@erraticonteuse yea, I suppose. What I mean in this case is the people who watch the trailers, play games in the same genre, and wishlist those games. I just don't like seeing developers ditching their audience that made them successful in order to chase "mainstream appeal" whatever that is
@@TurtleMan2023 Well sometimes it's out of their control. FF7 Rebirth seems to be loved by a lot of people. I wanted to love it. I played 60 hours. And then I stopped. Because a lot of the design choices annoyed me more than the fun I was getting from other design choices ( it's not all bad is what I am trying to say haha. But bad enough for me to stop )
The save-scum comment reminds me of the quote: "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." If you give the players a tool or option, they will use and abuse it to the full extent of their ability, so you had better make sure that it's a fun thing to abuse.
Exactly what happens in Baldur's Gate 3. Everyone in the industry moved away from doing percentage based dialogue checks a long time ago, no idea why Larian decided to ignore years of CRPG advancements just so that it could "look" closer to D&D. The result was, it's common for players to just save and reload checks, so what's the point in having different numbers or failing anyway?
Regarding Save Scumming, I always think of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall manual. “Most computer gamers use the save game to maximise their playing ability. Anytime something goes wrong, they return to a saved game and replay it until they get it right. The final history of their game looks like an endless streak of lucky breaks and perfect choices. “Role-playing is not about playing the perfect game. It is about building a character and creating a story. Bethesda Softworks has worked very hard to make The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall a game that does not require players to replay their mistakes. All adversity can be overcome, excepting only the character’s actual death. In fact, you will never see some of the most interesting aspects of the game unless you play through your mistakes. If your character dies, gets locked in a dungeon, or some other truly catastrophic event takes place, by all means return to your last saved game and replay it. However, if you character is caught pickpocketing, if a quest goes wrong, or some other mundane mishap occurs, let it play out. You may be surprised by what happens next.” If you want to save scum, by all means go ahead, but you never know, if you don't save scum, you might get something much more entertaining and memorable than a "perfect" playthrough.
The save-scum (but hates it) thing reminded me of something I think Thor/PirateSoftware said happened... "I don't like that your game has no story." ... The game is all story, do you mean you didn't like the story? "No, it has no story at all." ... Can you explain where? It's a story game, so I don't know what you mean that it has no story. What did you think of ? "Oh that, I skipped it." There is no such thing a foolproof. Also.. in my experience in over the phone tech support, some people are looking for a fight. It won't matter the outcome of the interaction, or the way the game is, their goal is to have that "negative experience", whether it is a fight over the phone or a mean comment/review that picks apart the game (fairly or unfairly). For some people, the "meta" is that they are getting something out of being negative. It wouldn't matter what you made or what happened. They were itching for negativity and you happened to be the next target.
A lot of stories get skipped not because the player doesn't want to engage with the story, but because the storytelling mechanism takes you out of the gameplay, away from the goals it's encouraging you to follow and replaces it with dialogue screens that just slow you down in achieving those goals. I loved Bioshock growing up and a HUGE part of that was that the world building and story-telling was often told through little audio logs that would play as you're walking around exploring and looting and such.
Making the key parts of the story optional content is... an odd decision to make if you want people to judge the game's story based on said optional content. There's a big difference between having a niche preference and having counterintuitive design.
Its a completely unrealistic wish but sometimes I wish there was a way to ask a designer why certain choice was made (besides money). Because sometimes you play a game and you understand why certain parts were made the way they are. But sometimes you encounter a decision that seems like it was made using some completely alien logic. You stare at it and you just don't understand. Tell me your secrets, design decision. I want to know. And on the topic of options I think I can explain for myself why I'm getting angry when I see a prompt to choose various gameplay options when I start the game but I don't know what the solution is. I press "New game" and most of the games prompt me to select difficulty. And most of the games do not care to explain to me what those options mean. I need to make an uninformed choice that (sometimes) will affect my entire playthrough because the only way to change it is to start a new game. I'm not starting a new game when I've invested a few hours in it. And if game will ask me "Do you want quest markers?" when I press "New game" my answer is:"I don't know! This is literally first time I'm playing it. Was it designed with or without quest markers in mind?" And usually there is no explanation. And sometimes some option was added after release because community was unhappy about it missing. So game might've been designed to not have them but they were added later. You start a game 5 years after release and see a toggle:"Classic mode: no quest markers / Enhanced mode: quest markers". "Enhanced" sounds better but "classic" sounds like it was intended like that from the start. What should I pick? I don't know. Maybe the solution is to run for about 30 minutes with "intended" settings and then start offering tweaks. Maybe solution is to provide is many information as possible. But then again. I remember playing a game and after failing a boss battle a few times it started offering me cheat-y ways of beating it and it was kind of annoying. No, I don't want your magic armor, I want to beat it myself. I know that I've lost a few times in a row. Thanks for rubbing it in 🙂 And providing too much information before player starts caring is not a successful strategy either🙂 I don't know.
Yeah agreed with this - making an option between quest markers or not quest markers is not best of both, it's a third option with it's own downsides - the player has to take on the work of deciding if it works for the game or not. You have to play through a certain amount of the game to work out if it's even playable without quest markers. Generally the designer should be able to save me the trouble since they designed the game one way or another.
I guess lazy devs were forced to make introductory choices late in the design. Maybe a descripton of ehat the fifficulty foes would work but anythinng like letting you try and then decide is extra coding and debugging and game design costs.
In Buenos Aires, Argentina, we have a common "story" told by our grandparents and parents that talks about this subject: "Once upon a time, an old gaucho and his grandson were walking down to a small town alongside his horse. When they arrived, people told them they were naïve because they weren't riding that horse. So, the next day, both of them got on the horse and rode to the next town. When they arrived at the next town, people started to criticize them because both were riding the horse, and that might hurt the horse. So, the next day, the grandson got on the horse and both went to the next town. Upon their arrival, people booed the kid for not letting and old man to ride the horse, and suffer because of the long journey. So, the next day, the gaucho got on the horse and both went to the next town. When they arrived, people threw everything at the old man because he was too selfish to travel comfortably while the kid had to walk a long distance with his tiny feet." What's the moral of the story? No matter what you do, whether you do something or its exact opposite, people will ALWAYS criticize you because you did what they couldn't do on their own.
you forgot the end. They decided to both walk instead of riding the horse and people came by saying: "Look, they are so dumb. They have a horse and don't even use it"
What I miss about gaming back then is that we had to work around so much shit and rough edges from awful controls to fighting with the camera, but we still loved the games we played regardless, nowadays people will throw the tantrum if they didnt like the fucking font.
A game dev friend of mine once said, "If you give a gamer a hat that will give them the game exactly as they want, they will bitch about the color of the hat." I agree with you. We all have different tastes.
I used to DJ. I know exactly what you are talking about. My goal for a set was to make some people very happy, and most people happy. There is nothing I could do about those who didn't like my style and choices, and trying to please them would only degrade the overall experience for everyone. Trying to please everyone pleases no one.
So happy I found this channel. Feels like the American version of Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games. Thank you for sharing your insight and preserving this knowledge for future generations!
Another takeaway may be that “making the most players happy” isn’t as useful a selection criterion as “making a cohesive experience,” because nothing exists in a vacuum, and we’re trying to make a game, not a loose aggregation of features.
Noob trap for me as a junior designer were cases when I stubbornly got caught up in solving cursed problems that tried to please everyone. I am grateful for deadlines and budget limits. They bring a lot of things sharply into perspective and your design mission begins to make sense in context
Elden Ring comes to mind. You have people who think there should be difficulty settings. I am personally VERY against that idea in Elden Ring specifically. I have nothing against difficulty settings, but Elden Ring as an experience is designed around overcoming a challenge and exploring a dangerous world. I believe thats baked into the design and if you take it away the game is a lot less fun to play.
Amusingly, one of most recent souls-likes, Another Crabs Treasure, went exactly the opposite way, and has loads of difficulty options ( inclouding joke "give crab a gun" ) for as easy or keyboard breaking experience as player wants. If this game succeds ( especialy finacialy ), we may see more shift in this genre towards opening for more casual audience.
If your goal is to make a great game, you can succeed by meeting your own criteria for game-greatness. If your goal is to sell a great number of games, you have to meet and avoid missing many other people's criteria.
I have an argument about the "probably money". Yes, budget is always something that affects a project a lot, but it's not like there are no bad design decisions. It depends a lot on what kind of project it is, what kind of budget it has, how many people are working on it and how many decision makers are there when it comes to mechanics and what should be in the game. A lot of these factors will affect how holistic the final product is and how well do mechanics blend into one another. More often than not, it will result in some not-so-good design decisions. It does not mean at all that the game itself will be bad - I think a ton of amazing games have some bad features here and there. In AAA, a good Game Director will take the reins on the vision and will produce amazing results (provided there's not too much interference from the money guys). In indie gaming (the small budget indies, I am not talking about very-well established indies, much less CDPR or Larian) the vision/design has to be handled with care because it might be the only shot those indies have. So yeah, they all do need money, but the final product does not have money reflect on the resulting quality only because of it, but because of the design approach as well. One last argument is about save-scumming - yes, the players will save scum and lose some flavor of fun in the game if you let them (and complain if you don't let them), but keep in mind that a lot of the approach from the gamers themselves will depend on the quality of the design as well. If you randomly introduce a DC30 skill check on an important character milestone without taking account on what you went through with that character previously, it's bad design. Reducing that DC according to your previous actions will result in a more logical approach where the save-scumming isn't needed, and having no chance to even roll if your previous actions led to what should increase this DC makes the player not able to save scum to alleviate these bad decisions. So, the design there could be better, no? Anyway, I know Tim knows all this, just wanted to throw it out there. Cheers.
Hey Tim, I’ve noticed you only have about 3 videos on this channel about the outer worlds I recently decided to give it a second play through since release and was surprised how good the dialogues are and that yes you really have choices and your skills matter in a dialogue Would be great to hear more about this game from you For example: - What did you think about choices and consequences, were they impactful in your opinion ? What would you change ? - Factions and how they work - replayability Or honestly anything, just would love to hear more from you
I’d love to do more videos on TOW, but since I’m working on the sequel, there are many topics I need to avoid, such as what I would do differently or how I would extend some mechanics. Because maybe I am.
Perfect example of this in action - Real Time Strategy games. The people who play older RTS games like Brood War appreciate the amount of skill needed to play the game. People who create modern RTS are constantly trying to appeal to a broader demographic of players by having the strategy element be more important than skill, but then you get the loudest voices in the reaction community be the big popular skill-first gamers who are still playing games from 30 years ago. You can't have things be an option if the option fully replaces the skill because people who develop the skill will be unhappy. You can't NOT include some changes because people who haven't developed the skill will say the game is old and unplayable. So things are made to appeal to more average skill gamers and the pros are always upset about how none of the new rts games reward skill. But then the marketing tries to focus on eSports and get pro players invested, and the game gets balanced to a pro level, which puts off more casual players who just want to move cool units around and beat up the AI. So you end up with a genre that ends up doing nothing but dividing their playerbase until nobody is actually happy with the end result.
Seems like there are no games for me then. I'd like something that feels like Fallout 1, but looks and plays like Fallout 4 in every aspect except dialogues and stupid hard skill caps. And damn unbreakable yet half-broken wooden doors. And without bulletsponge enemies.
Tim: bifurcates possible set of outcomes for a feature into "audience likes it" and "audience doesn't like it" Audience: bifurcates into people who like that take and who don't
One thing I have enjoyed about some games (mainly Indy) were optional commentaries from producers, designers, etc regarding choices made in the game and explaining why they did some of what they did in developing the game. Just a really good idea that can sometimes give you a different aspect while playing.
I think one of the factors into people claiming they dislike options is the options being communicated poorly to them. In some games, the intended experience is difficult, and a lower difficulty will result in a lesser experience. I particularly like the recently popular “assist mode” branding for options that lower the difficulty in such a game. Makes it clear that no assist options is the developer-intended and most fun way to play the game for most, but the assist mode is there if you really really want/need a less challenging experience.
Game devs that want to "make everyone happy" are like player characters that try to gain reputation with two factions that are mutually exclusive. Both factions expect loyalty to their cause and values out of it and neither one got it.
