Games are awesome! No really, with technology going the way it is, video games are a likely precursor to the future of human society. If we ever get to a state when technology can run the world mostly without us, simulated interactive experiences would be the best way to communicate everything from philosophy to early childhood learning. Yet, despite the enormity of all this, some people still feel compelled to make bad games. Bad games are not just someone who tried and missed, they are the direct result of someone who ignored all opposition to fight for a terrible idea. They are the creation of someone who should have known better, but for the following reasons, did not.
5. Not allowing people to play the game after they buy it.
This might sound silly but it’s true. Sometimes, you buy a game and then they don’t let you play it! In efforts to prevent piracy, game companies will put all sorts of locks and controls in their game. They add a series of hoops the user has to jump through, with passwords, online authentication, disc checking, serial numbers, etc… The problem is, that much like a car, the lock only prevent it from being stolen the first time, after that, the theives can remove the lock or make their own keys. Unlike cars, they only need to steal one copy, after that they can make all the copies they want. Then you have your paying customers having trouble playing the game because their serial number is missing a digit or the authentication servers crashed and the only people playing the game are the ones who stole it. Good job game companies! Good job!
"Put the game down, and show me your reciept! Ok, what's your serial number? You wait here I'm going to go check this out and make sure you're telling me the truth."
4. Copying the market without innovation or spirit.
This might sound obvious, but it’s still very common. Let’s say you’re a designer or an executive at a game company, and you are creating ideas for the next game your company will make. You could look at existing games and all the games that made money. Then take ideas from all of them, and create a game about a tough soldier who is tough and smokes cigars and blows up buildings while saying cool things and drives a hovercraft with a machine gun in the future with aliens who have flamethrowers. It could have realistic physics and photorealistic graphics and big hollywood voice actors! WOW! Sadly, that sort of idea is common and will probably end up in a bargin bin. Everyone wants to make the next big shooter or the next big racing game, but they only end up copying all the others.
Games like Half-Life and The Sims are successful because of their innovation and the refined game design experience. A Copy of The Sims or Half-Life won’t be that same success because people already have The Sims and are smart enough not to buy a second rate knockoff! For every good game that is sold, there’s 20 just like it that no one wants.
Because the first two mall tycoon games were just so close to gaming perfection!
3. Assuming everyone but you is stupid and making games fit for toddlers.
Children’s games are not a huge market. Young kids all want to play the games the older kids are playing. So why are so many games still designed assuming the players are three years old? Spore would have been a fantastic game were it not designed with the gameplay difficulty of a kindergarten lunchtime game. The game designers spoke of choosing a game for the masses rather some elite few they assumed that only they were a part of. Forgetting that the game playing masses learned how to play ‘Simon says’ when they were 3 and then spent another 20 years outgrowing that. Over the years, games have been getting both simpler and easier to compensate for the larger audience they’re trying to attract, but they forget that the difficulty curve is called a curve for a reason. And that while an easier start to a game will attract more players, they’ll get bored fast if the game doesn’t get more interesting from there.
On a more serious note, despite the problems with the gameplay in spore, the game is still awesome, I mean, look at that! Someone made that!
2. Pretending the past 20 years never happened.
Sometimes people sit down and say “We need to make a game for this movie about a fast-talking stockbroker! How about a 2D platform shooter where you shoot at aliens!” There have been a number of advances in how games are designed and played, and every now and then a game comes along that forgets about all that. Deciding to simply apply their game concept to simple game templates that were established in the 80’s. There’s nothing wrong with the way things were done, but many game designers don’t choose to use an old style, it’s all they know. At the same time, you have people who think like this, and then they notice the state of modern video game graphics, and it looks so amazing to them, they sort of forget there needs to be anything more then graphics and polycounts.
Because it's hard to come up with ideas for what superman could do in a game!
1. Forgetting to play the game after you make it.
You would think that after you make a game, you would try playing it to see if it’s fun and if it has any problems. Sometimes I get the feeling that some game designers skip that step. When a game requires you play a 20-minute tutorial each time you start the game over, you really don’t want to play that game more then once. Black & White is an amazing game, but it forces me to spend at least 10 minutes learning the camera and mouse controls, even if I already know them! Is it that hard to put in an “I already know how to click on stuff let me play the game now!” Button? When a game requires you to watch a 4 minute cutscene before a really hard boss fight, and each time you die you have to watch the unskippable cutscene over and over, you get the feeling the game designers didn’t try to play the game after they made it. Some games are just no fun to play. You would think they would have caught those early on too! Some games don’t even run, and have massive bugs that prevent you from playing them, again, something they would have found if they actually played it after they made it. Game designers often say, perhaps jokingly, “We hope you have as much fun playing our game as we had making it!” The sad truth in that statement is that some game designers have a a lot of fun making something, but they don’t save any of the fun for the person playing it.
Because that last paragraph is more important than all the other rules, I’ll sum it up again, Game designers take heed: Step 1, make game. Step 2, play game. Step 3, if game is not perfect, go back to step 1. I understand that a lot of large companies are under financial pressure to release on schedule and that you don’t want to spend forever on a stagnant project. But that’s no excuse to break the rules mentioned above, you know, unless you want to make bad games!
This. If you see this, the game is not done yet.
