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Clik here to view.The topic sounds confrontational, probably more so than it really is. Also, it’s not actually a completely black and white affair, it’s not an either/or situation, though to many people (developers in particular) it might well feel like it. Additionally, and this right at the start, gaming interests vary widely and there is a particular distinction between games from the asian market and the western (european/american) market. As someone who develops games in europe and predominantly plays western games, those are the games I primarily talk about.
There are many, many, factors that make up game design and determine how “good” a game really is. In fact how “good” a game is can’t be defined easy in itself – fun, scary, easy, difficult, entertaining, visually beautiful, amazing audio – all these elements contribute to how good a game is and all these aspects are judged by individuals, with their own opinions and ideas of what a good game should be like.
Over the last few years I have increasingly been looking at a very fundamental part of design, something that is (or should be) established early on when coming up with a new game concept: How accessible, how easy or how difficult do I want my game to be? How challenging should it be and challenging for whom?
I am not sure about other designers, but until recently I have mostly considered the difficulty of a particular game (as well as the pacing to a degree) towards the end of a project. The philosophy has always been to get all the content in, and polish that and bug fix it, before worrying about difficulty too much. After all it’s just adjusting a few values at the end right?
As I said, I can’t talk for other designers at all, but it was a bit of a revelation when i discovered that difficulty has to be taken into account from day one of design. That it permeates everything in a game and that each mechanic has to be evaluated with a view as to it’s impact on player experience as well as difficulty. If the player finds one mechanic or aspect of a game too difficult, she might not engage with that mechanic for example and this could have massive knock-on effects throughout, it could even lead to players abandoning the game.
Game development has changed a lot since the first few games were released. Games certainly have changed. But one thing that has changed very little is the fact that many game developers (and I’d argue that this is the majority) still make games based on their own preferences and their own abilities and gaming habits.
And there is nothing really wrong with that. Quite the contrary in many cases. Working on something you want to play yourself ensures enthusiasm, ambition, resourcefulness and enjoyment at the workplace – all absolutely amazing things to have. But it does very much depend on what kind of game it is you like to play. It does depend on what your target audience is, or rather it depends on the budget you want to spend and thus what your target audience has to be.
Regardless of their quality (both in terms of visual as well as gameplay), regardless of the critical acclaim they hold, games like Dark Souls for example are niche games. They are brilliant games, commanding a loyal following and a lot of respect from gamers, journalists and developers alike. But they are still niche games. Dark Souls has sold around 3 million units across 3 platforms. For a game with an 89 metacritic that is not a whole lot, considering there are about 160 million PS3 and 360 consoles out there and countless PCs, the game only has sold to a FRACTION of the available market. It is, by any account, a “great game”. The problem is simply that the vast majority of gamers does not enjoy that type of game – they do not get entertained by it.
This does not make people who buy Dark Souls wrong, nor does it make the vast majority right (contrary to what a lot of debate on the internet would lead you to believe), but it does give us a great example of what I mean with “develop for your intended audience”.
It is very simple really. If you are a developer (designer or studio,) and you want to make a game which (no matter how amazing it will be), can only attract a niche customer base, then your budget needs to reflect that. If your aim is to make the next “Dark Souls” and be as successful as they were, then your budget needs to reflect that you are likely to have 3 million or less sales. Ship a game with a budget that allows for that and you not only will have shipped a great game, but also one that is financially viable and will keep you in business to make more games.
The key thing is to be aware of difficulty and through difficulty often accessibility. To understand exactly what you build, why you build it and who you build it for. Unfortunately what happens more often than not is that designers and developers create cool mechanics (or, worse, a cool story) and develop away without any thought about target audience and budget correlations. And in the end, when it comes to difficulty balancing and pacing, they are so familiar with the game that the natural tendency is to crank it up, because they are gamers themselves and want a bit of a challenge. Only for developers who spent 2 years working on a game a “bit of a challenge” is something entirely than for someone who is brand new to the game. In the end you might well have an amazing product in many ways, but one that simply does not provide the accessibility for the masses. What good to create a masterpiece if nobody can squeeze through a tiny door to see it?
