"We tried not doing red barrels, but The Customer is always right."
No, no, no! This is the worst and most tired cliche of all! The customer is often wrong, stubborn, stupid or some combination of the three, and none of those make them right! When creators, and in this case specifically game creators, stop believing this trope, we won't always have to have "red barrels for explosions" and "green crates for health". Hell, when you think about it, green for health doesn't even make a ton of sense, since we've all been conditioned to the red cross of the health symbol, red first aid kits and other red iconography related to medicine. For Pete's sake, the organization dedicated to health and medicine is called The Red Cross! Where did green come from, anyway? An arbitrary decision at some point that other creators started parroting and look where it's gotten us. (I do realize the relation between a green cross on white first aid kit, but most first aid kits I've ever dealt with are red, with white markings, further ingraining the "health is red" conditioning)
It shows a surprising lack of originality and creativity that the developers of Bulletstorm couldn't figure out a way to give players an exploding barrel that wasn't red. What about a barrel with the large "explosive" symbol we find on aerosol cans? Not only is that a common symbol that everyone recognizes, they also would know immediately what it would mean in an in-game context.
Giving in to consumer pressure is sometimes good, but it's often bad. It's why we end up with games like DA2. Bioware and EA wanted a more accessible, "streamlined" product to appeal to more gamers. Well, look at the shit storm that's created for them. If creators stopped bowing to gamers and just did what was "right" for their game, or heavens forbid!, do what they want to do we'd start deconstructing and eliminating some of the hoary old tropes that plague so many games.
I understand that the bottom line and the future of your company is a powerful motivator, but without innovators and people willing to take a chance, we wouldn't have games, successful, critically lauded games, like Demon's Souls, Heavy Rain or Valkyria Chronicles. (just off the top of my head).
Sure, in a fast paced, frenetic gameplay environment clear signals and information is important, but I think sometimes, and this is especially true of modern games, there's too much hand holding going on and developers have made games too easy. Save points and check points are nice, but when there's no real penalty to dying, there's no real sense of accomplishment either. Going back to Demon's Souls, when I finally kill a boss demon and get to that new archstone, I'm stoked, because some of the levels are really hard and it takes a lot of skill and patience to get through. Other games with instant respawn without penalty can be just as fun, but I find the actual challenge is diluted by the lack of penalty for dying.
Personally, I'd like to see more Demon's Soul's and less games with a Fallout style progression where, if you're so inclined, you can save every five minutes in order to avoid having to repeat sections or lose too much progress. (Note, I'm not bashing Fallout, just using it as an example of a very easy to abuse save system)
who remembers when OMM were stymied by the original Doom's 0 second Time to Crate. (Er, Start to Crate, now that I look it up.) Was fresh in my mind as well since I've been reading the recent Slashdot threads on OMM and Wikipedia.
