{"id":99,"date":"2009-05-15T07:19:55","date_gmt":"2009-05-14T21:19:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/?p=99"},"modified":"2009-05-15T07:19:55","modified_gmt":"2009-05-14T21:19:55","slug":"is-your-game-underwhelming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/is-your-game-underwhelming\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Your Game Underwhelming?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/images\/blog\/DoW2.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"float: right;\" src=\"http:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/images\/blog\/DoW2sm.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"191\" height=\"118\" \/><\/a>Have you ever played an underwhelming game?\u00a0 It might be a lack of choice, depth, emergence or fun.\u00a0 Today I&#8217;m going to discuss why many games lack that key ingredient to succeed, giving specific examples of how <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dawnofwar2.com\">Dawn of War II<\/a> <\/em>(DOWII) and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.battlefield-heroes.com\/\"><em>Battlefield Heroes<\/em><\/a> (BH) both miss the mark.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll finish up by giving you an exercise to find out whether your game is underwhelming.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Limited choices<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Sid Meier once said &#8220;A game is a series of interesting choices&#8221;.\u00a0 This is the root cause of underwhelming games.\u00a0 It&#8217;s as simple as that.\u00a0 Games lacking enough interesting choices are doomed to fail.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll dive straight into a couple of concrete examples then we can move out to a more abstract look at the situation and general ways to keep your game moving in the right direction.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Case Study 1: Dawn of War II<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dawnofwargame.com\"><em>Dawn of War<\/em><\/a> (one) is a great game.\u00a0 It spawned the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/?p=77\"><em>Company of Heroes<\/em><\/a> series and solidified Relic&#8217;s position as one of the best RTS developers in the world.\u00a0 It was elegant, with plenty of choice and plenty of emergent behaviour.\u00a0 <em>Company of Heroes<\/em> took that to the next level adding more depth in many areas, while simplifying other parts of the game to make a cleaner experience.\u00a0 DOWII tried to take the simplification too far with the following core problems:<\/p>\n<ul type=\"disc\">\n<li>Linear tech <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">tree<\/span> cake<\/li>\n<li>Not enough unit types<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Side Note: Notice I didn&#8217;t mention base building as a core problem.\u00a0 Having no base building is a sure way to piss off a small, fanatical, part of the RTS market; however it isn&#8217;t enough to ruin your game.\u00a0 It can be replaced with a tech tree that serves almost an identical purpose.\u00a0 The problem arises when this abstraction is then hacked back so there is no choice in the progression through the tree.<\/p>\n<p>Just to mock us, Relic gives us a huge printout of the tech tree.\u00a0 But it&#8217;s not even a fraking tree; it&#8217;s just got tiers, like a cake!\u00a0 The issue with this cake is that it&#8217;s the same every single game.\u00a0 There&#8217;s no point even having this cake if the player isn&#8217;t given the choice.\u00a0 The FPS world has a name for it, rail shooter.\u00a0 I guess the best way to sum it up is &#8220;Rail-Time Strategy&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>The second core problem is the lack of unit types.\u00a0 Once again, there simply isn&#8217;t enough choice.\u00a0 The major problem here is the lack of emergence.\u00a0 When there are such a limited number of unit types there&#8217;s no room for deep strategy, let alone emergent gameplay.<\/p>\n<p>Limited choice in tech tree reduces strategic (high level) choice while limited unit choice reduces tactical (low level) choice.\u00a0 Limiting one or the other is problematic, but limiting both is a sure way to under whelm.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Case Study 2: Battlefield Heroes<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The core problem with <em>Battlefield Heroes<\/em> (BH) is the lack of emergence.\u00a0 One of biggest drawcards for the Battlefield series has been the sandbox nature of the game.\u00a0 Playing an FPS where a designer has scripted a hand crafted experience can be great.\u00a0 Even better is playing a sandbox game where something new and exciting happens most times you play based on the small building blocks set out by the designers.\u00a0 By limiting the choices too far, BH lacks this emergence without replacing it with a heavily structured gameplay experience.<\/p>\n<p>There are too few class types and their differences feel superficial.