This does not just go for difficulty either. Mechanics which developers find self explanatory, natural and easy to master, will be alien and new to people playing the game for the first time. Developers see the game “how it is meant to be played”, but this rarely survives first contact with the consumer. So we developers (and to a degree I will always be guilty of this myself, though I am working hard to get better) tune games to our own skillset, difficulty likings and we take control input and mechanics for granted – in short: we got too close to our product and lose sight of bugs, usability issues and user experience problems.
As I mentioned earlier there are 160 million last gen consoles out there. God knows how many PC gamers there are. Yet few, if any, games truly break into the mass market. Some games, like Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto and similar break into the 20 million copies sold. The reason they do this is not just because shooters are so popular (which they are), but also because the entry level for gamers is very low. On an easy difficulty rating, everyone, even grannies, can complete CoD. Everyone can participate in online multiplayer, and thanks to some clever design, even feel powerful from time to time and at the very least progress steadily. A few more games (Skyrim, Assassins Creed, Batman) flirt in the 10 million range. These are still fractions of potential user base. These games make a lot of money, and are almost always profitable, but there is a lot more potential to sell more. I don’t think any console game will ever sell to every console owner – differences in tastes for genres alone does not allow that to happen – but I don’t see why 50+ million sales for a AAA title across 3 platforms (Xbone, PS4 and PC) cannot be achieved.
But it might take a bit of effort on the side of the developer. In some cases developers don’t want to spend that effort, happy with the sales they have/are likely to get (after all any changes are unproven and could just be a cost and offer no benefit – and risk is not a wanted thing in AAA), but in many cases developers simply do not consider other options. They make the game they want to make and they do not consider the target audience until it is much too late.
Another issue is that developers working on “proper games” (read: AAA or console/PC in general), often ignore mobile and social games and the information they can provide. Social and mobile gaming more than anything else has helped to grow the number of “gamers” in the world in the last 10 years. Angry Birds has downloaded more than 2 billion times across all devices. And while this might well be a one hit wonder for Rovio (and their business model based on their early success might well be flawed), it shows that there are a tremendous number of people in the world who want to be entertained. Who want to engage in gaming, even repetitive motions, for short amounts of time to have fun.
These “casual” gamers are often ignored by “proper game” developers. We often even make fun of them. Just read some press releases by studios and publishers alike: we aim for the core! Win the core gamer and you win the internet debate. The vocal minority still holds a lot of sway with developers and studios. But success for a game, in my opinion, lies with the quiet masses, the hybrid – the “casual” gamer who owns a console or a PC (which he or she uses for gaming as well). Those gamers who don’t necessarily call themselves a “gamer” on social media or when talking to their friends. Those gamers who don’t tweet or FB about the latest games they play or how long it took them to take down a boss.
If we create games that allow those quiet masses to have a great time, to enjoy themselves, to feel like they are mastering the mechanics and they can play the game in a way they want to play it. Do that, and by all means combine it with a “hardcore mode”, and you break into a whole new market, you can break the boundaries between core and social. You can create an experience that players across the divide can enjoy.
But in order to achieve this it is essential that the game is designed from the ground up for this. As I said, the ideal scenario is to create a game that allows both core gamers to get a challenge as well as the more mainstream (I don’t like to use the word casual) gamers to just dive in and enjoy it. Almost every game I ever worked on at some point used the line “easy to get into – hard to master” – none of these games ever delivered.
At the end of the day the vast majority of players, core and mainstream alike, want to be entertained. They want to boot up the game, feel powerful, feel like they progress, feel like they master the mechanics, understand them and apply them. Picking up a controller has to feel natural, the UI must support this and the game needs to be adaptable enough (either automatically, under the hood, or through difficulty settings) to allow for different types of gamers. Get this right and the sky’s the limit.
One of the best examples out there is World of Warcraft. It does not matter if you like it or hate it, if you have played it or not. Just looking at the game, and in particular it’s evolvement over the years shows that Blizzard not only is willing to spend the extra development time to create an experience for a much wider range of people, but it also shows that collecting data, analyzing how players engage with a product, makes sense.
When World of Warcraft first came out it was a natural evolution from games like EverQuest – hard core MMO games with tough as nails raiding, punishing death and grinding leveling. World of Warcraft changed that drastically. Raids were 25 man (compared to EverQuests 72) and split in instances (no more competing with other guilds). Death was a bit of an inconvenience, but you never lost XP or gear. Leveling was much faster and there were a lot of quests supporting your XP gain – so it did not feel like work.
