Tell me, what makes a good game?
note: put anything, even the first thing that comes to mind. every opinion counts.
note: put anything, even the first thing that comes to mind. every opinion counts.
Game Development: What makes a good game?
- Thread starter CulixCupric
- Start date
Recommended Videos
its fun......................... dont want to get modded for this so words words words words words words words words that should do it
are there any gaming cliches that are good? which ones are bad? what's your favorite features in games? what makes your favorite game your favorite? what defines the experience of the worst game you played? examples are always a good way to start.
what is your favorite, and why?
what is your least favorite, and why?
what game do you want to see come out, and why?
etc..
what is your favorite, and why?
what is your least favorite, and why?
what game do you want to see come out, and why?
etc..
Variety, Interaction, Player initiative and Immersion for me.
Things that are often done wrong are.
Tedious, Cutscenes, Strict Scripting and Simplifying.
Things that are often done wrong are.
Tedious, Cutscenes, Strict Scripting and Simplifying.
i would say replayabilty. that encompasses visuals, story, and gameplay. often requires player choice and customization.
of course you can have good games that arent vary replayable (like portal), but the more replayability a game has the higher i would value it.
of course you can have good games that arent vary replayable (like portal), but the more replayability a game has the higher i would value it.
Immersion + Longevity + Well Paced + Compelling = Good
Atleast for me.
If it has all these it will be a really good game, for some reason Immersion is really impirtant to me.
Atleast for me.
If it has all these it will be a really good game, for some reason Immersion is really impirtant to me.
I like being a total jerk in games. Not that ultra strong guy that can PWN everyone but that guy who scams and cheats his way into richness and epic items. Like in EVE you can completely screw people out of months, even years of there hard work in a few minutes.
A hell of a lot of shit, son.
My suggestion is that you start playing good games, past to present. Start with Super Mario Bros. 3, X-Com: UFO Defense, Banjo Kazooie, and... oh, Deus Ex. The first one. And Doom 1. Make observations and take notes. Think carefully about how they differ from each other and other games, why one game made one decision and why another game made another decision.
I wanna make a few comments, though.
First, Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic 2006? Those games looked terrible, even for their time. They're two of the most incompetent games ever in terms of art direction as well as overall tech and game design. To call Sonic 2006 a game that sells itself on graphics is like calling Farmville a game that sells itself on subtlety and strategic complexity.
Aside from that minor objection, graphics do matter; it's a damn, damn good thing we've advanced beyond Doom 3's lighting and can have shadows of varying depth; but also, graphics aren't mutually exclusive with good gameplay and never have been.
The core design team for a game, the guy who programs the graphics engine, and the guys who make the models and animate them are never the same person, and most companies--I can attest to this from firsthand experience--are not thinking to themselves that they need to shill graphics without having any substance to their game. That's a myth perpetuated by gamers who can't seem to get it through their heads that different people are responsible for different things on a project. If there's weak gameplay but strong visuals, the only thing you have to blame is good old fashioned incompetence on the designer's part.
In fact, more than a couple of times out of ten, stronger or more innovative tech brings more focus on a production and allows a developer to come up with remarkable new mechanics--or pipeline elements for development.
Take Crysis, for instance; four years after its original release it's still one of the prettiest and most high-tech games out there, but it ain't just a pretty face. It's got big, open, playground-like environments unlike any other shooter on the market; it's got creative and flexible physics-based gameplay; it's got vehicles, it's got AI that has routines over a broad area instead of localized in a tiny room, and--this is important here--it's got one of the strongest engines on the market.
It's got four specialized scripting languages providing varying levels of accessibility versus functionality depending on how close to the engine someone's gotta get to program a new feature and how much functionality a certain set of features actually needs. It's one of the first games to adopt Scaleform, as well, allowing the devs to make the UIs in flash instead of some messy proprietary piece of shit. The level editor provides a real-time preview of lighting exactly as it appears in the game, re-computing on the fly every time you move or add a light and letting you see nothing less than exactly what the player does without having to futz around in build menus or guess-and-check. And that's just the tip of the iceburg.
