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  1. #1

    How to please gamers: A developer's dilemma

    How do you make a game that pleases gamers?

    Really this is a question I would like answered because no matter what the game be it pandas, swtor, gw2, tsw, etc gamers are never happy with the product.

    The only conclusion I have is that the problem with all these games are the gamers themselves. You are the common denominator. If the game sucks it's because there might be something wrong with your expectation.

    Just a thought. But seriously if anyone knows how to produce a game that would please gamers let us all know.

  2. #2
    Deleted
    Subjectivity.

    Example: Some people like Borderlands 2 because, essentially, it's the same game as Borderlands 1. Other gamers don't like Borderlands 2 because of the same reason.

    That doesn't mean the game sucks. Objectively, the game is improved, but that's not the point. The point is, if you don't like something that doesn't necessarily mean it's not good. People are often ignorant and replace "I don't like" with "it sucks".

    Concluding, you can't satisfy everyone.

  3. #3
    when you say "gamers" in this context, you are really only referring to mmo players, not gamers overall. there are a few reasons for this:

    1: difficulty - almost every single player has several difficulty levels to choose from. an mmo has to keep a far more even level, usually towards the easy side, with the exception of instanced content. even this has to be kept accessible to enough people to be relevant

    2: community - no griefers in single player, and for mmos can be a major issue. each game sets its thresholds, for various reasons

    3: content - single players typically have lower expectations for content. part of this is just having a lower bar set, part is due to subscriptions. some single players give an incredible amount of content, because they dont have to worry about the factors from point 1. some allow or even encourage a lot of player created content, something that almost never happens in mmos

    basically no mmo can please everybody, and there never will be such a game. even if it was possible, and it was made, a certain segment would bitch, because it turns out that is what they really like to do

  4. #4
    The Unstoppable Force
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    How to please gamers: Realise you can't please everyone and just create your product and see how people react.

    Amazing sig, done by mighty Lokann

  5. #5
    Focus not on what they want, but what you want out of a game. If it's done really well, people will inevitably like it. Regardless of taste, people can generally sense when a developer "put their heart into it".

  6. #6
    The largest issue of gaming developement in my eyes is that unless you're an indy you're pretty much pushed to make that what marketing department's research team deems to be "in" during the period of time.

    A good game comes when the game maker makes a game he would love to do and play himself because then he would usually put extra effort in reaching the state that he is happy with. That's how gaming pretty much was born.
    Modern gaming apologist: I once tasted diarrhea so shit is fine.

    "People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an excercise of power, are barbarians" - George Lucas 1988

  7. #7
    LOAD"*",8,1 Fuzzzie's Avatar
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    Ultimately, no matter what you do someone is going to take issue with it.

    Add to that the fact that people can post anonymously about every tiny grievance they have. People only tend to post when they don't like something. When you get a bunch of these people together, they feed off each other and create negativity.

    I try to follow a few simple rules.
    1) If I don't like something I don't play it.
    2) I don't go around being negative because no one gives a shit what I think
    3) I try lots of things so I don't get bored.

    What can developers do? They should make the games they want to make and stop trying to cater to everyone with a bad idea. Feedback on what you've done is a good thing, but when you're designing things to avoid negative feedback then you're not going to take chances. This is why we have 5-6 MMORPG's that are all basically the same game.

  8. #8
    That's a very narrow point of view, borderline prejudice. You see complaints, think gamers. You see other people complain, you again think gamers. It's not the same people that complain every single time, at least in my experience (I don't socialize with whiny bitches, so wouldn't know). Of course there are some people who never will be happy, but I think if someone's particularly prone to complaining it's because they envision something differently than what the developers produce. I've seen some very strange requests that players truly believe in that no sane game/mod developer would ever make. Ever.

    Gamers in general don't know what they want. They usually want one thing, but ask for something else, due to their inability to see a bigger picture. They're so entrenched in the game, that they can't see it from any other but their own personal perspective. They PvP as a warrior, they see PvP through the eyes of a melee class. That should tell you how little gamers know about making games.

    And if you want to be successful at making games, you'll just have to go about things like any other business. Know what people want, and give it to them. Also know that you can't please everyone. If that's your aim, you will never succeed, assuming pre-emptive genocide is out of the quesion.