WoW also let people customize their UI and create add-ons that worked with the UI and game mechanics – boss mods told players exactly what to do, quest helpers showed where quest NPCs where, map add-ons helped with gathering. Couple that with the fact that the game essentially ran on every PC in every household and it is no surprise that it broke every record for MMO games and many PCs games out there (at least in the western market – and WoW is to date one of the few MMOs successful in asia).
There are only about 400 guilds in the US which have currently cleared the entire high end raid content in WoW for 25 man raids (the tougher one to get people for). Even if you average 50 people raiding in these guilds (double of what is needed) that would only mean about 10.000 people have killed every boss in the game on highest difficulty – in the US. Double that for EU and Asia and you get between 20.000 and 30.000 people out of currently about 7 million who have done it all, completed the game in it’s current form. Those are the core, the hard core, the first, the achievers. If you want to know what it takes to be there, watch this:
If Blizzard would only cater to these people, WoW would have gone the same way as EQ and other western MMOs – they would have been successful to a degree, but eventually declined. The MMO world is littered with plenty of corpses to show this.
But WoW has always been casual and inclusive to a degree, and then it adapted. With each expansion new tools, new mechanics and new content came along, which allowed players who did not have 8 hours or more in one sitting, to still enjoy the same content and make progress. To feel powerful, to feel masterful and to project how awesome they too could be in a few weeks and months. Grouping was made easier, dungeons gave more powerful loot, special events were put on, world bosses were brought in. And then finally, 2 expansions ago, the LFR or Looking For Raid feature made it in. Players did not have to be in raiding guilds. They could consume and experience the raid content, previously reserved to those with dedication and extra time on their hands, in short chunks. Bosses were dumbed down a bit, loot not quite as powerful, but it was all there.
In it’s current incarnation WoW offers something for everyone. Regardless of whether you have 30 minutes or 20 hours available to play – you can always find something to do.
Don’t get me wrong, the game is still not flawless, there are plenty of things which can be improved (Crafting, quest rewards, even some loot drops), but Blizzard is on it. With each expansion the game caters to more and more people. Pandaria introduced pet collection and pet battles and the next expansion will introduce base building. And all this time the core gamers still have their raids, still have the challenges, still can die repeatedly to the same bosses if they so wish – the (estimated) 5% of hardcore gamers get the difficulty they want.
So, in closing (this ended up longer than intended – it felt shorter in my head), i think we developers need to consider, from the start, who our audience is and who we want to include and exclude. We need to make this a conscious decision and that decision needs to feed into all the mechanics and systems of our game. Personally i think many developers need to actively try to include the non core gamers, realize the potential market out there and look at how they can be brought into the game in addition to, not instead of, the core gamers. There are plenty of options through design to achieve this. It does not need to be an either/or decision. Catering to the mainstream gamers does not mean we have to abandon the core. If casual gamers play our games, it is not a blemish and does not take away from the hardcore. The ideal game allows all types of gamers to gain enjoyment from it, regardless their skill level and time investment.
We live in times where we are bombarded with entertainment products. TV shows, internet media, movies, music, games, mobile games, social games, social media – we are constantly on our phones, our devices, on the PC and on the TV. We have to fit the entertainment we enjoy the most into our busy schedules. So i think the vast majority of gamers out there simply has no time to be challenged unduly. Most gamers want to pick up the controller or device and get lost, enjoy themselves, get entertained. They don’t want to be frustrated, they don’t want to think (too hard), they want to feel empowered, masterful, bad-ass and they want to kick some ass. They want gratification and they don’t want to work hard for it – in short, they want everything they can’t get (easily) in real life.
Once again, there are exceptions, and i can already hear some of you bristling about my points, thinking no doubt that it’s all about the challenge. Don’t worry! I am not calling for Dark Souls to go the way of the Dodo. There will always be a need and a market for games like Dark Souls. But if you are a developer i would argue that you should always reflect on the game you are making. Be sure you know what game you are making, what your market is and how many units you need to sell, and are likely to sell.Is your target audience the 3 million people who play Dark Souls? Is it the 25 million who play Call of Duty? Or could it be the 100 million who play Angry Birds?
Filed under: GAMES INDUSTRY Tagged: AAA Games, Angry Birds, call of duty, Dark Souls, design, entertainment, Game Design, game development, skyrim Image may be NSFW.
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