Obvious and Cheap
Reskins (also known as Cookie-Cutter Games)
Patrick Perrault of Airborne Entertainment writes, "It's
common practice in the mobile space [i.e. cell-phone games] to take an existing
engine (or entire game) and reuse it to do another, usually branded, game."
"While some companies (like Gameloft with games like Splinter Cell, Prince of Persia, and all its platformers) do a good
job at adding new functionalities to each iteration, other publishers will stop
at loading different graphics and modifying existing levels. Some really,
really greedy publishers will even stop at changing only the game's title and
splash screen."
"But if you want to be greedy, at least be smart! If
you are reskinning a game, making sure you remove all mentions of the old title
in the credits is smart. And so is making sure the characters from the original
game do not appear in the new game. Failure to be smart is sure to result in
players not buying any more of your games."
Leaving old characters and credits to turn up in the new
game is one of the funniest screwups I've ever heard about. It doesn't get much
more sloppy than that. Alas, if this were only a new problem.
Certain companies
in the early '90s were infamous for turning out cookie-cutter platform games on
the Genesis and SNES. And it's hardly confined to the mobile space these days;
there are plenty of clone shooters around. I think the FPS is the side-scroller
of this generation: there are way too many of them.
Computer Crashed
While Saving? Game Over!
Someone named Ilya writes, "If you save and the game
crashes while it's saving, your game's corrupt. Why not save a file with a .sa2
extension if there's one with a .sav one and delete the .sav when you're done?"
Ilya's right -- this is freshman year computer science. Unless
storage space is limited, basic caution says you don't overwrite someone's old
data until you know their new data has been safely stored away. (If there is a shortage of space, you can warn the
user that their old save is being overwritten -- along with a "don't show
this warning again" checkbox, of course.) The implementation is trivial,
so get it right.
Friendly AI
Characters That Do More Harm Than Good
I've often complained about stupid AI wingmen in flight
simulators -- they're supposed to be watching your back, and instead they get
killed in the first ten seconds of battle. Steven Taylor points out that this
can be generalized to include escort missions in which the character you're
escorting is an idiot, and in fact I think it really applies to any
AI-controlled ally character.
He writes, "If the person being escorted
simply followed the main character, or stayed in one place, this wouldn't be a
problem. Instead, the escorted character
runs around unpredictably in such a way that the player loses control over the
situation and instead has to react to whatever nonsensical move the AI makes. Tactics
are thrown out the window as the escorted character runs into the next source
of gunfire."
Shawn Lucas independently offers a good example from The
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: "I remember a quest where the player was
tasked with rescuing a peasant girl who had been kidnapped by a group of
cultists. After journeying to their hideout and freeing the girl from her cell,
I attempted to flee with the prisoner. However, it seemed that the girl was
more interested in attacking the hostile cultists than she was in getting to
safety. The second she spotted one of the cultists she attacked him and drew
other enemies to our position. As it turned out, she was no match for them, nor
was I. After numerous deaths and reloads, I was able to take out the cultists
one by one, by means of cheap tactics, but it put me off from playing the game."
Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
And he had another example as well: "There was one mission in Grand Theft
Auto: San Andreas that required the player to follow alongside a train on a
dirt bike while shooting enemies who were riding the train. The dirt bike was
driven by the player and the friendly AI sat on the back and had to shoot the
enemies. However, the friendly AI would often choose not to shoot at the
enemies, despite having a clear shot. There was also a time limit for this
mission, which made my partner's lackluster performance all the more
aggravating."
You occasionally see this played for laughs in movies, where
our hero is stuck with an ally who is more trouble than he's worth. (Indiana
Jones's sidekick Wilhelmina "Willy" Scott from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a good example.) But a
movie is different -- it goes forward no matter what.
As a player, if I'm
constantly being held up or killed on account of my moronic companion, I'm
strongly tempted to shoot him myself. I object to confronting stupid enemy AI (Stupid
Opponents is a Twinkie Denial Condition too), but I really object to having to cooperate with, and compensate for, bad
AI that's supposed to be on my side. If you can't make your AI NPCs smart, at
least make them cautious and predictable.
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"People play games in order to overcome challenges, make interesting choices, and generally express themselves"
That's a very limited (and oldschool) view of games. Yes, simplistic and unchallenging games are generally crap, and QTEs are abused these days, but there's value in letting the player enjoy executing a series of moves just because they are cool and fun to watch, even if there's no challenge, choice or self-expression.
The DKC example wasn't quite the same thing. That's breaking established game rules on a whim. (Probably also a TDC, I can't remember.) But DKC is good for a reason. All of those off-screen barrels either had 'signs' or they were only 95% clipped by the edge of your TV. Or they were visible for a quarter of a second as you flew by them at 90 mph. Then it was just a matter of going back for them. All of the levels were designed to be run through once at full speed and once more by crawling with your spider sense on.