I feel like a game designed to pacify the largest audience with palatable features limits itself. That decision is predicated on the idea that players actually know what they want most, and that they communicate what they want based on what they buy, but in reality there might be a huge market for some bold, untested choice that'll excite players rather than just simply being passable.
Really want to say I love your choice in tops Tim. I think every single one you've worn thus far really suits you! Glad you covered this topic, I remember having it many times with students I used to teach in College. The thing they seemed to struggle most with is when sequels change or introduce mechanics they don't like.
It's so weirdly serendipitous that you made this. I'm working on a video referencing you (Ive been binge-watching your videos) regarding game design. Thanks!
Interesting way to look at Design Choices Mr.Cain. But I think I'll take on the challenge of making an argument against parts of your advice. I agree with the "you can't make everyone happy" argument, but I would argue that your advice to in fact not make everyone happy but rather piss off the smallest group has downstream effects that would ultimately lead to the formulation of design choices that are meant to make "everyone" happy in an inorganic way. The advice is based on the core idea that games are intended to make money and hence the argument for casting a wide net by only pissing off a small group, if the vast majority of the audience is happy that means profit and success. Therefore the assumed hierarchy in which the designer informs his decision is as follows = primary motivation for creating game = money --> motivation informs design decision --> designer realizes that the only way to do this is to capture a larger audience --> design decisions made with no focus leading to multiple options or just bland options (aka milquetoast shallow design). Inorganic creation of entertainment to garner a large audience and having a large audience liking the thing is not an audience expressing their taste for the thing, the entertainment is created with the intention of garnering a large audience, it's like marketing and advertisement logic it meant to entice you, you being enticed does not mean it reflects your inner wants and likings. The advice you have given would lead to choices that would yield a lot of success and the choices would become a trend in videogames leading to the same design choices across the industry leading to garnering an inorganic audience, since the design choices would be so clinically made they will end up creating a taste in said inorganic audience that will lead them to demand more of the same, leading to stagnation in creativity in a so-called "creative" industry. Thus creating an audience that is entirely inorganic and is completely addicted to certain design choices by design, those who don't as it don't play it don't count as the audience. So yes it is possible to please everyone if you as a designer follow a path of designing your game using designing principles that are proven to attract this inorganic audience. This audience exists because they have no experience playing older games, they avoid them for multiple reasons, and all of them relate to them being conditioned to only like a certain game (by design). This design philosophy has ultimately created the ultimate consumer, they will always buy the new thing because they know the new thing will follow the same game design and will scratch the same itch. This advice has been a staple of the industry as evidenced by the copy-pasted design decisions across games and has led the entire modern AAA industry and I would argue even the modern indie scene into a pit of creative bankruptcy. Just because there are thousands of games on Steam does not mean all of them have a creative spirit, especially when probably a vast majority of them are made with the primary motive of creating money. A part of the reason why people say things were good back when the industry wasn't that big and mainstream is because the design decisions were organic, design decisions were made by the designers because they wanted to create games they'd personally want to play, not specifically those that would gain the largest praise of success, even if these inorganic motives played a part it was not the main focus. The games might have had a small audience and they might have alienated some parts of the audience but they had an organic focus which led to a unique experience for the player, which ultimately made them popular, the players who weren't so open to playing a game with a tight focus tried it out and because of the uniqueness of the experience kept playing it and grew to love the thing. It was despite the hurdles of not appealing to the player, the player endured it and grew to love it, organically. Tastes are not set in stone, they change especially when you casually dabble in a hobby. The modern industry manipulates this fact and tries to create games that create a taste that is addictive, creating an inorganic audience. Older games stayed true to their focus and tried to be fun for the creator, thus the devs tried to appeal to themselves and their art and code were true to themselves, and any popularity that followed was organic. When people say X has no taste they mean your taste is inorganic, it isn't true it is a product of a popular trend which are manufactured to be popular by design. A lot of people might like a Coke, but is it because of the copious amount of caffeine in it? and is it intentional by the manufacturer? Well if the answer to both those things is yes, then those people don't have organic taste it is inorganic ,thus, they do not have taste I like Sprite fight me Coke fans P.S. Sorry for the long read
The value statement of "liking something" or enforcing one's own judgment upon something is directly tied to expectation or the aim for said unit. By this I mean if you have no desires or goals when using something, you are simply experiencing it for what it is. You could say those experiences can harmonize or synergize with parts of you or not. But the moment you begin to actively engage with something, goals and expectations start to form. Thought experiment: If you are a capable carpenter using a simple hammer to hammer nails to build something and the hammer has a firm grip among other attributes as to not create friction between the tool, your ability, your goal, the expectation you bring to the hammer along with the output from said process. If you then did the job you set out to do, the hammer simply bridged that gap. The hammer becomes a part of you. Now if you for some reason were not satisfied with how the job was executed there are multiple factors involved in the process and you have the freedom to direct the frustration and blame it all on the hammer or any other factor involved. Now whether it's justified/ reasonable or not is a different question and context specific. The paradigm on tools are more concrete with a narrower scopes goal-wise. With leisure activities this complexity grows as well as fluctuate. This line of reasoning is borrowed from Clay Christensen "Understanding the Job"
There is way to hide the options by sending hudden signal only specific group of player pick up. Like layering path in the level design that appeal to different player subtly. The most obvious example is Mario coin catégories : regular coin are incititive to follow a bread crumb path for the less adventurous, big coin reward straying from that path with more challenging routes, red coin are literal puzzle that test mastery. Every sections with those ask the player is this something worth pursuing now, which is a cost analysis but doesn't prevent progression while still rewarding player at their skill and play style level. Same for old final fantasy game, you either go the slow routes of quaffing 99 potions, or spend more on buff items for riskier but faster battle. Quaffing isn't undervalued by laking the gale easier, just simpler to understand, as you still have to anticipate more and more complex pattern to know when you can heal and revive fallen members, which incidentally makes you learn about the enemy behavior for optimizing more complex and faster strategy. These kind of stretchy design makes player think their way is the better way without realizing it cater to every play styles, modern example, kinda faulty because it's only at the selection screen and loosely in the world design, is elden ring. It's harder but possible.
I played a Far Cry game, and I haaaaated how the UI was handholdy. Showing me where all the enemies were, lots of markers everywhere. I turned that off, and now it felt like a real challenge again. That's an option that lets me choose my play style. In some games however, where there are features or mechanics that are overpowered and break the game, and the only option is "just don't use it if you want it to be harder", that feels bad to me. Because it never feels like the game is intended to work without it. And I have to now resist the "get me out if this pickle" button.
@@JellyJman Playable sure, but The Witcher 3 was absolutely not a better experience when turning everything off, just more tedious. I'd love to see more games be designed without these mechanics and then only have them implemented at the 11th hour for people who want them.
@@simulacrumgames that’s just ultimately your opinion. I’ve seen many gamers turn everything HUD option off in games despite being “more tedious” just to be more immersive. An example I know is the Metro games, they have a mode where the HUD is turned off by default and it’s more tedious, but also more fullfuling.
So I am going to be a pedantic engineer. You can 100% make your player base happy all of the time. It requires you to say "hey you don't fully like this game with all of it's flaws? Then the game isn't for you and you aren't in the player base." Which any business/marketing person will tell you is a terrible waste of potential money. It's also something we are seeing more of because of indie developers making passion projects and saying "I don't care about the size of my player base, I am building a game for me." You can please everyone you care about all of the time, just stop caring about those who are not flexible enough to be pleased by what you've made.
Especially true for games with big budgets. Focus on profit and predictability of profit. Creativity costs a lot for larger companies because they validate ideas to remove risk, and validation is often quite expensive so they usually go with the safe route. This ties back into many studios not really having R&D departments; but also the focus of those departments is generally narrowed down a lot compared to what players wish for.
This is actually why I'd like to see more small and medium budget games where the stakes weren't quite so high -- but even that is a some people will like it some won't, since some players demand the detail, realistic / "next gen" graphics, and all the other things only a AAA game with a big budget can provide, while others would rather see lower budget games with more interesting game play.
@@BlackJar72 Absolutely. Frankly, I don't think the massive amounts of clutter in 3d worlds are improving sales anyway, so it's not like the AAA companies would have much to lose from downsizing/segmenting their studios a bit more. Lest we forget, there's so much junk laying around on maps now that they have to paint the correct path yellow!
I love this! Your thoughts directly contend with the modern Triple A game segment. As studios are creating iterations of myriad beloved series that remove divisive design elements to appeal to a broader audience.(design elements I feel are crucial to the experience). The Sales figures would certainly imply that its working, but that could also be attributed to the growing success over the previous iterations manifesting in the mass purchase of a new game in a series, years after the last one was released. I really like the idea of normalizing uniquely designed games that get across a particular story through its narrative and its mechanics that would necesitate forgoing this "widest approach" design philosophy in favor of a less applicable, more impactful approach.
Thank you Tim, I'm sure it's not easy to tell people that are very excitable about games that development is challenging and often you're inevitably going to be ridiculed
I have a few good examples of me being a horrible player that dislikes a mechanic yet refuses to not use/abuse it. Hopefully this clears it up for anyone who has a hard time imagining how and why players sometimes do this. Not all of these have solutions but I think it's good to at least be aware of them. 1. Mechanic was "too good": In the 3ds Metroid II remake they added a parry and a quick scan to indicate hidden/breakable walls. For the scan, normally I like spamming attacks and bombs everywhere to uncover secrets myself but it was hard to actively not abuse the quick scan when it saved so much time. This is something you could will yourself to ignore, but it felt like it was a waste not to do this. Metal Gear Solid 4 actually had a similar situation where when prone, Snake would automatically change his camo to reflect the color of the ground instead of manually doing it, but for me I had so much fun in the previous game where every time I entered a new room, I'd change my outfit. And I could still do this, but as a player it felt like a waste of time, and especially since MGS4 is more action than the previous game. Going back to the parry in Metroid II remake, they made this thing absolutely busted. It was easy, took little skill, and easily killed enemies, but it sucked to do because instead of running and gunning it was optimal (and faster) to wait when you see an enemy until it charges at you, and then parry. This absolutely killed the pacing of the exploration and action platforming, but to not do this made the game harder and actually slower than the stop in all movement to parry. I've commented about this to people and they called me a purist but understood that this change was not for everyone, but in the next game, Metroid Dread, Mercury Steam balanced the enemies to where the parry was only another tool in the arsenal and rarely the sole optimal solution to a problem, which made the game so much more fun for me and for the players who already liked the previous title. That example is where there actually was a solution that helped "both players", but you're right in that pretty much no matter what some people will always like or dislike a mechanic. 2. Player does not understand the mechanic correctly/player expectations ruins a mechanic: I've seen this happen in some action games or action RPGs, but it can totally happen in any game. Sometimes players will abuse a mechanic because it's either the only one they understand, or they actually don't understand it at all but cling onto it despite using it wrong. This is the sort of thing you'll see with inexperienced players who may not have played too many video games. An example I have is with Fromsoftware RPGs and parrying. I love Dark Souls and Elden Ring but one of my friends absolutely hates it because he's bad at parrying. He was used to action open world games like Assassin's Creed and Ghosts of Tsushima where parrying is fairly simple to do and useful, but in FromSoft RPGs they are just another tool in your arsenal that is not only completely optional, but often not the best move to even do. When I got him to play Dark Souls 2, he was bad at the combat because I put him as a Mage that would be easier once he has a spell or two, but in the intro of the game is a bit difficult to play as. Instead of blocking and strafing, he wanted to just use the parry to quickly and efficiently take down enemies, but in this game parrying is slow and often too risky for such a small reward (you do NOT get i-frames during the riposte animation). You CAN get good at the game and use the parry to solve many problems, but it takes hours and hours of practice to master when to input the parry at the right frame of an enemy's attack animation. When he tried Elden Ring he was better at the parrying but he still had the same problem where he would spam the same attack and fail a parry and then give up and say the game "isn't for him". Honestly though who can blame him, if a game like that isn't your style then of course it's gonna be hard to let yourself understand the game and learn how to play it "correctly" or in a way that is fun for you. ("correctly" in this case being where you do not die) 3. Player has developed habits from other games that become "bad habits" in the game they're currently playing: After I played the Resident Evil 1 remake, I became an item hoarder because you can't really beat that game without carefully managing your health items and ammo, but when I started playing JRPGs with mass amounts of items, I rarely used them and had less fun times because it was engrained in me to always save items and seldom use them. I could have a hard time with a boss but it was my fault for not popping a rare health item or combat booster that would of let me win. After some amount of time (literal years) I realized I had this habit so I made it a habit to instead use items I found, but if I wasn't aware and critical of my playstyles I would of never bothered to do something about it. 4. Player is stupid and ignorant (and sometimes afraid of change): This happens to even the best of us. Sometimes I just don't understand something and don't bother to do something about it. When I played Final Fantasy 5 I didn't bother experimenting with some of the wacky classes you unlock later in the game because I liked the basic starting ones. When I played Hollow Knight I didn't bother experimenting with the badge system to equip different passives that would make combat more fun because the one time I equipped a new badge I thought it seemed dumb. Sometimes item descriptions do this, other times the player has a bad experience and will never try the item or equipment again while not knowing that it may make their experiences more fun. You can try to work around this as much as you want, but some players will always skip dialogue and ignore tutorials then complain about when they don't understand something, and sometimes you do this too so you need to be aware not to talk down to others but also encourage them to keep trying a game and push them to actually pay attention sometimes. Another aspect about the "afraid of change" is that players may not want to inconvenience themselves despite it being fun to succeed when in a bad position. In Thief there are plenty of items to help you make a quick getaway, but you can save scum to have a "flawless run". They may be afraid of being spotted to the point of save scumming while not knowing that the best tense and funny moments of the game are when you barely make it out alive from a bad situation.
