So many of you have probably decided from seeing how much I complain that I just don't like modern games. This isn't true, but I am finding it harder and harder to find an enjoyable gaming experience these days. Starcraft 2 and Dragon Age Origins are both solid modern titles. But for every Dragon Age 2, there are 4 wastes of time and money. What is worse, many of these failures are someone played off as passable by the gaming community. However, the more modern games I've played the more I see conclusive evidence for a disturbing theory of mine. So I've come to an important conclusion, which naturally leads into an important questions. Conclusion: Companies no longer playtest their videogames. Question: Why don't people playtest their games anymore? Let's take a look at the evidence. Listen up nerds and gaming companies alike. This post is where I draw the line.
Mass Effect, much beloved, but hardly playable. Nearly the same can be said of its sequel. I have never seen such a blatant case of someone simply not play testing their game. Mass Effect had two major problems that nearly made me stop playing the game despite how extremely well it was received by critics and household nerds alike. First, the Mako. This bastard is well known. An armed vehicle is not a useful source of transportation through a hostile area when its turret refuses to aim in places that it should. Nobody making this game decided it was a good gameplay decision for the Mako's turret to suck balls. Nobody could have played this and thought it was a good idea, remotely fun or working as intended. Second, all of the extra exploration and side quests you can do are the completely same thing. Somehow, all of the planets evolved the same in the Mass Effect universe. They all have the same insane terrain. They have the same terrorist group who built the same facility you need to invade and arranged their furniture exactly the same. Seriously. The building that sidequest 1 and sidequest 100 has you invade on planet 1 and planet 100 are the same exact building. This is a waste of my time. It isn't fun. All it does is allow you to put “Has HOURS of extra side quests!” on the back of the box. You are full of shit. It has 1 extra planet with 1 extra side quest that you have to do 100 times if you want to complete everything. World of Warcraft has this, and they call it a repeatable daily quest. You know what people hate grinding in World of Warcraft? Repeatable daily quests. Nobody played ME1 through and thought it had a bunch of fun, engaging, and cool extra planets and sidequests. Anyone playing this thinks it is retarded and repetitive.
Mass Effect 2 pulls the same crap to a slightly less extent, and it is a better game for it. Gone is the terrible terrible terrible handling of the Mako turret. However, it retains the extra meaningless fluff that serves no purpose to entertain, only to extend a game's play time. Mineral finding. Most reviews mention it is lame. Nobody stressed enough how terrible it is. If you want to max out your crew and get all your ship upgrades (ship upgrades needed for the good ending by the way) you will spend hours doing the worst minigame ever conceived. People thought Blitzball was bad. Blitzball is beyond golden compared to mineral finding. You want the dirt? Here we go. You fly to a planet. You get a picture of a planet in front of you, and a graph that shows you how rich the minerals are in the area directly under your mouse cursor. So, you slowly glide your cursor over the picture of the planet, and click when the graph spikes. Yup, you do this for hours folks. Nobody could have played this and thought it added anything to the gameplay or enjoyment of Mass Effect 2. It breaks up the action and the story, and makes you look desperate to fill time in your game that you just couldn't quite make as long as you wanted to. You know what a better way to fill time is? Make a dungeon longer. Way more fun than this crap. I found this mineral finding minigame insulting. As a developer, if you think this is enjoyable, you need to quit making games. If you playtested this and thought it was fun (impossible as it is), you need to stop playing games. If you designed this minigame, you should be fired. If you were part of any team that ok'ed this to be released in a game you worked on, you should be fired. In fact, everyone that knew of the existence of this mineral finding and didn't scream at everyone important that they can't release the game with this in it should no longer be employed. I am insulted as a gamer that you think finding those minerals was a good use of my time. I will never replay Mass Effect 2 because of this.
Ok, so I've repeatedly insulted not only the same company, but the same game series. Maybe you think I just hate Mass Effect. Mass Effect could have been great if someone play tested it and fixed this shit, but lets look at other examples. Did anyone play test Final Fantasy 13? LOLOLOLOL! Seriously. I am a Final Fantasy fanboy, and I couldn't finish that shit. I couldn't get half way through. I bought this game about a year after its release, and I knew what people had said about it. I trusted Square. I was wrong. The characters suck, the combat sucks, the leveling sucks, the exploration? DOESN'T EXIST. Half the characters in the game seem to have been designed to deliberately annoy the player. The other half are generic and uninteresting. The combat is the worst in a Final Fantasy series to date. I mean really, this game deserves a post about it in itself. I'm tempted to go the route of The Spoony One on this and do a multi-hour video about how completely shitty this game is. It could probably launch a career in vloging. The leveling is such a watered down Final Fantasy X sphere grid that they really should have just given you stats and abilities on leveling up, because its such a linear system that there is virtually no player input. I played for about 12 hours before giving up, because the story in this terrible excuse for a game isn't any good either. Nobody involved with this project played the game, or even read the script for that matter. I could have saved the Final Fantasy series if Square had let me play this game for 2 hours and talked with the designers. Nobody there could have played through the entire thing and thought it was good. I REFUSE to believe anyone thinks this is a good game, unless it is the ONLY VIDEOGAME THEY HAVE EVER PLAYED IN THEIR LIFE.
