macroing. It took me 5 mins of seeing darkfall before I knew that as soon as you logged into the game, you would see countless players AFK shooting magic missles into the air. Open skill rulesets are great, gaining skills by using those skills is great.. but you better be spending a LOT of your dev time planning against afk macroing and exploiting.
I think I would enjoy reading about a game's design if the developer gave more insight as to why they made the decisions they made. I can try and reverse engineer the decision making process, but there's really a lot of information that developers are privy to that most people (myself included) are not. I wouldn't necessarily want to know the nitty-gritty details and industry secrets, but I'd really like a little "why" without the nebulous reasons that don't seem to mean very much or which could mean many things.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I think a lot of reasons the devs don´t give reasons for things is because many of those decisions come down to money. If you give that reason, players will either say you are money-hungry or cheap. ´don´t build a MMO if you can´t get financing to do it correctly´..
WOW has been getting a lot of flack lately because they have used the excuse ´that would cost us a raid tier´ as a reason why they aren´t allowing race-specific garrisons. A lot of decisions simply come down to money, and players just don´t want to hear that.
I also think players who don´t know the entire game as a whole might not understand the trickle-down effects of some decisions, and even if they do know the whole game, they might not have the capacity to predict the secondary and tertiary effects of changes.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
~Albert Einstein
I like reading them out of curiosity but I stopped trusting that the devs will ever deliver on many of the designs.
Warhammer Online was notorious for having great designs that they used to advertise the game while it was in development only to drop those elements when the game went live.
Before Darkfall was released, I looked up a design document on its website. It was very ambitious and proposed a number of neat PvE features. After the game released it became apparent that the document was years out of date and the devs failed to update they site to reflect what they really were developing. It really soured me on the game and I still see it as blatant false advertising.
Since this is a MMORPG forum I think most of us here are interested about upcoming games and what the future will bring us.
Of course, I am also interested in changes to existing games, reviews and gamers experience in various games.
Sadly so many interesting ideas never reaches launch. WAR seriously disappointed me because they cut out so many features (like having your avatar change as you get more experienced , that was such a good idea). and it isn't the only game. But then again, some features that sounds good on paper is hard to implement or not as fun as they sound.
That is another perfect example of telegraphed failure. A game based on pvp cannot exist with two factions. The reason DAoC worked so well is because the third faction was always the kingmaker. WIth 2 factions, it is just always going to snowball.
As for my topic. I think this site has a lot of people that enjoy playing games obviously. But I think for many it is about graphics and action.. not so much digging into the rulesets (death, crafting, skills, talents, economy) and that type of stuff. I think the people who care about the interaction between all that stuff is much smaller than the population of people who are looking fora fun game.