3) Oh, that's me in most games😅 "Why are these potions in this game anyway? I never used them" "But I must pick them up! What if I actually need it later?" *Completes the game with 100+ potions of every kind that he was saving for The Boss*
I made the game I wanted, something fun, simple, and action focused to balance all the long, involved games I was playing, I thought of it as sort-of the "Snakes on a Plane of games," a straight-forward retro-shooter with roguelike elements... ...practically no one bought it.
Hi Tim, Great video as always! I think you briefly touched on this near the end of your Discoverability video but I think this one ties in quite nicely to that. I see the biggest problems today around discoverability is curation and reviews. With the rise of fake reviews online (maybe less so for games), How can we combat this? How can we be sure the right people are finding the right games for them? I think as you mentioned previously finding reviewers you like is important, but its not an easy task for the average person who has limited time because of other responsibilities. How can curation be free from corporate interests and becoming another form of marketing? As you mentioned a lot of decisions come down to money. I'm glad there are more games than I could feasibly play in a lifetime and all the choice that provides, but how can one be sure they aren't wasting their time and money in buying the wrong games? How can developers be sure the right reviewers/curators are showcasing their games? I would appreciate if you dove further into this topic! Thank you
Yeah… true. I am not an objective party, but I do feel I am alright at recognising that a game isn’t for me, and appreciating them for what it is. What I am not good at dealing with, are those big budget production that cast such a wide net, that they give me a glimpse at a game I would want to play, but aren’t focused enough to provide a full and satisfying experience. Those are very frustrating to me, as you can see what those games could be, but they will never be that as it would require focusing and tightening of the design, and therefore appealing to smaller player base. Eh, at least there are games still being made that I enjoy - and with Microsoft acquiring some of my favourite studios and going on shutting down spree, I do wonder how long it will last. 😢
On "bad games" video I was going to point to some of the "bad" games, but then it clicked with me, yes, even those games were probably loved by some people.
I'm in the group of people that loves options, lol. In Cyberpunk, I NEEDED all the UI options because I really didn't like how intrusive the standard UI was, and Starfield's new difficulty options vastly improved that game for me, and I still think there should be at least one more survival mechanic (fuel economics) and an option related to how hardcore the player wants that mechanic to be.
Having lots of options is great indeed. Problem is, there definietly exist point ( ofc, diffrent for each individual player) where there can be so many options of playing that you either won't ever use majority of them or worse, be stuck in decision paralisis and just nope out of the game.
Thank god they've included "disable damage numbers" option! That and the fact that they seem to have balanced the game by 2.0. This was my biggest problem with the game right from the start. I HATE seeing 99999999 damage being dealt yet completely no reaction from the enemy. It doesn't make me want to level up it makes me want to delete and refund.
The Peanuts shirt returns! I love your style choices in all your videos. Those neon baseball Ts, company Ts, even game-/video-specific shirts! And I must compliment your impressive collection of cool shirts. I'm wondering: do you have some favorite t-shirts? Were you able to wear your t-shirts proudly throughout your career, or were there roles or companies that required you to dress more formally? Have you been involved at all in the merchandising around your games? And if so, what was it like making those decisions and what were the outcomes?
There is plenty of elitism among game enthusiasts, but I disagree that it's just settled wisdom that it comes down to different taste or preferences. Philosophically you can find plenty of arguments for objectivity in art and aesthetics, good and bad taste etc. Not just coming from some random commenter but real philosophers.
It's about focusing on what you want to make, with the possibility of someone else enjoying it or learning from it. For a lot of creatives it's about the work, the process. Not about the critical or commercial reception when it's unveiled. Both great if you get them, but not the be all and end all. I have a CRPG in my head that I would love to try to make, which I feel would only be appreciated by a minority. Not because I want to make something purposefully niche, but simply because it's the kind of a game I would love to play. There's an old Bob Dylan quote, something along the lines of 'nobody was writing about the things I thought should be written about. So I wrote them'.
I acknowledge that developers have a better understanding of game design than the players, and that their design choices are made with some consideration and not because "they are dumb". I get it. It's sort of like how managers/coaches usually know better than sports fans who criticize their choices because they spend more time with the team and their knowledge of tactics go deeper. But how about sequels with too many design changes? Fallout 4 is immensely successful but did it have to be so insanely polarizing and controversial as a sequel? No skills thus no skill checks, go to specific spot to unlock this perk with a bobblehead/magazine, a thematically low charisma perk that requires 3 charisma, etc. So where do we draw the line, exactly? Would Fallout 4 be a failure with 3 and especially NV's systems?
It wouldn't fail, but it's part of Bethesda's "new" vision. You could see traces of it even in Fallout 3 and later in Skyrim. It is especially evident if you look at Creation Kit. 4 dialogue options isn't just a design choice. It's literally hardcoded into the engine now. If you want to make a mod and have more dialogue options - you need f4se and plugins that allow to put more options and ui mod that supports multiple options. To me it seems that what I've commented yesterday is especially true with Bethesda. They want to make a game for literally everyone which is why people like me, who actually want better story, more roleplay options and more RPG elements in general, feel left out or even betrayed.
"a game made for everyone is a game made for no one": so pick your niche, preferably something you enjoy yourself, and hope for the best. (saw this recently on the interwebs, but forgot who said it)
7:17 btw I hate when people blame "capitalism" for the likes of Call of Duty thriving while Indies starving. Well, tons of people love the Call of Duty types: so much so that they buy it with their precious time (i.e. money) every year. I love some niche games but would be unfair of me to force people who don't like them to pay for them.
As always another poignant video Mr. Cain! I consulted for a project awhile back and offered a few ideas to expand the narrative scope possible within the existing framework. At the time I assumed players would love the opportunity to experience the game in a new way, emulating what was possible within another medium but adapted for a different genre. Out of all of the projects I had consulted on up until that point this was the one I was most invested in, as it had the biggest opportunity to advance what was possible. Players hated it. While I generally stay away from sale numbers, I believe it may have been one of the worst performing projects that I have ever consulted on. My initial response was defensive - "the players are just not intelligent enough to appreciate the value of the project!", they failed to recognize what new avenues were now available to them - that even if this particular product was too niche, it was good for the future health of the game as a whole! On the other hand, a previous project I consulted on sold very well, and players loved it - even though I felt comparatively it was mechanically shallow! Ultimately, I had to remind myself that yeah, not everyone is going to love everything you produce. The players are not ignorant for not "getting it", I just failed to gauge what my audience wanted at that time. While I believed it was the more "valuable" (and I feel Design/Development may agree) project, it failed to bring in the money - which means apathetic players and I imagine very angry shareholders!
That's exactly why I don't like when people go and try to change games into something they WANT them to be (like what happened to Stellar Blade). Everybody has their own tastes. The beauty of games and arts is that you can choose what you want to produce and consume.
Thanks for saying all this. It's extremely validating to hear things that I've been thinking for a while from someone who actually makes games. The "solution" (for lack of a better word) that comes to mind for me is signposting those things that will be divisive in a way that filters the playerbase, preferably before they've invested money and time into something they won't like - and will therefore give a bad review of. I guess my question would be how do you effectively signpost what your game will be like in a way that lets a potential player know as soon as possible whether a game will or will not be for them?
I don't know if "popular" is the right word but if micro-transactions were universally "unpopular" then game companies wouldn't do it. Some people (generally those with money to burn) even appear to like pay-to-win. And if that's what some people want then... Put the money in the bag suckers.
Oh they are. And if you try to throw shade on one of the popular p2w mtx mobile games you will have to face an army of useful idiots defending a big corporation that is robbing them.
@@VioletMiracle "robbing them" sounds a bit hyperbolic but yeah... If someone is so desperate to win that they're willing to pay $5000 then someone is going to cater to that market. Possibly even a small indie developer (because it's not just big fish that like money).
@@VioletMiracle Is that a question about game design choices or a question about how to regulate gambling (which goes way beyond videogames)? Gambling is another one that plenty of people seem to demand and enjoy. How to keep it fair and square seems to be the issue here. That doesn't really reflect on its popularity one way or another.
One justification I can guess for a player potentially disliking having both choices provided as an option is that them both being in there represents an oppurtunity cost that was paid by taking some of the limited time or budget away from another part of the game. I can imagine it would sting if someone felt that a specific mechanic or area they liked was noticeably undercooked and other things had more visible effort put into them than was "necessary" (in heavy quotes). The usual assumption would be that the random layman wouldn't even consider that development resources were limited at all but if someone is commenting on things besides making smalltak they probably at least think that they know something about the topic. Certainly would be a more sensible thought process than the no-self control (ie "I don't want you to give this option because I'll use it to ruin the game" like the savescummer) approach to disliking choice.
I'm definatly in the 'More options = More better' camp, the people who hate options remind me of the people whose favourite class is a Red Mage 'Because of the versitility' or 'freedom' but once you give them that freedom over the entire party where they can make anyone into anything or have everyone learn everything, even if you give hints as to what class someone could be, a high INT stat, their Limit Breaks mostly focus on physical, etc, they just give everyone everything and say everyone is the same and it's the games fault, anything to shift the blame away from them and in my opinion, essentially their lack of imagination.
Hey Tim, I absolutely love your videos! Ever considered making videos like Smash Ultimate director Sakurai? He started a channel years ago with short videos about game dev concepts etc., but loaded with a bigger emphasize on presentation (graphics and so on) with the focus to help younger game devs years to come.
Honestly, when it comes to options for game design, I definitely believe there's a degree of risk when making things options, or toggles, specifically in cases where the toggle is super important and the difference between some playstyles being fun and others not. Like, difficulty options are often really misleading - because you can never know what changes from one to the other - and in a case like the 3D fallout games, the difficulty toggle just makes enemies spongier and doesn't provide more of a challenge other than making weaker weapons unviable. Special mention to the remaster of Yakuza 3, where the FPS increase to 60 broke the enemy AI and everyone reacts twice as fast to the actions of your characters - meaning the difficulty toggle turns into a trap for unaware players.
It's kind of funny. As a player I prefer fewer options and to be put at the mercy of the game. I think it comes down to not really feeling like I know what the "right" options are. As a developer, I want to expose everything possible as an option, both to my players and to designers who have to work with my tools. Something I've learned, though, is that there are a lot of people out there like me. They don't want to know what all the knobs do, or have to think about turning them. They want me to decide what I think is best and have me adjust it later if something's not quite to their liking after working with it for a while.