Ok Square, round 2. Final Fantasy 14. You bastards. This game needs no explanation. You made a game so bad that you APOLOGIZED for releasing it. You apologized for a game that was in development for years. You failed, that hard. Has anyone else ever apologized for a game they have released? Has anything been this bad? I mean....this was so awful that it pushed back other Square-Enix titles because it crushed them that hard. Wow. Really. This happened... Thankfully I was so wrecked by Final Fantasy 13 that I didn't touch this disgrace. There are people that were paid as professional game designers, and had to apologize for the result that years of their work resulted in. FIRE EVERYONE ON THE FF14 TEAM.
Riot Games. You did not play test League of Legends for years. Either that, or you never cared. Twisted Fate was broken for 2 years before you nerfed him. Really. You want to be an Esport and you leave a champion broken for 2 years (and one of those years you couldn't even ban him because drafting wasn't implemented!). Want another? Vladimir. You left him barely nerfed for ages. Your game's top tournaments only see the use of about 15 of your 70+ champions. Xin Zhao couldn't have been play tested before release either. A small sampling, but you get the point.
How about every game that has had poor controls? Did people play these? How do you have people play test your game, see it has difficult/unintuitive control, or unresponsive control, and allow it to be released that way? Or games with super poor scaling (Oblivion anyone)? I could probably go for over a hundred pages on this, but I think you get the point.
I originally planned to give a shout out to Blizzard here, for their work on Starcraft 2, Warcraft 3 and The Frozen Throne expansion, as well as Diablo 2 and The Lord of Destruction, as these games all were very enjoyable and clearly had some decent amout of fine tuning done (especially Starcraft 2's intricate gameplay). Sure, there were some questions in Diablo 2's balance (LOLOLOL Frozen Orb) but these games all delivered a consistently enjoyable experience without anything game breaking. However, someone then reminded me of what World of Warcraft had turned into, and really this hurts Blizzard's case a bit. It was good through Burning Crusade for the most part, but Wrath of the Lich King got silly. Blizzard took any sense of reward out of their game, making all the initial content complete easy-mode. The game didn't get remotely challenging until you were attempting Ulduar hard modes, which started to get as hard as regular bosses in Burning Crusade. Epics were free. Leveling was too easy. Deathknights were trolllololol. Nobody play tested a death knight and thought it was balanced. Again, I didn't play WotLK until about a year after launch, and deathknights were STILL troll. I did every non-instance quest as I leveled to 70 solo, even the 5mans. It was a joke. Heroics were AOE fests, crowd control was for noobs. You could argue this is simply an issue of my taste in difficulty, but really the reward was gone in WotLK because there was no effort involved, and when you compare it to Burning Crusade and vanilla WoW it just felt wrong. This is less of an offense as some of the other games listed in this post for sure, and Blizzard does need to be noticed for its fantastic work in Starcraft 2. If Diablo 3 has the same passions, love, effort, and intelligence as was used to make Starcraft 2, I will be a delighted nerd. Here's to hoping I get in beta, because I think I might explode if I need to wait for 2012 for D3 to hit the shelves.
Some of you might be raising a few counterpoints here. Developers have a timeline they have to meet, and can't always polish everything perfectly. I know that. However, many of these flaws are so game breaking that they need to be on the top of the list to fix, and are inexcusable in release. Look at the road we are heading down. A game was so bad, people apologized. It delayed other titles. It cost them millions. Delay if you must, you need to release a solid title. What about the demand for extra content, you ask? Gone are the days that you can simply release a linear story without any side quests or post game content. Games on rails are a thing of the past. Is that how ME1 and 2 fell into the trap of adding such useless fluff? Quite possibly, but this too, is inexcusable. Nobody cares if your game is long if it isn't good. It is horribly obvious when you are just throwing in content that you don't care about to add time to your game. Again, FF14 should be an alarm for you, a boldface warning of the road you are heading down. When you stop caring about your content, and put things in just to have things there, you run this risk. You have millions of dollars and hundreds of jobs at risk when you are publishing these titles. Take some PRIDE in what your name is on. Make something to be remembered as greatness, or your title might just become another warning sign on the road to failure.