  9. #9
    LOAD"*",8,1 Fuzzzie's Avatar
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    I also want to make a point about entitlement too. I think a lot of gamers believe that if a game company doesn't give them exactly what they want and how they want it then they're terrible and not worth looking at. Again, this is why we see copies of the same game year after year.

    Also, moved to Video Games.

  10. #10
    From interview about the Project Eternity, totally love those guys

    [Feargus:] If we listened to everyone, it would be a Japanese turn-based dating sim with insect people.
    Modern gaming apologist: I once tasted diarrhea so shit is fine.

    "People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an excercise of power, are barbarians" - George Lucas 1988

  11. #11
    Deleted
    Simple, you do not.

    However, there is an exception here, expansions or follow-ups of games. In general you don't change the follow-up of a game to something truly different unless it wasn't loved in its first incarnation that much (saints row 2 was better then 1 for example) or the change truly improves the game (as in you allow jumping in a game that didn't before). When you do change something too much, it is understandable for people to hate it since you're moving from your original target audience to another by changing the parts of the game that weren't broken (think of Diablo 2 and 3, and the RMAH, it destroyed an aspect of the game, searching for loot, and replaced it with just hoarding gold since you'll be buying stuff for either gold or real money).

    So, all in all, you, as a developer, need to be careful not to replace what is not broken and only change what doesn't work anymore (the graphics from Diablo 2 for example weren't ok for a Diablo 3, that's for sure or the way some aspects of the acrobatics skill weren't normal in Oblivion, it wasn't very immersive to keep jumping like crazy trying to level that, so removing them was ok).

    ---------- Post added 2012-09-23 at 08:00 PM ----------

    Quote Originally Posted by Wilian View Post
    [Feargus:] If we listened to everyone, it would be a Japanese turn-based dating sim with insect people.
    That would be an interesting game.

  12. #12
    It is all subjective. The only objective things you can say that makes a game good is stuff like a good options screen, good optimization, not horrible ports, not many bugs, and stuff like that. The rest is subjectivity

  13. #13
    The problem comes in as early as the initial statement imo.

    "Gamers are never happy" suggests that it would be possible for all gamers to be happy with something. That's never gonna happen. Book Readers have never all been happy with a book, Film Fans have never all been happy with a film. There will always be some gamers who are happy, and some gamers who are not.

    Then there's the oft-repeated self-selection process. If gamers are happy, and have free time to do something, they'll generally be playing the game happily rather than on forums. People who go to forums are the unhappy ones.

    And because things change over time, the gamers who are unhappy on the forums are the ones who've just become unhappy & are fresh and full of new complaints. Any positive gamers on the forums are probably at work or otherwise unable to play, and are unlikely to be as full of immediate emotion as the newly-made-unhappy gamers who've shown up with metaphorical pitchforks & a bad experience which only just happened.

    So really, if you want to see happy gamers, you need to somehow separate your forums from your complaints department. And preferably get the forums into the actual game so the happy-to-be-playing-currently gamers are involved too (possibly the capacity to send tweets from within the game, and link those tweets in with forums?)

    But yeah.. the whole issue comes down to "gamers" being about as legitimate a representative group as "blondes" or "drivers".

  14. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by Arnorei View Post
    That would be an interesting game.
    Take away japanese turn based and insects and you'd have Bioware game in few years. *Cough cough*
    Modern gaming apologist: I once tasted diarrhea so shit is fine.

    "People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an excercise of power, are barbarians" - George Lucas 1988

  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by Oldschoolwow View Post

    The only conclusion I have is that the problem with all these games are the gamers themselves. You are the common denominator. If the game sucks it's because there might be something wrong with your expectation.
    Nononono. The costumers most certainly aren't at fault. People complain in every single situation, not just gaming. I'm sure that while there are people who do complain just to complain and there are people who do set their expectations too high, but the fact of the matter is that no game is going to make every single person happy. Everybody has different tastes and different ideas of what makes a good game and that's all there is to it. For example, I had really high expectations for GW2 going into the game and I was happy with it. For Diablo 3 my expectations were high and I didn't enjoy it, and for Borderlands 2 my expectations were low and I really enjoyed it. However, my expectations had nothing to do with whether I enjoyed the game or not. It all boiled down to the gameplay and what I liked and didn't like about it. I legitimately didn't like Diablo 3 because I did not enjoy the way the game played, not because I had high expectations for the game. Sometimes it really is as simple as that.