Ive got mud on my face on this one for sure. when I was a teenager and Fallout New Vegas was relatively new I sang its praises and complained about Fallout 3. Now that I am not an emotional teenager with zero awareness I love all the Fallout games differently. But I remember when I was the butt end of Henry Fords saying "If I had asked them what they wanted they would've said faster horses." It's a process I won't ever understand even if I spend my life specializing in it, which I won't. Art is complex, work is hard. I imagine that doing both at the same time can feel like juggling a chainsaw and a vase of flowers.
I don't know that I've ever heard anyone complain about Celeste's assist mode. I'm sure somebody has, but it's so clearly demarcated and explained that it's tough for even difficulty setting haters to hate it or 'save scummers' (not literally save scumming, but taking the fun out of something by choosing an easy mode) to choose it
i think the best way to make a game is to decide what that game is supposed to be and just try to do that the best you can. if the game is amazing at what it does then it doesnt have to try to please anyone.
Hey Tim, what do you think of difficulty and game flow options being an in-game system rather than a pause menu toggle? I think of the way the FromSoftware games don’t have gameplay toggles because all their options are actual in-game systems and items
Arrowhead's motto: "A game for everyone is a game for no one" I couldn't have worded it better myself. And have been living by that since the Magicka days.
Tim your comment about people having different tastes rings so true to basically everything in fiction. Games or otherwise. The fact that people get genuinely upset over me liking a certain game or movie or book they don’t is just bizarre to me.
Yeah seen that about xp in games I made or in general. There is people that hates grinding, but WILL ALWAYS grind if given the chance, and then have a terrible experience. (and then there is people that absolutely love it and get very frustrated if you don't let them). I thought that a game is something you own, so you play it in the way that suits you best. For some, this way is not always the most fun way, and there will be no responsibility taken, on how they consume the content.
Sometimes it is just a case of not seeing the forest for the trees though, or at least it seems to be. When XCom2 was announced and they talked about the Stealth mechanic and the mission timer countdown everyone assumed the countdown would only start when you were spotted or attacked the enemy, because otherwise why would there be a limit, right? Well the game comes out and no the countdown starts immediately, and it's such a baffling and weird choice that it even came up in interviews, where the Devs essentially said "Oh that makes sense doesn't it? Well we didn't think of that." And then a few days later someone makes a mod to do exactly that (for PC players at least) and it's left as a weird legacy decision.
In general I support options but there is some times there is stress in figuring out which options are actually well supported by the game. A good example this are difficulty options in games, usually "normal" is the one that has been throughly tested by the devs, it's the curated experience. but harder options can sometimes be awkward because they just increased the stats of enemies which works out fine for most of the game but causes unintended difficulty spikes in encounters that haven't been well tested under these conditions. Another one is quest markers in open world games, despite not actually given the choice by the devs it's best illustrated in the elder scrolls games. TES3: Morrowind didn't have quest markers npcs and the quest log provided extensive descriptions which you could follow, then oblivion replaced these with just giving you a marker to follow. There are mods to remove these but the game becomes borderline unplayable with them because the quest design relied on these markers and there aren't the location descriptions like in morrowind to fall back on. Usually I can just google to see what options are actually recommended by players but there is some comfort in a game only letting you play one way knowing it's the one the devs intended for (like dark souls game being very difficult but there is the assurance that it's fully intentional).
When it comes to the giving players options part, I think it's a great example of why moddable games stay beloved, the developer can make the best curated base game experience possible, and if someone wants to play it a different way, they can just change it and enjoy it how they want to. As an example, I've been playing Diablo 2 Resurrected, and I get why the developers didn't add a bajillion stash tabs, but I'm fine with it because I can just mod (the offline part, at least) to have a larger amount of bigger stash tabs.
I had no idea there were people who hates having options in their games...having the choice in what mechanics and parts of a game you interact with just sounds like a positive in my book. To each their own and whatnot. Love the content as always!
It is good to have precisely designed and dedicated experience sometimes. When you go overboard with options you can come across as lacking vision and faith in what they actually tried to make, being lazy and just throwing every game design decision at player (like devs saying yeah whatever) . This makes it more wide, but also often limits how deep can you go, limits interconnectivity of systems etc. Sometimes games works only when you combine many elements together and features that you don't like by themselves suddenly makes sense as part of something bigger, you feel purpose in every decision that was made. The more options you open, the harder it is to achieve that special combination. It is also hard to predict at first playthrough what settings you would want since you have no context how whole game was designed, so it often makes first contact kind of waste of time since often you can make that decisions with hindsight. It can make you feel like you might like it if you find perfect combination of settings, but you can be left unsatisfied at the end without much of a payoff if it turns out that it was a deeper in game problem. Oblivion speaks to mind. It has difficulty slider. All 100 options to choose! But it takes away any meaning from leveling, it's hard to judge and predict and just lazy to the point of almost insulting. If they didn't care why should I?
Got me thinking! I wonder how many people will find it annoying once I release my project in full and the first screen they see on boot is the settings - gameplay screen. If everything goes as planned (plans are still being made) then I'd have options for markers, mini map, minimal or detailed hud and others. Would that be truly terrible to see first before being greeted by the game proper? I imagine not. It's like how some games'll have you calibrate lighting levels before starting.
@@simulacrumgames Honestly I like the idea. There have been times I do not find out about a setting that would have made something much more enjoyable until either a: I read it in a comment after looking up something because I am utterly stuck or b: I am done with the game and simply exploring every setting before putting it down for good.
A questionable decision. I kinda prefer how original Fallout handles it - there's some predefined default setup and if you wish so - there are options under the button of the same name that you can tweak. I think two biggest questions here are "do these options work" and "do they mean anything to anyone". I feel like most modern games just aren't designed to be played without assistance. Turn off GPS or markers and there's literally no way to find goals because nobody ever gives enough details for you to figure it out. Like, sometimes it's literally "go talk to John" instead of "you gotta talk to our boss, John. His room is on second floor in the main building" or something like that. That's related to "do they work". On the "do they mean anything" - a couple examples. What do "combat looks" mean in fallout? Like, I literally don't know. What do "combat difficulty" and "game difficulty" change? Your hp? Enemies' hp? Skill levels? XP gains? Damage? Encounter frequency? But then again there will be someone complaining that these options' descriptions are "spoiling" the game somehow.
@@zhulikkulik That's pretty much what I was describing actually. The predefineds in my project would have a more minimal hud and no quest markers, for instance. But upon that first boot you get to choose whether you'll want more information on your screen or not. I wouldn't be as concerned about it as the purpose of Tim's video points out, you can't make everybody happy.
3:32 When I play a game, I'm looking for experiencing it, rather than exploring it. I want to play how designers has visioned the game, so all options enabled and on default, I play generic build that can fight, speak, sneak, steal so I can experience all of these parts. I don't like to miss things out, skip quests, not obtain an information, I want the full experience. It's similar to listening to an album or watching a movie, reading a book. You could argue, "just play the game again but with different build" - well, I don't play the same game twice or watch same movie twice, It's not the same, I can't enjoy it second time that much anymore.
Tim, could you make a video about why you made some of the design choices you made in the games you worked on, and which options did you consider, but decided to go in a different direction?
As with many other people dark souls turned me around on the difficulty option debate. The issue is that from my experience games with multiple difficulty options tend to be much less well-balanced overall. The hard option is too hard the easy option is too easy. There's also the fact that the hard option might not be too hard but I might not realize it because there's always that nagging thought in the back of my head that maybe this is harder than I actually want it to be and I'm just being stupid playing on the hardest difficulty and wasting my time. But then the medium difficulty feels too easy. It's not a huge bug bear or something the only reason I even bring this up is because a lot of people are adamantly against a game without difficulty options. I'm perfectly fine with those games existing that have difficulty options and I will play them sometimes but I also like it when some games don't have difficulty options because I find that they are often more balanced and have just a better difficulty curve overall.
The worst thing is when hard is not hard, but like one single number there is too hard. So there's finally a reasonable amount of ammo boxes/m² and the enemies are smart enough but on top of that they have 10000x hp compared to normal. So it's almost perfect difficulty but you can't enjoy it because that one number in stats turns it into grindfest.
I wouldnt be surprised at all if the reality was that people want their cake and eat it too, but they dont understand that overcoming a challenge when there is not rewarding. You quite literally cannot have your cake and eat it too.
I loved Baldurs Gate 3, but I couldn't help but save-scum. I want "the good ending" or at least what I perceive to be the good ending. I can't deny though that I did not enjoy constantly reloading at all. I don't know what the solution is though the inspiration mechanic in BG3 definitely helps.
I think a big thing people tend to forget is that people are gonna have opinions... and that's ok. It's ok for the player to not like something, regardless of how good it was, it's ok for the designer to make a decision that pisses off the majority of the player base. I wish, instead of spending time complaining about it, they'd at least have a civil discussion about how they might've improved it. Ideally, they'd focus that energy into making a patch or mod to fix it the way they want.
There are 3 paths to success in making and selling any product: 1) Know the market so well that you are able to accurately and effectively minimize the 'I hate it!' numbers while maximizing the 'I like it!' numbers. (Tim's main argument.) 2) Make something you really like, without compromise, and serendipitously happen to match the desire of a large number of buyers. (Tim's suggestion to make the game you like.) 3) Something else which I don't know.
@@arcan762 are you blind? current capitalism dictates publicly traded companies perpetually maximize value for shareholders. larian, for example, did what they wanted with bg3 because they are privately owned. many indie devs also make decisions based on dumb shit. like tim said, mostly money is at the root of problems here.
You don't need everyone to love your game. You need the people who want to love your game to love your game
Eh, depends on why they "want" to love it, and why they hate it.
@erraticonteuse yea, I suppose. What I mean in this case is the people who watch the trailers, play games in the same genre, and wishlist those games. I just don't like seeing developers ditching their audience that made them successful in order to chase "mainstream appeal" whatever that is
Or more accurately, you need the people who will buy your game to love your game 😅
@@TurtleMan2023 Well sometimes it's out of their control. FF7 Rebirth seems to be loved by a lot of people. I wanted to love it. I played 60 hours. And then I stopped.
Because a lot of the design choices annoyed me more than the fun I was getting from other design choices ( it's not all bad is what I am trying to say haha. But bad enough for me to stop )
@@simulacrumgames yea that's what I meant. Phrased it poorly though
The save-scum comment reminds me of the quote: "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." If you give the players a tool or option, they will use and abuse it to the full extent of their ability, so you had better make sure that it's a fun thing to abuse.
100% this.
Flashbacks to Folding Ideas's "Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft".
SOME players will do this. Not all. So, this is simply another example of "you can't please everybody."
Exactly what happens in Baldur's Gate 3.
Everyone in the industry moved away from doing percentage based dialogue checks a long time ago, no idea why Larian decided to ignore years of CRPG advancements just so that it could "look" closer to D&D.
The result was, it's common for players to just save and reload checks, so what's the point in having different numbers or failing anyway?
@@juicejooos just make it a option forehead
Regarding Save Scumming, I always think of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall manual.
“Most computer gamers use the save game to maximise their playing ability. Anytime something goes wrong, they return to a saved game and replay it until they get it right. The final history of their game looks like an endless streak of lucky breaks and perfect choices.
“Role-playing is not about playing the perfect game. It is about building a character and creating a story. Bethesda Softworks has worked very hard to make The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall a game that does not require players to replay their mistakes. All adversity can be overcome, excepting only the character’s actual death. In fact, you will never see some of the most interesting aspects of the game unless you play through your mistakes.
If your character dies, gets locked in a dungeon, or some other truly catastrophic event takes place, by all means return to your last saved game and replay it. However, if you character is caught pickpocketing, if a quest goes wrong, or some other mundane mishap occurs, let it play out. You may be surprised by what happens next.”
If you want to save scum, by all means go ahead, but you never know, if you don't save scum, you might get something much more entertaining and memorable than a "perfect" playthrough.
This is the philosophy I strain against my own nature to appreciate.
The save-scum (but hates it) thing reminded me of something I think Thor/PirateSoftware said happened...
"I don't like that your game has no story."
... The game is all story, do you mean you didn't like the story?
"No, it has no story at all."