This is another biggie: a very, very wrong and bad TDC in an otherwise good game. I'll let a lady named Jessica explain it: "This damaged the ending of Shadow of the Colossus for me -- and it happens in other games too. You allow the player to control their character during a sequence, but no matter what the player does, the sequence can only go one way. Since it's not clear that it would ever happen, when it does happen, it makes you want to try the sequence again, but that only gives you the same result."
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Let me think this is certainly not a biggie at all. It gives you the impression you can succeed, and the bittersweet taste of failure is precisely what the character would feel for real.
It's not a big deal if it's linear at this point, with enough critical thinking and intelligence, you should realize that it was meant to happen this way.
But sure, stupid designers for not making all games sandboxes, or not accepting the dilemma about "all in your face linear" vs. "rather obvious branching". Let's absolutely NOT try anything else!
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For tragedy to really work, the audience must know in advance that the hero is doomed, or at least come to realize it without spending fruitless hours trying to avoid it. We can still make games about Napoleon, or the Americans in the Vietnam war, even though the player knows the ultimate outcome will be failure.
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Damn right yeah! Man! I want all my mana points spent on healing and reviving Aerith back!
Wait.
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'Push the button when I tell you to' -- what game is that?
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It's called DDR. And it happens a lot.
I would not have much problems with those QTEs if they allowed much more flexibility in adventure/action games (check my link above to see what I mean).
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Mouse-based interfaces work poorly on joysticks, and usually joystick-based interfaces work poorly with the mouse too. They don't do the same thing. A mouse is a pointing device. A joystick is a steering device.
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I agree. I have a good one for you: Vroom. Driving a Formula-1 with a mouse. Although there's no reason you couldn't turn a mouse into a wheel with a bit of tweaking, by default the appendice was clearly not meant for such uses.
Besides, here's a question for Gamasutra staff: what about adding at least the mundane bold, italic and url tags in comments?
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But I also believe in letting the player make multiple saves. OK, the player saved in the last instant before an inevitable death -- so let him restore an earlier save. Problem solved. If you only have storage space for one save, then checkpoints might be a better option -- just make sure they're placed in such a way that the player is definitely healthy when he saves.
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Quake 4, despite its flaws, managed the quicksave system fairly well. Nothing special, but the latest quicksave wouldn't erase the former.
On the other hand, there's that classical example of limited saves being the AVP shooter for PC.
Globally, I also notice that many gamers lack the flair to know when to save a game. There are plenty of signs to know when you're in a quiet zone. The frequency of enemy spawns, the magnitude of the last fight you went through, the aspect of the level where the next corridor or door looks like a trap, or you feel you're going to enter the Boss' arena. It's always good to backpedal just a bit, make your save there, and then proceed forward, safely.
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SEVERAL YEAR OLD SPOILERS!
I agree with this in theory, but in practice, the part in Deus Ex where player death is part of the story worked for me very well (as in, it was a huge surprise when it didn't reload, and instead I had awakened in an strange environment).
Did anyone get frustrated by that part of Deus Ex? One important difference to the "impossible boss battle" is that you are not necessarily led to believe that the encounter in which you inevitably die is going to be that much harder than the rest of the game - that after you happen to die there, you may think "Wow, that was hard", but by the time you've thought that, you're already progressing through the story.
Lufia II on the SNES also had a player death that I thought worked well in the context of the larger story and was an interesting thing to happen (I remember being pretty wowed as a kid) - although I must admit that I probably used up quite a lot of stuff trying to get through it the first time.
Thanks Ernest!
Good read anyway :)
I don't think at this point it is a spoiler to mention that early in the game the player gets captured and partially turned into a Strogg (the cyborg bad guys). This capture occurs during a boss fight that you cannot win. Here's the problem: if you take too much damage and die too early in the boss fight, that's it - you're dead. Reload. You have to survive long enough to make it to the stage of the battle in which your defeat triggers the whole captured-turned-into-cyborg cutscene. Which probably sounds like a bad idea already, but I'll give you an example to explain why it is: I DID die early in this encounter the first time I played it. So coming back in and trying again I assumed the boss could be defeated, even though I was overwelmingly outmatched. Or at the very least, I had decided that I couldn't let myself be killed. So I took cover, I unloaded every last bit of ammunition I had, and still I fought on, trying to survive as long as I could. Eventually I got tired of hiding with nothing left to throw at my enemy, so I let him kill me. Cue cutscene. Cue remorse over 20 minutes of my life wasted.
I'm really pissed by modern shooters. They are clearly built for consoles (which, imo, is horrendous, as you have to use a turning device for aiming purposes), and then ported to PCs. So we get games with huge aiming sights (and spreading bullets), AI that make large sidesteps, and clunky button layout.
The entirety of the game is about holding on and stubbornly refusing to quit. In the ending you can hold on for a long time, but you eventually have to let go. I believe that the act of the player giving up during the ending is exactly what makes it so moving.
On that game, non-winable fights at a point become quite common, how they work? You fight, fight and fight and after some time the enemy just flees, and the screen shows: timeout.