  16. #16
    How do you make a game that pleases gamers?
    All gamers?

    The correct answer would probably be; You don't.
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  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by -Scarecrow- View Post
    All gamers?

    The correct answer would probably be; You don't.
    The problem is, that's what marketing wants to do and thus we get games that are a little bit of everything but hardly nothing on their own if you take bit or two away.

    I think Mass Effect 2 onwards is perfect example of it.

    It's half third person shooter (A) and half conversation simulator (B) but the two have no connection beyond do A again and again until you get to a point B triggers.

    A in this case means going through endless amounts of trash mobs in tight corridors that are crafted in manner that it's obviously meant to be a shooter. The two have no connection at all. Beyond the obvious "THIS IS A PLOT CHANGE" parts B doesn't affect A's outcome nor the other way around. It's not necessarily bad as the shooting is enjoyable and nice for their part and conversations are diverse and usually interesting when they're on about.

    Reason why I keep ME1 (Created pre-EA) in different spot is because it still had those sort of RPGeish "game outside the game" elements to it even though minimized. I'd assume that if EA didn't take over Bioware we'd have seen ME2 that was expanded on the first game and fixed those bits that didn't work too well instead of remaking it in more streamlined form.

    Then it of course went further with ME3 with all those different game modes you could pick, just so they could "broaden the audience" and market it to the action game people "It's action game" while RPG/conversation simulator people were still told the "It's RPG"

    What I'm getting at though, that when you are starting to try to please everyone you eventually shoot yourself into the foot as you become gray mass. This was expesially evident in DA2 aswell as it alienated a lot of old fans (lot, not all) and didn't really attract all that many new ones because they simply weren't interested in the genre no matter how actiony it got.

    Now with production of DA3 they've gone full fan service apparently and I don't find it all that promising direction either (As I don't like it in any of the Kickstarter products like WL2 either) because I find the good game it could be if it was made on what developers want to play themselves is buried beneath fan input.
    Modern gaming apologist: I once tasted diarrhea so shit is fine.

    "People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an excercise of power, are barbarians" - George Lucas 1988

  18. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by lakhesis View Post

    But yeah.. the whole issue comes down to "gamers" being about as legitimate a representative group as "blondes" or "drivers".
    Pretty much this except I would add it isn't us that has this distinction in their head, it's developers who do. They consider "gamers" to be a legitimate classification and then attempt to make games that appeal to "gamers" and in the end appeal to no one.

  19. #19
    Deleted
    If anyone could answer your question, his ass would be worth millions.

  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by Wilian View Post
    T
    Reason why I keep ME1 (Created pre-EA) in different spot is because it still had those sort of RPGeish "game outside the game" elements to it even though minimized. I'd assume that if EA didn't take over Bioware we'd have seen ME2 that was expanded on the first game and fixed those bits that didn't work too well instead of remaking it in more streamlined form.
    Your assumption has no validity unfortunately. First of all the founders of Bioware willingly SOLD the company to EA, so this isn't a direction that they didn't already have in mind. Second of all it's the nature of any franchise that enjoys any sufficient degree of popularity. They make a bit of money and gain a bit of success. They like to make more money and more success, realise the only way to do this is to broaden the potential group of people who will play the game and then go ahead and do this. It doesn't matter if your name is EA/Bioware or Acti/Blizzard. That's to say nothing of how terrible the controls and gameplay overall was in the first mass effect game... No it's an improvement aimed to garner a wider base of players and it was going to happen anyway EA or not.

    Gaming has become to popular for it's own good. D3 is an excellent example of this. I still can't figure out who that game is made for because as far as I can tell it's made for everybody and in the end it's made for nobody. I suspect the only cure will be another game market crash.

    This is more or less the crux of the grief that many games get. How valid those complaints are depends where you stand on the issue. I happened to enjoy ME2/3, not as much as 1 mind you but for entirely different reasons than it became gears of war in space. In fact I remember when the first game out. Me and my friends all had xboxs. I absolutely loved ME even with it's shitty gameplay and controls. The entire thing just swept me up. My friends couldn't get past it. Flashforward a couple years to ME2. Their hooked on ME2. I had noticed the change between the games as well but I understood why they liked it. They took feedback and improved it.
    Last edited by Leonard McCoy; 2012-09-23 at 07:08 PM.

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