\u00a0 The core idea of classes has been watered down so the choice really doesn&#8217;t matter any more.\u00a0 The strengths and weaknesses of the classes are also too watered down.\u00a0 Is this to make the game easier to balance?\u00a0 When there are so few classes, having an overpowered class can be disastrous, so the safest option is to make them all very similar to each other.<\/p>\n<p><strong>So complexity is the answer?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Obviously, adding a bunch of complexity to these games isn&#8217;t going to solve the problem.\u00a0 The key is finding the right balance between too much complexity, and not enough choice.\u00a0 Also, note that complexity and choice are not necessarily opposites.\u00a0 You can add large amounts of choice without adding overwhelming complexity simply by making smart choices in gameplay and UI.<\/p>\n<p>Automating no-brainer choices is a great way of reducing the burden on the player and leaving them to make only interesting, meaningful choices.<\/p>\n<p>Bejewelled is a great example of a simple game that works really well.\u00a0 Love it or hate it, it&#8217;s enjoyed by millions of people the world over.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a great example of a game that&#8217;s extremely simple to understand, but gains in complexity and depth as you continue to play.\u00a0 The player is simply swapping one gem with another, that&#8217;s it.\u00a0 Yet layered on top of this is such great depth that players keep playing it for hours.\u00a0 This is the perfect example of deep gameplay that is abstracted into the most perfectly simple interface.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Is it a cop out?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Is having less choice\/depth easier to develop, balance and test?\u00a0 Is this cut-back going to solve the problem of games costing millions of dollars to develop? No.\u00a0 There are two ways to reduce the cost of developing games.\u00a0 Make them simpler, or get smarter with how they are made.\u00a0 With the right people, and the right processes in place to develop games, we can achieve deep, emergent games without blowing millions of dollars.\u00a0 Agile development is a great way to reduce the cost of games while still producing extremely high quality.\u00a0 Focus on making the game fun first and <strong>then<\/strong> decide how much money needs to be spent to polish the game up before it is released.<\/p>\n<p>By having the core game created as soon as possible play testing and balancing can begin very early in the project.\u00a0 This reduces the risk of many choices being difficult to balance as you have longer to make it work.<\/p>\n<p>Making a game simpler to reduce cost is like changing the gameplay to make it easier for the programmers to implement something difficult.\u00a0 This is the wrong way around.\u00a0 Choice and fun need to drive the development of your game.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Check your game, right now<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Here is a simple exercise for you to try on your current game:<\/p>\n<ol type=\"1\">\n<li>Find someone that hasn&#8217;t      played your game before, ever.<\/li>\n<li>Sit them down in front of      the game and get them to play<\/li>\n<li>Ask them to say &#8220;<strong>choice<\/strong>&#8221;      every time they make a choice in the game.<\/li>\n<li>Keep a record of how many      choices they make, either for each different part of the game, or grouped      per minute of gameplay<\/li>\n<li>Help the player if they      get stuck, this isn&#8217;t a focus test<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Once finished, have a look at your results.\u00a0 What you want to see is a good distribution of choices throughout the entire time they were playing.\u00a0 If there are large gaps, why wasn&#8217;t the player making a choice?\u00a0 How could this be resolved?<\/p>\n<p>Try this exercise yourself on other successful and unsuccessful games and compare with the results of your own game.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Have you played a game recently that&#8217;s been underwhelming or that you&#8217;ve loved?\u00a0 Add a comment about it and we can continue the discussion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Have you ever played an underwhelming game?\u00a0 It might be a lack of choice, depth, emergence or fun.\u00a0 Today I&#8217;m going to discuss why many games lack that key ingredient to succeed, giving specific examples of how Dawn of War II (DOWII) and Battlefield Heroes (BH) both miss the mark.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll finish up by giving <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/is-your-game-underwhelming\/\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33,5],"tags":[21,22],"class_list":["post-99","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-development","category-games","tag-company-of-heories","tag-dawn-of-war-ii"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgEc5-1B","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}