... Can you explain where? It's a story game, so I don't know what you mean that it has no story. What did you think of ?
"Oh that, I skipped it."
There is no such thing a foolproof.
Also.. in my experience in over the phone tech support, some people are looking for a fight. It won't matter the outcome of the interaction, or the way the game is, their goal is to have that "negative experience", whether it is a fight over the phone or a mean comment/review that picks apart the game (fairly or unfairly).
For some people, the "meta" is that they are getting something out of being negative. It wouldn't matter what you made or what happened. They were itching for negativity and you happened to be the next target.
Love his stuff. Not as watchable as Tim's, but he's a blessing on the platform.
A lot of stories get skipped not because the player doesn't want to engage with the story, but because the storytelling mechanism takes you out of the gameplay, away from the goals it's encouraging you to follow and replaces it with dialogue screens that just slow you down in achieving those goals. I loved Bioshock growing up and a HUGE part of that was that the world building and story-telling was often told through little audio logs that would play as you're walking around exploring and looting and such.
@@bendean20 that's fair, I think there's something to be said for exploring more immersive storytelling mechanics beyond the standard dialog window.
Making the key parts of the story optional content is... an odd decision to make if you want people to judge the game's story based on said optional content. There's a big difference between having a niche preference and having counterintuitive design.
Its a completely unrealistic wish but sometimes I wish there was a way to ask a designer why certain choice was made (besides money). Because sometimes you play a game and you understand why certain parts were made the way they are. But sometimes you encounter a decision that seems like it was made using some completely alien logic. You stare at it and you just don't understand. Tell me your secrets, design decision. I want to know.
And on the topic of options I think I can explain for myself why I'm getting angry when I see a prompt to choose various gameplay options when I start the game but I don't know what the solution is.
I press "New game" and most of the games prompt me to select difficulty. And most of the games do not care to explain to me what those options mean. I need to make an uninformed choice that (sometimes) will affect my entire playthrough because the only way to change it is to start a new game. I'm not starting a new game when I've invested a few hours in it.
And if game will ask me "Do you want quest markers?" when I press "New game" my answer is:"I don't know! This is literally first time I'm playing it. Was it designed with or without quest markers in mind?" And usually there is no explanation.
And sometimes some option was added after release because community was unhappy about it missing. So game might've been designed to not have them but they were added later. You start a game 5 years after release and see a toggle:"Classic mode: no quest markers / Enhanced mode: quest markers". "Enhanced" sounds better but "classic" sounds like it was intended like that from the start. What should I pick?
I don't know. Maybe the solution is to run for about 30 minutes with "intended" settings and then start offering tweaks. Maybe solution is to provide is many information as possible.
But then again. I remember playing a game and after failing a boss battle a few times it started offering me cheat-y ways of beating it and it was kind of annoying. No, I don't want your magic armor, I want to beat it myself. I know that I've lost a few times in a row. Thanks for rubbing it in 🙂
And providing too much information before player starts caring is not a successful strategy either🙂
I don't know.
Yeah agreed with this - making an option between quest markers or not quest markers is not best of both, it's a third option with it's own downsides - the player has to take on the work of deciding if it works for the game or not. You have to play through a certain amount of the game to work out if it's even playable without quest markers. Generally the designer should be able to save me the trouble since they designed the game one way or another.
I guess lazy devs were forced to make introductory choices late in the design. Maybe a descripton of ehat the fifficulty foes would work but anythinng like letting you try and then decide is extra coding and debugging and game design costs.
Yeah I feel that, sometimes you just wanna know what some options mechanically does and the tooltip (if there even is one) does not provide
In Buenos Aires, Argentina, we have a common "story" told by our grandparents and parents that talks about this subject:
"Once upon a time, an old gaucho and his grandson were walking down to a small town alongside his horse. When they arrived, people told them they were naïve because they weren't riding that horse. So, the next day, both of them got on the horse and rode to the next town.
When they arrived at the next town, people started to criticize them because both were riding the horse, and that might hurt the horse. So, the next day, the grandson got on the horse and both went to the next town.
Upon their arrival, people booed the kid for not letting and old man to ride the horse, and suffer because of the long journey. So, the next day, the gaucho got on the horse and both went to the next town.
When they arrived, people threw everything at the old man because he was too selfish to travel comfortably while the kid had to walk a long distance with his tiny feet."
What's the moral of the story? No matter what you do, whether you do something or its exact opposite, people will ALWAYS criticize you because you did what they couldn't do on their own.
You forgot the last part - they try to carry the horse and are crushed
Bien dicho
This is actually an extremely old fable.... though normally it involves a mule, not a horse.
you forgot the end. They decided to both walk instead of riding the horse and people came by saying: "Look, they are so dumb. They have a horse and don't even use it"
@@andresaraya5198 actually, that's how I started the fable
What I miss about gaming back then is that we had to work around so much shit and rough edges from awful controls to fighting with the camera, but we still loved the games we played regardless, nowadays people will throw the tantrum if they didnt like the fucking font.
There were literally no forums pr comments to read the idiots whine then. You just have to learn to ignore the sewer dwellers
"Saying other peoples game choices are bad to justify their own choices" great way of wording this
A game dev friend of mine once said, "If you give a gamer a hat that will give them the game exactly as they want, they will bitch about the color of the hat." I agree with you. We all have different tastes.
"A game for everyone is a game for no one."
I thought it was called Skyrim lol
There are some games that try to please everyone and end up pleasing no one
I agree but Tetris
@simulacrumgames there's a lot of people that LOVE Skyrim. I'm not of them but I can confirm they exist.
@@kotzpenner Yep, there are exceptions to the norm but are extremely rare.
I used to DJ. I know exactly what you are talking about. My goal for a set was to make some people very happy, and most people happy. There is nothing I could do about those who didn't like my style and choices, and trying to please them would only degrade the overall experience for everyone. Trying to please everyone pleases no one.
So happy I found this channel. Feels like the American version of Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games. Thank you for sharing your insight and preserving this knowledge for future generations!
wait, masahiro sakurai has youtube channel?
@@badfriend2025Yes and it’s amazing!
@@badfriend2025 lmao that was my reaction as well
Another takeaway may be that “making the most players happy” isn’t as useful a selection criterion as “making a cohesive experience,” because nothing exists in a vacuum, and we’re trying to make a game, not a loose aggregation of features.
I understood this concept implicitly but could never put it into words as well as you did.
Noob trap for me as a junior designer were cases when I stubbornly got caught up in solving cursed problems that tried to please everyone.
I am grateful for deadlines and budget limits. They bring a lot of things sharply into perspective and your design mission begins to make sense in context
Having an idea that you really like but you are unwilling to admit is fundamentally cursed no matter how much it is tinkered with 😩
Elden Ring comes to mind. You have people who think there should be difficulty settings. I am personally VERY against that idea in Elden Ring specifically. I have nothing against difficulty settings, but Elden Ring as an experience is designed around overcoming a challenge and exploring a dangerous world. I believe thats baked into the design and if you take it away the game is a lot less fun to play.
Amusingly, one of most recent souls-likes, Another Crabs Treasure, went exactly the opposite way, and has loads of difficulty options ( inclouding joke "give crab a gun" ) for as easy or keyboard breaking experience as player wants. If this game succeds ( especialy finacialy ), we may see more shift in this genre towards opening for more casual audience.
If your goal is to make a great game, you can succeed by meeting your own criteria for game-greatness.
If your goal is to sell a great number of games, you have to meet and avoid missing many other people's criteria.
I have an argument about the "probably money". Yes, budget is always something that affects a project a lot, but it's not like there are no bad design decisions. It depends a lot on what kind of project it is, what kind of budget it has, how many people are working on it and how many decision makers are there when it comes to mechanics and what should be in the game. A lot of these factors will affect how holistic the final product is and how well do mechanics blend into one another. More often than not, it will result in some not-so-good design decisions. It does not mean at all that the game itself will be bad - I think a ton of amazing games have some bad features here and there.
In AAA, a good Game Director will take the reins on the vision and will produce amazing results (provided there's not too much interference from the money guys). In indie gaming (the small budget indies, I am not talking about very-well established indies, much less CDPR or Larian) the vision/design has to be handled with care because it might be the only shot those indies have. So yeah, they all do need money, but the final product does not have money reflect on the resulting quality only because of it, but because of the design approach as well.
One last argument is about save-scumming - yes, the players will save scum and lose some flavor of fun in the game if you let them (and complain if you don't let them), but keep in mind that a lot of the approach from the gamers themselves will depend on the quality of the design as well. If you randomly introduce a DC30 skill check on an important character milestone without taking account on what you went through with that character previously, it's bad design. Reducing that DC according to your previous actions will result in a more logical approach where the save-scumming isn't needed, and having no chance to even roll if your previous actions led to what should increase this DC makes the player not able to save scum to alleviate these bad decisions. So, the design there could be better, no?
Anyway, I know Tim knows all this, just wanted to throw it out there. Cheers.
You can always just not save scum.
Hey Tim, I’ve noticed you only have about 3 videos on this channel about the outer worlds
I recently decided to give it a second play through since release and was surprised how good the dialogues are and that yes you really have choices and your skills matter in a dialogue
Would be great to hear more about this game from you
For example:
- What did you think about choices and consequences, were they impactful in your opinion ? What would you change ?
- Factions and how they work
- replayability
Or honestly anything, just would love to hear more from you
I’d love to do more videos on TOW, but since I’m working on the sequel, there are many topics I need to avoid, such as what I would do differently or how I would extend some mechanics. Because maybe I am.
@@CainOnGames oh i see, that makes sense, thank you for the answer !
Brian: There's just no pleasing some people.
Leper: That's just what Jesus said sir!
A 9-minute reminder that other people exist seems very appropriate for 2024. Love this video. 😂
I remember one of the first things I learned while working on games was: "I'm not making this game just for myself".
Perfect example of this in action - Real Time Strategy games.
The people who play older RTS games like Brood War appreciate the amount of skill needed to play the game. People who create modern RTS are constantly trying to appeal to a broader demographic of players by having the strategy element be more important than skill, but then you get the loudest voices in the reaction community be the big popular skill-first gamers who are still playing games from 30 years ago.
You can't have things be an option if the option fully replaces the skill because people who develop the skill will be unhappy. You can't NOT include some changes because people who haven't developed the skill will say the game is old and unplayable. So things are made to appeal to more average skill gamers and the pros are always upset about how none of the new rts games reward skill. But then the marketing tries to focus on eSports and get pro players invested, and the game gets balanced to a pro level, which puts off more casual players who just want to move cool units around and beat up the AI. So you end up with a genre that ends up doing nothing but dividing their playerbase until nobody is actually happy with the end result.
I think you summed it up perfectly at the end there: "You aren't in every demographic" so no, not every game is going to have what you want.
Seems like there are no games for me then.
I'd like something that feels like Fallout 1, but looks and plays like Fallout 4 in every aspect except dialogues and stupid hard skill caps. And damn unbreakable yet half-broken wooden doors.
And without bulletsponge enemies.
Tim: bifurcates possible set of outcomes for a feature into "audience likes it" and "audience doesn't like it"
Audience: bifurcates into people who like that take and who don't
One thing I have enjoyed about some games (mainly Indy) were optional commentaries from producers, designers, etc regarding choices made in the game and explaining why they did some of what they did in developing the game. Just a really good idea that can sometimes give you a different aspect while playing.
I think one of the factors into people claiming they dislike options is the options being communicated poorly to them. In some games, the intended experience is difficult, and a lower difficulty will result in a lesser experience. I particularly like the recently popular “assist mode” branding for options that lower the difficulty in such a game. Makes it clear that no assist options is the developer-intended and most fun way to play the game for most, but the assist mode is there if you really really want/need a less challenging experience.
I’m not as much a fan of “Baby Mode (for suckers)”, “regular mode”, “GIVE ME GAME FRANCHISE MODE” for example
@@extremepayne "videogame journalist" mode, "normal" mode, "I have no life so I'm okay fighting a single lvl1 slime for 8 hours" mode.
Game devs that want to "make everyone happy" are like player characters that try to gain reputation with two factions that are mutually exclusive. Both factions expect loyalty to their cause and values out of it and neither one got it.