Think twice about poo-pooing tech as a motivation for developing a game and learn to appreciate programmers. While we do often see games like RAGE, it's less likely that the dev team said "fuck it, we're not going to do our jobs today and just hope the prettyness of this game carries it through instead of the content," and more likely the designers couldn't make their minds up about what the core design of the game actually was.
That brings me to the second thing: people think they want a lot of seamlessly integrated parts--a game that offers everything--but the truth is that trying to please everyone is the fastest way to pleasing nobody. What people really want is a game that knows what it's trying to do and does it really well, with a strong sense of focus above all else. You're less likely to win people over with a novel-length design document than you are with a single sentence that describes what the player does in your game, that happens to make them laugh or smile when you say it.
-----
[HEADING=3]Examples[/HEADING]
X-COM is a game about managing the entire world's UFO defense grid, down to the budget, staffing, and construction of each base, as well as individual missions to neutralize threats and recover and research alien technology.
Deus Ex is the quintessential cyberpunk game, putting players into the shoes of a cyernetically enhanced agent who can adapt to do anything, be it hack computers with his mind or take out foes with superhuman strength.
Dungeon Keeper asks a question: What if I were running the dungeon that the heroes plunder in every RPG, instead of plundering it myself? And What problems does the dungeon keeper have to deal with in his everyday doings when heroes aren't plundering his dungeon?
Sonic the Hedgehog is about being a pinball with legs on it, who can roll up at will to bounce off robotic enemies and rocket through stages at high speed.
Crysis is a game where you're set loose in a military playground on a tropical island armed with a super-suit that can grant superhuman speed, strength, endurance, or stealth. How's this for a high-class vacation?
Devil May Cry is the Tony Hawk of action games; it's all about being the showboating jackass that Dante is and seamlessly blending multiple styles of fighting in pursuit of the most stylish and crazy of combos.
Mass Effect is about running your very own USS Enterprise. At least it wishes it were. In the grand scheme of things, actually managing the crew is secondary to copy/paste gunfights, but this is why people buy the game and why they look forward to the conversation engine more.
Doom is about running at 60 mph and killing lots and lots of demons in a goddamn funhouse from hell; you're outnumbered--they're outgunned.
-----
See what I mean? All good games, all easy to describe in about one sentence, and I probably made a few people (who had the patience to read this far) want to boot up Steam and play at least one or two of these, without even mentioning the story or characters in any depth. Some people may or may not appreciate what any given game in this lineup does, but it's difficult to dispute that these games know what they're trying to deliver and deliver it quite well, starting with a certain kind of base gameplay and expanding on it to develop more features and modes of play from there. Each one has its own way of providing satisfaction and enjoyment, and thus its own, unique identity.
To put it in the simplest terms, people want that sense of focus and identity to a game. If a game does have multiple modes of play as part of its appeal, then yeah, folks want them integrated very strongly, but what matters more is that sense of product identity and focus at the core; a game that, in other words, knows exactly how it in particular will provide you with opportunities for fun.
My suggestion is that you start playing good games, past to present. Start with Super Mario Bros. 3, X-Com: UFO Defense, Banjo Kazooie, and... oh, Deus Ex. The first one. And Doom 1. Make observations and take notes. Think carefully about how they differ from each other and other games, why one game made one decision and why another game made another decision.
Well, you have SOME sense in you, at least.EternalNothingness said:
I wanna make a few comments, though.
First, Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic 2006? Those games looked terrible, even for their time. They're two of the most incompetent games ever in terms of art direction as well as overall tech and game design. To call Sonic 2006 a game that sells itself on graphics is like calling Farmville a game that sells itself on subtlety and strategic complexity.
Aside from that minor objection, graphics do matter; it's a damn, damn good thing we've advanced beyond Doom 3's lighting and can have shadows of varying depth; but also, graphics aren't mutually exclusive with good gameplay and never have been.
The core design team for a game, the guy who programs the graphics engine, and the guys who make the models and animate them are never the same person, and most companies--I can attest to this from firsthand experience--are not thinking to themselves that they need to shill graphics without having any substance to their game. That's a myth perpetuated by gamers who can't seem to get it through their heads that different people are responsible for different things on a project. If there's weak gameplay but strong visuals, the only thing you have to blame is good old fashioned incompetence on the designer's part.