I tought: Nice solution, so I get rewarded for fighting properly and I do not need to know if I was supposed to beat him or not.
Then in a single cut-scene I was supposed to LOSE the fight, but I did not knew, and I beated the boss like mad, spammed items, fought it with every inch of my soul, expecting that at least it would time-out like bosses before and that.
But no! The boss started to manage to kill my characters, I still ressurected them, after a while the mana items to give to my healer depleted, after a while he killed the healer, but I still fought valiantly, started to heal myself heavily with items, even inneficient ones that are supposed to be used in the creation of other items...
After a 30 minute long fight he managed to kill me after all my healing and MP items (and some other items too, like bombs and stats changing items) depleted.
And then I see a crappy cut-scene where he kicks me into the water, and other characters run from him and jump into the water too, to me land ashore in the last island of the planet (where the final fight of the planet is).
I just looked at the screen and screamed: HOLY CRAP! IF IT WAS NOT THE FACT THAT RELOADING WOULD FORCE ME TO SEE 40 MINUTES OF CUT-SCENES AND DIALOGUES AGAIN I WOULD DO IT BECAUSE THIS DAMN STUPID GAME ROBBED ME ALL MY FRACKING ITEMS THAT HAS A TOTAL COST OF 70% OF ALL THE MONEY THAT I EVER GOT ON THE GAME!
Still, I think that they made it better first by giving you a reward for "winning" the ultimately unwinnable battle, and second by replenishing your stock of wasted items immediately following the fight.
The directions to the game should be clear, you should know when you're trying to kill something that can be killed, and if you as a developer REALLY want a player to figure out how to beat the enemy, at least give a hint. Don't make me have to look up a FAQ just to learn that the only way to beat Psycho Mantis is to take the controller out and plug it into a different slot.
re: Saving just before you die - Set save points in non-danger areas are okay, but sometimes you can forget to save at one, or you might be saving in a totally different place from where you're supposed to be [yay for dying and having to trek all the way to the objective], or may just not see it entirely. Multiple saves is also okay, but in my own experience, I tend to forget to make a "backup save" for so long that if I do screw up my main save I have to go back so far that I don't want to play anymore, though alternating saves usually helps.
Checkpoints are a great way to solve this problem, especially if you have the option to either load from a checkpoint or your own save point. I also like when there are other ways to save yourself from doom, like in Prince of Persia, with the ability to reverse time to before your death [though it's limited, so you might not always be able to save yourself] or like in the new Duke Nukem 3D for Xbox Live that records your progress for the entire level and allows you to replay at any point, but this borders close on the "repetitive loading" method of cheating in games, where dying is irrelevant as you can just load up a save from seconds before until you get it right.
These things aren't easy, but developers really should put more time into these key aspects in functionality. Someday they'll learn. Until then I won't be jumping into any pits looking for secrets.
If you're fighting waves of endlessly-respawning enemies, it's probably because it's a puzzle and you're supposed to find another way around. Unless the game has repeatedly forced you to fight 200 bad guys in a row, or has somehow told you "your mission is to kill every last ghoul with your holy sword," it's your fault for not recognizing the pattern. For example, there are multiple scenes in Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones where you are the Dark Prince and you get mobbed endlessly by bad guys who come out of places that you cannot enter. Killing them will sustain your health meter, but they never stop coming. You need to find a way out of the area. The real purpose of the bad guys is to buy you time while you figure out where to go; they're actually there to help you. The game doesn't mislead you into thinking that killing them is going to get you out of trouble. You know by that point that the Dark Prince has a life drain on him and if you don't find your way to water to return to normal, you'll eventually die. If you somehow manage to forget that information, it's your own fault.
There's a big difference between "setting the player up to fail" and forcing the player to figure something out. It sounds like you just give up to fast, or flat-out refuse to think. Seriously, you found out about the controller-port trick on Psycho Mantis by looking up a FAQ? That means that you didn't exhaust the conversation with the colonel before you went online. You actually left the game to look for help instead of using the game's built-in hint system. Furthermore, you went for help without even trying the battle two or three times on your own, because if you had been using continues, the colonel would've contacted you. Not to mention that it's actually possible to win without it anyway.
So basically, you must have given up without asking the game for help and without even trying very many times. That's not the game's fault. That's the player's fault.
Another example is in God of War 2, but that one I think works better for everyone because the animations of Kratos change dramatically to communicate that he's getting very weak and it's impossible to fight properly. It's clear the end is near and that it's intentional because the animations changed.
SOTC's ending is one of my favorite endings because of that part. It made you feel very tragically helpless, and contrasted well with the rest of the game in a very real, interactive way. I can understand why some may interpret it as another challenge and actually try to survive (the thought did cross my mind), but for a good number of people, it was clear that it was helpless. So, it's a matter of how to do it well. You need to communicate to the player, yet don't do it too soon since you want that realization of helplessness. A very subtle, interesting issue indeed.
Serious lack of research: bad game designer, no twinkie!