I feel like a game designed to pacify the largest audience with palatable features limits itself. That decision is predicated on the idea that players actually know what they want most, and that they communicate what they want based on what they buy, but in reality there might be a huge market for some bold, untested choice that'll excite players rather than just simply being passable.
I hate Preston Garvey! "Another settlement needs your help".... - 100% agree with me.
Playing through Arcanum right now it’s so so good thank you
Really want to say I love your choice in tops Tim. I think every single one you've worn thus far really suits you! Glad you covered this topic, I remember having it many times with students I used to teach in College. The thing they seemed to struggle most with is when sequels change or introduce mechanics they don't like.
It's so weirdly serendipitous that you made this. I'm working on a video referencing you (Ive been binge-watching your videos) regarding game design. Thanks!
Interesting way to look at Design Choices Mr.Cain. But I think I'll take on the challenge of making an argument against parts of your advice. I agree with the "you can't make everyone happy" argument, but I would argue that your advice to in fact not make everyone happy but rather piss off the smallest group has downstream effects that would ultimately lead to the formulation of design choices that are meant to make "everyone" happy in an inorganic way. The advice is based on the core idea that games are intended to make money and hence the argument for casting a wide net by only pissing off a small group, if the vast majority of the audience is happy that means profit and success. Therefore the assumed hierarchy in which the designer informs his decision is as follows = primary motivation for creating game = money --> motivation informs design decision --> designer realizes that the only way to do this is to capture a larger audience --> design decisions made with no focus leading to multiple options or just bland options (aka milquetoast shallow design).
Inorganic creation of entertainment to garner a large audience and having a large audience liking the thing is not an audience expressing their taste for the thing, the entertainment is created with the intention of garnering a large audience, it's like marketing and advertisement logic it meant to entice you, you being enticed does not mean it reflects your inner wants and likings. The advice you have given would lead to choices that would yield a lot of success and the choices would become a trend in videogames leading to the same design choices across the industry leading to garnering an inorganic audience, since the design choices would be so clinically made they will end up creating a taste in said inorganic audience that will lead them to demand more of the same, leading to stagnation in creativity in a so-called "creative" industry. Thus creating an audience that is entirely inorganic and is completely addicted to certain design choices by design, those who don't as it don't play it don't count as the audience. So yes it is possible to please everyone if you as a designer follow a path of designing your game using designing principles that are proven to attract this inorganic audience. This audience exists because they have no experience playing older games, they avoid them for multiple reasons, and all of them relate to them being conditioned to only like a certain game (by design). This design philosophy has ultimately created the ultimate consumer, they will always buy the new thing because they know the new thing will follow the same game design and will scratch the same itch.
This advice has been a staple of the industry as evidenced by the copy-pasted design decisions across games and has led the entire modern AAA industry and I would argue even the modern indie scene into a pit of creative bankruptcy. Just because there are thousands of games on Steam does not mean all of them have a creative spirit, especially when probably a vast majority of them are made with the primary motive of creating money.
A part of the reason why people say things were good back when the industry wasn't that big and mainstream is because the design decisions were organic, design decisions were made by the designers because they wanted to create games they'd personally want to play, not specifically those that would gain the largest praise of success, even if these inorganic motives played a part it was not the main focus. The games might have had a small audience and they might have alienated some parts of the audience but they had an organic focus which led to a unique experience for the player, which ultimately made them popular, the players who weren't so open to playing a game with a tight focus tried it out and because of the uniqueness of the experience kept playing it and grew to love the thing. It was despite the hurdles of not appealing to the player, the player endured it and grew to love it, organically.
Tastes are not set in stone, they change especially when you casually dabble in a hobby. The modern industry manipulates this fact and tries to create games that create a taste that is addictive, creating an inorganic audience. Older games stayed true to their focus and tried to be fun for the creator, thus the devs tried to appeal to themselves and their art and code were true to themselves, and any popularity that followed was organic.
When people say X has no taste they mean your taste is inorganic, it isn't true it is a product of a popular trend which are manufactured to be popular by design.
A lot of people might like a Coke, but is it because of the copious amount of caffeine in it? and is it intentional by the manufacturer? Well if the answer to both those things is yes, then those people don't have organic taste it is inorganic ,thus, they do not have taste
I like Sprite fight me Coke fans
P.S. Sorry for the long read
The value statement of "liking something" or enforcing one's own judgment upon something is directly tied to expectation or the aim for said unit.
By this I mean if you have no desires or goals when using something, you are simply experiencing it for what it is. You could say those experiences can harmonize or synergize with parts of you or not. But the moment you begin to actively engage with something, goals and expectations start to form.
Thought experiment:
If you are a capable carpenter using a simple hammer to hammer nails to build something and the hammer has a firm grip among other attributes as to not create friction between the tool, your ability, your goal, the expectation you bring to the hammer along with the output from said process.
If you then did the job you set out to do, the hammer simply bridged that gap. The hammer becomes a part of you.
Now if you for some reason were not satisfied with how the job was executed there are multiple factors involved in the process and you have the freedom to direct the frustration and blame it all on the hammer or any other factor involved. Now whether it's justified/ reasonable or not is a different question and context specific.
The paradigm on tools are more concrete with a narrower scopes goal-wise. With leisure activities this complexity grows as well as fluctuate.
This line of reasoning is borrowed from Clay Christensen "Understanding the Job"
Another really brilliant video, Tim! Your videos on game design are my favorite.
There is way to hide the options by sending hudden signal only specific group of player pick up. Like layering path in the level design that appeal to different player subtly. The most obvious example is Mario coin catégories : regular coin are incititive to follow a bread crumb path for the less adventurous, big coin reward straying from that path with more challenging routes, red coin are literal puzzle that test mastery. Every sections with those ask the player is this something worth pursuing now, which is a cost analysis but doesn't prevent progression while still rewarding player at their skill and play style level. Same for old final fantasy game, you either go the slow routes of quaffing 99 potions, or spend more on buff items for riskier but faster battle. Quaffing isn't undervalued by laking the gale easier, just simpler to understand, as you still have to anticipate more and more complex pattern to know when you can heal and revive fallen members, which incidentally makes you learn about the enemy behavior for optimizing more complex and faster strategy. These kind of stretchy design makes player think their way is the better way without realizing it cater to every play styles, modern example, kinda faulty because it's only at the selection screen and loosely in the world design, is elden ring. It's harder but possible.
Hey, Tim! It’s us, everyone.
Yes!
Original.
@@flingymingyAre pancakes original? No. Are they delicious anyways? Hell yeah!
I played a Far Cry game, and I haaaaated how the UI was handholdy. Showing me where all the enemies were, lots of markers everywhere. I turned that off, and now it felt like a real challenge again. That's an option that lets me choose my play style.
In some games however, where there are features or mechanics that are overpowered and break the game, and the only option is "just don't use it if you want it to be harder", that feels bad to me. Because it never feels like the game is intended to work without it. And I have to now resist the "get me out if this pickle" button.
Far Cry 2 😭
If you have the option to turn it off it probably means that it is playable without it.
@@JellyJman Playable sure, but The Witcher 3 was absolutely not a better experience when turning everything off, just more tedious.
I'd love to see more games be designed without these mechanics and then only have them implemented at the 11th hour for people who want them.
@@simulacrumgames that’s just ultimately your opinion. I’ve seen many gamers turn everything HUD option off in games despite being “more tedious” just to be more immersive. An example I know is the Metro games, they have a mode where the HUD is turned off by default and it’s more tedious, but also more fullfuling.
@@JellyJman You're saying it like I'm not one of those people. Have you tried it with Witcher 3? Not great
I just watched every single video from GamesonHardMode because of you 😂
So I am going to be a pedantic engineer. You can 100% make your player base happy all of the time. It requires you to say "hey you don't fully like this game with all of it's flaws? Then the game isn't for you and you aren't in the player base." Which any business/marketing person will tell you is a terrible waste of potential money. It's also something we are seeing more of because of indie developers making passion projects and saying "I don't care about the size of my player base, I am building a game for me."
You can please everyone you care about all of the time, just stop caring about those who are not flexible enough to be pleased by what you've made.
Especially true for games with big budgets. Focus on profit and predictability of profit. Creativity costs a lot for larger companies because they validate ideas to remove risk, and validation is often quite expensive so they usually go with the safe route. This ties back into many studios not really having R&D departments; but also the focus of those departments is generally narrowed down a lot compared to what players wish for.
This is actually why I'd like to see more small and medium budget games where the stakes weren't quite so high -- but even that is a some people will like it some won't, since some players demand the detail, realistic / "next gen" graphics, and all the other things only a AAA game with a big budget can provide, while others would rather see lower budget games with more interesting game play.
@@BlackJar72 Absolutely. Frankly, I don't think the massive amounts of clutter in 3d worlds are improving sales anyway, so it's not like the AAA companies would have much to lose from downsizing/segmenting their studios a bit more.
Lest we forget, there's so much junk laying around on maps now that they have to paint the correct path yellow!
Thanks a lot tim! its such a privilege to have these videos from a legend like you
I love this! Your thoughts directly contend with the modern Triple A game segment. As studios are creating iterations of myriad beloved series that remove divisive design elements to appeal to a broader audience.(design elements I feel are crucial to the experience).
The Sales figures would certainly imply that its working, but that could also be attributed to the growing success over the previous iterations manifesting in the mass purchase of a new game in a series, years after the last one was released.
I really like the idea of normalizing uniquely designed games that get across a particular story through its narrative and its mechanics that would necesitate forgoing this "widest approach" design philosophy in favor of a less applicable, more impactful approach.
What about indifference? To sell, it is not enough for a product to not be hated, but a it needs to be at least liked.
Thank you Tim, I'm sure it's not easy to tell people that are very excitable about games that development is challenging and often you're inevitably going to be ridiculed
I have a few good examples of me being a horrible player that dislikes a mechanic yet refuses to not use/abuse it. Hopefully this clears it up for anyone who has a hard time imagining how and why players sometimes do this. Not all of these have solutions but I think it's good to at least be aware of them.
1. Mechanic was "too good":
In the 3ds Metroid II remake they added a parry and a quick scan to indicate hidden/breakable walls. For the scan, normally I like spamming attacks and bombs everywhere to uncover secrets myself but it was hard to actively not abuse the quick scan when it saved so much time. This is something you could will yourself to ignore, but it felt like it was a waste not to do this. Metal Gear Solid 4 actually had a similar situation where when prone, Snake would automatically change his camo to reflect the color of the ground instead of manually doing it, but for me I had so much fun in the previous game where every time I entered a new room, I'd change my outfit. And I could still do this, but as a player it felt like a waste of time, and especially since MGS4 is more action than the previous game. Going back to the parry in Metroid II remake, they made this thing absolutely busted. It was easy, took little skill, and easily killed enemies, but it sucked to do because instead of running and gunning it was optimal (and faster) to wait when you see an enemy until it charges at you, and then parry. This absolutely killed the pacing of the exploration and action platforming, but to not do this made the game harder and actually slower than the stop in all movement to parry. I've commented about this to people and they called me a purist but understood that this change was not for everyone, but in the next game, Metroid Dread, Mercury Steam balanced the enemies to where the parry was only another tool in the arsenal and rarely the sole optimal solution to a problem, which made the game so much more fun for me and for the players who already liked the previous title. That example is where there actually was a solution that helped "both players", but you're right in that pretty much no matter what some people will always like or dislike a mechanic.