In fact, more than a couple of times out of ten, stronger or more innovative tech brings more focus on a production and allows a developer to come up with remarkable new mechanics--or pipeline elements for development.
Take Crysis, for instance; four years after its original release it's still one of the prettiest and most high-tech games out there, but it ain't just a pretty face. It's got big, open, playground-like environments unlike any other shooter on the market; it's got creative and flexible physics-based gameplay; it's got vehicles, it's got AI that has routines over a broad area instead of localized in a tiny room, and--this is important here--it's got one of the strongest engines on the market.
It's got four specialized scripting languages providing varying levels of accessibility versus functionality depending on how close to the engine someone's gotta get to program a new feature and how much functionality a certain set of features actually needs. It's one of the first games to adopt Scaleform, as well, allowing the devs to make the UIs in flash instead of some messy proprietary piece of shit. The level editor provides a real-time preview of lighting exactly as it appears in the game, re-computing on the fly every time you move or add a light and letting you see nothing less than exactly what the player does without having to futz around in build menus or guess-and-check. And that's just the tip of the iceburg.
Think twice about poo-pooing tech as a motivation for developing a game and learn to appreciate programmers. While we do often see games like RAGE, it's less likely that the dev team said "fuck it, we're not going to do our jobs today and just hope the prettyness of this game carries it through instead of the content," and more likely the designers couldn't make their minds up about what the core design of the game actually was.
That brings me to the second thing: people think they want a lot of seamlessly integrated parts--a game that offers everything--but the truth is that trying to please everyone is the fastest way to pleasing nobody. What people really want is a game that knows what it's trying to do and does it really well, with a strong sense of focus above all else. You're less likely to win people over with a novel-length design document than you are with a single sentence that describes what the player does in your game, that happens to make them laugh or smile when you say it.
-----
[HEADING=3]Examples[/HEADING]
X-COM is a game about managing the entire world's UFO defense grid, down to the budget, staffing, and construction of each base, as well as individual missions to neutralize threats and recover and research alien technology.
Deus Ex is the quintessential cyberpunk game, putting players into the shoes of a cyernetically enhanced agent who can adapt to do anything, be it hack computers with his mind or take out foes with superhuman strength.
Dungeon Keeper asks a question: What if I were running the dungeon that the heroes plunder in every RPG, instead of plundering it myself? And What problems does the dungeon keeper have to deal with in his everyday doings when heroes aren't plundering his dungeon?
Sonic the Hedgehog is about being a pinball with legs on it, who can roll up at will to bounce off robotic enemies and rocket through stages at high speed.
Crysis is a game where you're set loose in a military playground on a tropical island armed with a super-suit that can grant superhuman speed, strength, endurance, or stealth. How's this for a high-class vacation?
Devil May Cry is the Tony Hawk of action games; it's all about being the showboating jackass that Dante is and seamlessly blending multiple styles of fighting in pursuit of the most stylish and crazy of combos.
Mass Effect is about running your very own USS Enterprise. At least it wishes it were. In the grand scheme of things, actually managing the crew is secondary to copy/paste gunfights, but this is why people buy the game and why they look forward to the conversation engine more.
Doom is about running at 60 mph and killing lots and lots of demons in a goddamn funhouse from hell; you're outnumbered--they're outgunned.
-----
See what I mean? All good games, all easy to describe in about one sentence, and I probably made a few people (who had the patience to read this far) want to boot up Steam and play at least one or two of these, without even mentioning the story or characters in any depth. Some people may or may not appreciate what any given game in this lineup does, but it's difficult to dispute that these games know what they're trying to deliver and deliver it quite well, starting with a certain kind of base gameplay and expanding on it to develop more features and modes of play from there. Each one has its own way of providing satisfaction and enjoyment, and thus its own, unique identity.
To put it in the simplest terms, people want that sense of focus and identity to a game. If a game does have multiple modes of play as part of its appeal, then yeah, folks want them integrated very strongly, but what matters more is that sense of product identity and focus at the core; a game that, in other words, knows exactly how it in particular will provide you with opportunities for fun.