So where do we go from here? What can us nerds do to help this problem? We need to start holding companies accountable for the shit they are shoveling on us. People, stop being drones. When a game is bad, don't just glance over the flaw and call it acceptable. Videogames aren't new, they have been around for a long time. There is no excuse for such blatantly terrible things in our videogames. We not only invest our money in their games, but we invest our time, which cannot be replaced. Square stole 12 hours of my life in FF13 that I will never get back. We can't continue to excuse this. How is Mass Effect 3 going to be better if people aren't causing an uproar about mineral finding? We need to hold companies accountable for what they are releasing. I think it is high time that companies started actually caring about the quality of their titles, because great games are becoming harder to find, not easier. As gaming ages, it should be EASIER for companies to see what is enjoyable. I know I have a talent for pointing out flaws in things, but it can't be that difficult to get someone to play your game and tell you what is wrong with it. So many of these flaws are just so glaringly obvious that I feel like my intelligence has been insulted when a designer is actually asking me to do something like mineral finding or trying listen to another one of Hope's awful woe-is-me whining sessions. I will even offer my services to any company reading this. I will even offer them for Mass Effect 3 and Final Fantasy 15. Why? Because I care about the quality of videogames. The more crap like FF13, mineral finding, and Oblivion become acceptable, the harder it is for me to find an enjoyable game to play. The more people accept these games as the norm, the less companies care that they are releasing crap. So let this post be seen by companies across the globe. Let this be the call out to all nerds to demand quality from their games, and not to settle for mediocrity. Let Final Fantasy 14 be the warning to all the gaming companies of the world. We demand quality, and will not settle for another rushed title looking to cash in. You can't tell me you can't build on what has been done the past 20 years of gaming. Take pride in the product your name is going on, and make something fantastic, something that will be remembered as a classic, instead of just another cash in. I WANT to like you games, I really do, but it is becoming harder and harder to excuse the content you are releasing.
Final Fantasy 14's epic fail is your warning. The next move is yours.
One might say that polishing a game doesn't matter as long as people are buying it. Here's my response.
ReplyDeleteBlizzard is a really good example why companies should care about polishing a game. They might think, let's just release this and make some money, even though we know it has flaws. Well, look at what Blizzard has done.
It would be tough to say Blizzard has done anything particularly original--several iterations on RTS (star/warcraft), some hack'n'slash (diablo), and an Everquest clone (WoW). But they have certainly polished all their titles they have released.
Look at where they wound up. They are rich (even excluding WoW they do very well). Starcraft is the #1 e-sport. Their brand is regarded so highly people will buy whatever they publish.
And that's for a company that isn't even doing anything particularly original.
To summarize, the point I want to make is that better games = more money. You might get by with one sloppy release, but *consistent* quality will give you extraordinary customers and loyalty.
In an unrelated vein, though I certainly play fewer games than you, it's also apparent to me that game design quality is really lacking in AAA titles. This is surprising to me, as designing a game seems like it shouldn't require especially uncommon skills. You need some sense of what is "fun", and some basic technical skills to understand the mathcraft behind the games, but it seems like these are skills that plenty of people should possess.
ReplyDeleteThere's a resource issue: testing games can be very time-consuming and might not fit in a desired release schedule. If you have a MOBA game with dozens of heros, and you make significant changes to one, you probably need to go through all hero combinations and look for game-breaking synergies, new strategies, etc. So I can see how League might have trouble fixing some of their heros, even if their designers know what's wrong.
Nevertheless, the resource issue doesn't explain some mechanics that are simply UNFUN. Hunger in Minecraft (or any other game!), lame mini-games (Oblivion), missing core elements that make the genre fun (exploration in FF), absurd leveling systems (Oblivion/Morrowind), etc. These are simply bad design and cannot be explained by lack of resources.
What is it about the structure of video game companies that good designers aren't getting into design positions?
There are dozens (hundreds?) of REALLY FUN mods out there, so it's not like there's a shortage of people that could be recruited.
I kind of wonder if it's a project management issue. Not enough coordination on the team, not enough communication between people who are qualified game designers, and not recruiting/promoting people who are good at the job.