2. Player does not understand the mechanic correctly/player expectations ruins a mechanic:
I've seen this happen in some action games or action RPGs, but it can totally happen in any game. Sometimes players will abuse a mechanic because it's either the only one they understand, or they actually don't understand it at all but cling onto it despite using it wrong. This is the sort of thing you'll see with inexperienced players who may not have played too many video games. An example I have is with Fromsoftware RPGs and parrying. I love Dark Souls and Elden Ring but one of my friends absolutely hates it because he's bad at parrying. He was used to action open world games like Assassin's Creed and Ghosts of Tsushima where parrying is fairly simple to do and useful, but in FromSoft RPGs they are just another tool in your arsenal that is not only completely optional, but often not the best move to even do. When I got him to play Dark Souls 2, he was bad at the combat because I put him as a Mage that would be easier once he has a spell or two, but in the intro of the game is a bit difficult to play as. Instead of blocking and strafing, he wanted to just use the parry to quickly and efficiently take down enemies, but in this game parrying is slow and often too risky for such a small reward (you do NOT get i-frames during the riposte animation). You CAN get good at the game and use the parry to solve many problems, but it takes hours and hours of practice to master when to input the parry at the right frame of an enemy's attack animation. When he tried Elden Ring he was better at the parrying but he still had the same problem where he would spam the same attack and fail a parry and then give up and say the game "isn't for him". Honestly though who can blame him, if a game like that isn't your style then of course it's gonna be hard to let yourself understand the game and learn how to play it "correctly" or in a way that is fun for you. ("correctly" in this case being where you do not die)
3. Player has developed habits from other games that become "bad habits" in the game they're currently playing:
After I played the Resident Evil 1 remake, I became an item hoarder because you can't really beat that game without carefully managing your health items and ammo, but when I started playing JRPGs with mass amounts of items, I rarely used them and had less fun times because it was engrained in me to always save items and seldom use them. I could have a hard time with a boss but it was my fault for not popping a rare health item or combat booster that would of let me win. After some amount of time (literal years) I realized I had this habit so I made it a habit to instead use items I found, but if I wasn't aware and critical of my playstyles I would of never bothered to do something about it.
4. Player is stupid and ignorant (and sometimes afraid of change):
This happens to even the best of us. Sometimes I just don't understand something and don't bother to do something about it. When I played Final Fantasy 5 I didn't bother experimenting with some of the wacky classes you unlock later in the game because I liked the basic starting ones. When I played Hollow Knight I didn't bother experimenting with the badge system to equip different passives that would make combat more fun because the one time I equipped a new badge I thought it seemed dumb. Sometimes item descriptions do this, other times the player has a bad experience and will never try the item or equipment again while not knowing that it may make their experiences more fun. You can try to work around this as much as you want, but some players will always skip dialogue and ignore tutorials then complain about when they don't understand something, and sometimes you do this too so you need to be aware not to talk down to others but also encourage them to keep trying a game and push them to actually pay attention sometimes. Another aspect about the "afraid of change" is that players may not want to inconvenience themselves despite it being fun to succeed when in a bad position. In Thief there are plenty of items to help you make a quick getaway, but you can save scum to have a "flawless run". They may be afraid of being spotted to the point of save scumming while not knowing that the best tense and funny moments of the game are when you barely make it out alive from a bad situation.
3)
Oh, that's me in most games😅
"Why are these potions in this game anyway? I never used them" "But I must pick them up! What if I actually need it later?"
*Completes the game with 100+ potions of every kind that he was saving for The Boss*
I wish that I had the first clue about making games because you sir are an absolute masterclass and motivator.
I made the game I wanted, something fun, simple, and action focused to balance all the long, involved games I was playing, I thought of it as sort-of the "Snakes on a Plane of games," a straight-forward retro-shooter with roguelike elements...
...practically no one bought it.
Hi Tim,
Great video as always! I think you briefly touched on this near the end of your Discoverability video but I think this one ties in quite nicely to that. I see the biggest problems today around discoverability is curation and reviews. With the rise of fake reviews online (maybe less so for games), How can we combat this? How can we be sure the right people are finding the right games for them? I think as you mentioned previously finding reviewers you like is important, but its not an easy task for the average person who has limited time because of other responsibilities. How can curation be free from corporate interests and becoming another form of marketing? As you mentioned a lot of decisions come down to money. I'm glad there are more games than I could feasibly play in a lifetime and all the choice that provides, but how can one be sure they aren't wasting their time and money in buying the wrong games? How can developers be sure the right reviewers/curators are showcasing their games? I would appreciate if you dove further into this topic!
Thank you
Yeah… true.
I am not an objective party, but I do feel I am alright at recognising that a game isn’t for me, and appreciating them for what it is. What I am not good at dealing with, are those big budget production that cast such a wide net, that they give me a glimpse at a game I would want to play, but aren’t focused enough to provide a full and satisfying experience. Those are very frustrating to me, as you can see what those games could be, but they will never be that as it would require focusing and tightening of the design, and therefore appealing to smaller player base.
Eh, at least there are games still being made that I enjoy - and with Microsoft acquiring some of my favourite studios and going on shutting down spree, I do wonder how long it will last. 😢
On "bad games" video I was going to point to some of the "bad" games, but then it clicked with me, yes, even those games were probably loved by some people.
I'm in the group of people that loves options, lol. In Cyberpunk, I NEEDED all the UI options because I really didn't like how intrusive the standard UI was, and Starfield's new difficulty options vastly improved that game for me, and I still think there should be at least one more survival mechanic (fuel economics) and an option related to how hardcore the player wants that mechanic to be.
Having lots of options is great indeed. Problem is, there definietly exist point ( ofc, diffrent for each individual player) where there can be so many options of playing that you either won't ever use majority of them or worse, be stuck in decision paralisis and just nope out of the game.
Thank god they've included "disable damage numbers" option!
That and the fact that they seem to have balanced the game by 2.0.
This was my biggest problem with the game right from the start. I HATE seeing 99999999 damage being dealt yet completely no reaction from the enemy. It doesn't make me want to level up it makes me want to delete and refund.
The Peanuts shirt returns! I love your style choices in all your videos. Those neon baseball Ts, company Ts, even game-/video-specific shirts! And I must compliment your impressive collection of cool shirts. I'm wondering: do you have some favorite t-shirts? Were you able to wear your t-shirts proudly throughout your career, or were there roles or companies that required you to dress more formally? Have you been involved at all in the merchandising around your games? And if so, what was it like making those decisions and what were the outcomes?
thanks for always making great videos!
No one will make a game like Arcanum again. I need to step up!
We need more media with similar setting
Guess i will step up as well
There is plenty of elitism among game enthusiasts, but I disagree that it's just settled wisdom that it comes down to different taste or preferences. Philosophically you can find plenty of arguments for objectivity in art and aesthetics, good and bad taste etc. Not just coming from some random commenter but real philosophers.
It's about focusing on what you want to make, with the possibility of someone else enjoying it or learning from it.
For a lot of creatives it's about the work, the process. Not about the critical or commercial reception when it's unveiled. Both great if you get them, but not the be all and end all.
I have a CRPG in my head that I would love to try to make, which I feel would only be appreciated by a minority. Not because I want to make something purposefully niche, but simply because it's the kind of a game I would love to play.
There's an old Bob Dylan quote, something along the lines of 'nobody was writing about the things I thought should be written about. So I wrote them'.
I acknowledge that developers have a better understanding of game design than the players, and that their design choices are made with some consideration and not because "they are dumb". I get it. It's sort of like how managers/coaches usually know better than sports fans who criticize their choices because they spend more time with the team and their knowledge of tactics go deeper.
But how about sequels with too many design changes? Fallout 4 is immensely successful but did it have to be so insanely polarizing and controversial as a sequel? No skills thus no skill checks, go to specific spot to unlock this perk with a bobblehead/magazine, a thematically low charisma perk that requires 3 charisma, etc. So where do we draw the line, exactly? Would Fallout 4 be a failure with 3 and especially NV's systems?
It wouldn't fail, but it's part of Bethesda's "new" vision.
You could see traces of it even in Fallout 3 and later in Skyrim. It is especially evident if you look at Creation Kit. 4 dialogue options isn't just a design choice. It's literally hardcoded into the engine now. If you want to make a mod and have more dialogue options - you need f4se and plugins that allow to put more options and ui mod that supports multiple options.
To me it seems that what I've commented yesterday is especially true with Bethesda. They want to make a game for literally everyone which is why people like me, who actually want better story, more roleplay options and more RPG elements in general, feel left out or even betrayed.
You can't please everyone. But you can choose who to displease.
"a game made for everyone is a game made for no one": so pick your niche, preferably something you enjoy yourself, and hope for the best.
(saw this recently on the interwebs, but forgot who said it)
7:17 btw I hate when people blame "capitalism" for the likes of Call of Duty thriving while Indies starving. Well, tons of people love the Call of Duty types: so much so that they buy it with their precious time (i.e. money) every year. I love some niche games but would be unfair of me to force people who don't like them to pay for them.
Its batshit whem devs decide to make a genre they dont even like and end up with boring junk as basically practice.
Literally what i'm doing. making a game for me. and if i like it then yay. just hoping it makes money lmao
As always another poignant video Mr. Cain! I consulted for a project awhile back and offered a few ideas to expand the narrative scope possible within the existing framework. At the time I assumed players would love the opportunity to experience the game in a new way, emulating what was possible within another medium but adapted for a different genre. Out of all of the projects I had consulted on up until that point this was the one I was most invested in, as it had the biggest opportunity to advance what was possible.
Players hated it.
While I generally stay away from sale numbers, I believe it may have been one of the worst performing projects that I have ever consulted on.
My initial response was defensive - "the players are just not intelligent enough to appreciate the value of the project!", they failed to recognize what new avenues were now available to them - that even if this particular product was too niche, it was good for the future health of the game as a whole! On the other hand, a previous project I consulted on sold very well, and players loved it - even though I felt comparatively it was mechanically shallow!
Ultimately, I had to remind myself that yeah, not everyone is going to love everything you produce. The players are not ignorant for not "getting it", I just failed to gauge what my audience wanted at that time. While I believed it was the more "valuable" (and I feel Design/Development may agree) project, it failed to bring in the money - which means apathetic players and I imagine very angry shareholders!
That's exactly why I don't like when people go and try to change games into something they WANT them to be (like what happened to Stellar Blade). Everybody has their own tastes. The beauty of games and arts is that you can choose what you want to produce and consume.
Still can't believe they censored the gore effect for that game. I thought developers are stopped doing that around the late 200s0s.
The only other time I saw the word "bifurcate", it scarred me for life :p
noita?
@@psyantologist oh, nooooo no no. Body modification community posts.
Thanks for reminding me of that trauma
Thanks for saying all this. It's extremely validating to hear things that I've been thinking for a while from someone who actually makes games. The "solution" (for lack of a better word) that comes to mind for me is signposting those things that will be divisive in a way that filters the playerbase, preferably before they've invested money and time into something they won't like - and will therefore give a bad review of.
I guess my question would be how do you effectively signpost what your game will be like in a way that lets a potential player know as soon as possible whether a game will or will not be for them?
I didn't know micro-transactions were so popular among gamers... also money
I don't know if "popular" is the right word but if micro-transactions were universally "unpopular" then game companies wouldn't do it. Some people (generally those with money to burn) even appear to like pay-to-win. And if that's what some people want then... Put the money in the bag suckers.
Oh they are. And if you try to throw shade on one of the popular p2w mtx mobile games you will have to face an army of useful idiots defending a big corporation that is robbing them.
@@VioletMiracle "robbing them" sounds a bit hyperbolic but yeah... If someone is so desperate to win that they're willing to pay $5000 then someone is going to cater to that market. Possibly even a small indie developer (because it's not just big fish that like money).
@@ColaSpandex what about "warping the idea of what is normal and acceptable in order to lure people into casinos disguised as videogames"? xd
@@VioletMiracle Is that a question about game design choices or a question about how to regulate gambling (which goes way beyond videogames)? Gambling is another one that plenty of people seem to demand and enjoy. How to keep it fair and square seems to be the issue here. That doesn't really reflect on its popularity one way or another.
Great video as always. BTW, how can we support your videos?
Thanks for the vid. Always great.
One justification I can guess for a player potentially disliking having both choices provided as an option is that them both being in there represents an oppurtunity cost that was paid by taking some of the limited time or budget away from another part of the game. I can imagine it would sting if someone felt that a specific mechanic or area they liked was noticeably undercooked and other things had more visible effort put into them than was "necessary" (in heavy quotes).
The usual assumption would be that the random layman wouldn't even consider that development resources were limited at all but if someone is commenting on things besides making smalltak they probably at least think that they know something about the topic.
Certainly would be a more sensible thought process than the no-self control (ie "I don't want you to give this option because I'll use it to ruin the game" like the savescummer) approach to disliking choice.
I'm definatly in the 'More options = More better' camp, the people who hate options remind me of the people whose favourite class is a Red Mage 'Because of the versitility' or 'freedom' but once you give them that freedom over the entire party where they can make anyone into anything or have everyone learn everything, even if you give hints as to what class someone could be, a high INT stat, their Limit Breaks mostly focus on physical, etc, they just give everyone everything and say everyone is the same and it's the games fault, anything to shift the blame away from them and in my opinion, essentially their lack of imagination.
Hey Tim, I absolutely love your videos! Ever considered making videos like Smash Ultimate director Sakurai? He started a channel years ago with short videos about game dev concepts etc., but loaded with a bigger emphasize on presentation (graphics and so on) with the focus to help younger game devs years to come.
Honestly, when it comes to options for game design, I definitely believe there's a degree of risk when making things options, or toggles, specifically in cases where the toggle is super important and the difference between some playstyles being fun and others not. Like, difficulty options are often really misleading - because you can never know what changes from one to the other - and in a case like the 3D fallout games, the difficulty toggle just makes enemies spongier and doesn't provide more of a challenge other than making weaker weapons unviable.
Special mention to the remaster of Yakuza 3, where the FPS increase to 60 broke the enemy AI and everyone reacts twice as fast to the actions of your characters - meaning the difficulty toggle turns into a trap for unaware players.
It's kind of funny. As a player I prefer fewer options and to be put at the mercy of the game. I think it comes down to not really feeling like I know what the "right" options are. As a developer, I want to expose everything possible as an option, both to my players and to designers who have to work with my tools. Something I've learned, though, is that there are a lot of people out there like me. They don't want to know what all the knobs do, or have to think about turning them. They want me to decide what I think is best and have me adjust it later if something's not quite to their liking after working with it for a while.
Ive got mud on my face on this one for sure. when I was a teenager and Fallout New Vegas was relatively new I sang its praises and complained about Fallout 3. Now that I am not an emotional teenager with zero awareness I love all the Fallout games differently. But I remember when I was the butt end of Henry Fords saying "If I had asked them what they wanted they would've said faster horses."
It's a process I won't ever understand even if I spend my life specializing in it, which I won't. Art is complex, work is hard. I imagine that doing both at the same time can feel like juggling a chainsaw and a vase of flowers.
I don't know that I've ever heard anyone complain about Celeste's assist mode. I'm sure somebody has, but it's so clearly demarcated and explained that it's tough for even difficulty setting haters to hate it or 'save scummers' (not literally save scumming, but taking the fun out of something by choosing an easy mode) to choose it
I'm work "working", but really I'm hiding and watching this video 👀
i think the best way to make a game is to decide what that game is supposed to be and just try to do that the best you can. if the game is amazing at what it does then it doesnt have to try to please anyone.
Hey Tim, what do you think of difficulty and game flow options being an in-game system rather than a pause menu toggle? I think of the way the FromSoftware games don’t have gameplay toggles because all their options are actual in-game systems and items
Arrowhead's motto: "A game for everyone is a game for no one"
I couldn't have worded it better myself. And have been living by that since the Magicka days.
Tim your comment about people having different tastes rings so true to basically everything in fiction. Games or otherwise. The fact that people get genuinely upset over me liking a certain game or movie or book they don’t is just bizarre to me.
Yeah seen that about xp in games I made or in general. There is people that hates grinding, but WILL ALWAYS grind if given the chance, and then have a terrible experience. (and then there is people that absolutely love it and get very frustrated if you don't let them). I thought that a game is something you own, so you play it in the way that suits you best. For some, this way is not always the most fun way, and there will be no responsibility taken, on how they consume the content.
Sometimes it is just a case of not seeing the forest for the trees though, or at least it seems to be. When XCom2 was announced and they talked about the Stealth mechanic and the mission timer countdown everyone assumed the countdown would only start when you were spotted or attacked the enemy, because otherwise why would there be a limit, right?
Well the game comes out and no the countdown starts immediately, and it's such a baffling and weird choice that it even came up in interviews, where the Devs essentially said "Oh that makes sense doesn't it? Well we didn't think of that." And then a few days later someone makes a mod to do exactly that (for PC players at least) and it's left as a weird legacy decision.
In general I support options but there is some times there is stress in figuring out which options are actually well supported by the game. A good example this are difficulty options in games, usually "normal" is the one that has been throughly tested by the devs, it's the curated experience. but harder options can sometimes be awkward because they just increased the stats of enemies which works out fine for most of the game but causes unintended difficulty spikes in encounters that haven't been well tested under these conditions.
Another one is quest markers in open world games, despite not actually given the choice by the devs it's best illustrated in the elder scrolls games. TES3: Morrowind didn't have quest markers npcs and the quest log provided extensive descriptions which you could follow, then oblivion replaced these with just giving you a marker to follow. There are mods to remove these but the game becomes borderline unplayable with them because the quest design relied on these markers and there aren't the location descriptions like in morrowind to fall back on.
Usually I can just google to see what options are actually recommended by players but there is some comfort in a game only letting you play one way knowing it's the one the devs intended for (like dark souls game being very difficult but there is the assurance that it's fully intentional).
When it comes to the giving players options part, I think it's a great example of why moddable games stay beloved, the developer can make the best curated base game experience possible, and if someone wants to play it a different way, they can just change it and enjoy it how they want to.
As an example, I've been playing Diablo 2 Resurrected, and I get why the developers didn't add a bajillion stash tabs, but I'm fine with it because I can just mod (the offline part, at least) to have a larger amount of bigger stash tabs.
ya know i cant believe he had to make a video about understanding that you have different tastes from another human being.
I had no idea there were people who hates having options in their games...having the choice in what mechanics and parts of a game you interact with just sounds like a positive in my book. To each their own and whatnot. Love the content as always!
It is good to have precisely designed and dedicated experience sometimes. When you go overboard with options you can come across as lacking vision and faith in what they actually tried to make, being lazy and just throwing every game design decision at player (like devs saying yeah whatever) . This makes it more wide, but also often limits how deep can you go, limits interconnectivity of systems etc. Sometimes games works only when you combine many elements together and features that you don't like by themselves suddenly makes sense as part of something bigger, you feel purpose in every decision that was made. The more options you open, the harder it is to achieve that special combination. It is also hard to predict at first playthrough what settings you would want since you have no context how whole game was designed, so it often makes first contact kind of waste of time since often you can make that decisions with hindsight. It can make you feel like you might like it if you find perfect combination of settings, but you can be left unsatisfied at the end without much of a payoff if it turns out that it was a deeper in game problem. Oblivion speaks to mind. It has difficulty slider. All 100 options to choose! But it takes away any meaning from leveling, it's hard to judge and predict and just lazy to the point of almost insulting. If they didn't care why should I?
Got me thinking! I wonder how many people will find it annoying once I release my project in full and the first screen they see on boot is the settings - gameplay screen. If everything goes as planned (plans are still being made) then I'd have options for markers, mini map, minimal or detailed hud and others. Would that be truly terrible to see first before being greeted by the game proper? I imagine not. It's like how some games'll have you calibrate lighting levels before starting.
A lot of MS studios games do this and I really appreciate it. I feel like its probably a mandate from upper management.
@@simulacrumgames Honestly I like the idea. There have been times I do not find out about a setting that would have made something much more enjoyable until either a: I read it in a comment after looking up something because I am utterly stuck or b: I am done with the game and simply exploring every setting before putting it down for good.
A questionable decision.
I kinda prefer how original Fallout handles it - there's some predefined default setup and if you wish so - there are options under the button of the same name that you can tweak.
I think two biggest questions here are "do these options work" and "do they mean anything to anyone".
I feel like most modern games just aren't designed to be played without assistance. Turn off GPS or markers and there's literally no way to find goals because nobody ever gives enough details for you to figure it out. Like, sometimes it's literally "go talk to John" instead of "you gotta talk to our boss, John. His room is on second floor in the main building" or something like that.
That's related to "do they work".
On the "do they mean anything" - a couple examples. What do "combat looks" mean in fallout? Like, I literally don't know.
What do "combat difficulty" and "game difficulty" change? Your hp? Enemies' hp? Skill levels? XP gains? Damage? Encounter frequency?
But then again there will be someone complaining that these options' descriptions are "spoiling" the game somehow.
@@zhulikkulik That's pretty much what I was describing actually. The predefineds in my project would have a more minimal hud and no quest markers, for instance. But upon that first boot you get to choose whether you'll want more information on your screen or not. I wouldn't be as concerned about it as the purpose of Tim's video points out, you can't make everybody happy.
Great shirt tim, even better video
3:32 When I play a game, I'm looking for experiencing it, rather than exploring it. I want to play how designers has visioned the game, so all options enabled and on default, I play generic build that can fight, speak, sneak, steal so I can experience all of these parts. I don't like to miss things out, skip quests, not obtain an information, I want the full experience. It's similar to listening to an album or watching a movie, reading a book. You could argue, "just play the game again but with different build" - well, I don't play the same game twice or watch same movie twice, It's not the same, I can't enjoy it second time that much anymore.
Come on, you can tell me... you almost used two sock puppets to explain this to us, didn't you?
You know me too well.
Tim, could you make a video about why you made some of the design choices you made in the games you worked on, and which options did you consider, but decided to go in a different direction?
As with many other people dark souls turned me around on the difficulty option debate. The issue is that from my experience games with multiple difficulty options tend to be much less well-balanced overall. The hard option is too hard the easy option is too easy. There's also the fact that the hard option might not be too hard but I might not realize it because there's always that nagging thought in the back of my head that maybe this is harder than I actually want it to be and I'm just being stupid playing on the hardest difficulty and wasting my time. But then the medium difficulty feels too easy. It's not a huge bug bear or something the only reason I even bring this up is because a lot of people are adamantly against a game without difficulty options. I'm perfectly fine with those games existing that have difficulty options and I will play them sometimes but I also like it when some games don't have difficulty options because I find that they are often more balanced and have just a better difficulty curve overall.
That’s why there is Sekiro, it really only has one way to play.
The worst thing is when hard is not hard, but like one single number there is too hard.
So there's finally a reasonable amount of ammo boxes/m² and the enemies are smart enough but on top of that they have 10000x hp compared to normal.
So it's almost perfect difficulty but you can't enjoy it because that one number in stats turns it into grindfest.
I wouldnt be surprised at all if the reality was that people want their cake and eat it too, but they dont understand that overcoming a challenge when there is not rewarding. You quite literally cannot have your cake and eat it too.
Hey Everyone?? Don't you mean Hi Everyone? What universe did I wake up in!
I loved Baldurs Gate 3, but I couldn't help but save-scum. I want "the good ending" or at least what I perceive to be the good ending. I can't deny though that I did not enjoy constantly reloading at all. I don't know what the solution is though the inspiration mechanic in BG3 definitely helps.
You can just not save scum, maybe the ending you would had gotten been more satisfying if you didn’t save scum to a “perfect” ending
I think a big thing people tend to forget is that people are gonna have opinions... and that's ok. It's ok for the player to not like something, regardless of how good it was, it's ok for the designer to make a decision that pisses off the majority of the player base.
I wish, instead of spending time complaining about it, they'd at least have a civil discussion about how they might've improved it. Ideally, they'd focus that energy into making a patch or mod to fix it the way they want.
This should be called Tim Parents the Internet.
There are 3 paths to success in making and selling any product:
1) Know the market so well that you are able to accurately and effectively minimize the 'I hate it!' numbers while maximizing the 'I like it!' numbers. (Tim's main argument.)
2) Make something you really like, without compromise, and serendipitously happen to match the desire of a large number of buyers. (Tim's suggestion to make the game you like.)
3) Something else which I don't know.
We need a live dog cam in the corner of the video, I hear him.
currently the worst problem with design choices is that they are not being made by developers.
source?
@@arcan762 are you blind? current capitalism dictates publicly traded companies perpetually maximize value for shareholders. larian, for example, did what they wanted with bg3 because they are privately owned. many indie devs also make decisions based on dumb shit. like tim said, mostly money is at the root of problems here.
@@evoltaocao5078 source?
@@arcan762 your mom.
@@evoltaocao5078 source?
M-m-m-money