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Classic Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Capturing Gaming Feel Not All About Complexity? 40

Posted by simoniker from the scratch-the-twitch dept.
Thanks to GameSpot for its 'GameSpotting' column discussing the largely indefinable 'feel' of a videogame, suggesting: " I'd much rather play a very simple game with a great feel to it than a highly complex, sweeping game consisting of a huge variety of different elements, none of which are terribly good in and of themselves." The writes goes on to compare the "polar-opposite types of game design philosophies" displayed in Ikaruga ("I think of [the game] essentially a flawless masterpiece") versus Morrowind ("I think of [it] as being great mostly through the sum of its many parts"), before concluding: "Games shouldn't take on extra features for the sake of it... Quality of gameplay is ultimately what matters most to people who avidly play games, and high-quality gameplay comes from having the right feel, rather than the other way around."
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Capturing Gaming Feel Not All About Complexity? More

Capturing Gaming Feel Not All About Complexity?

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  • for example (Score:5, Interesting)

    by standsolid ( 619377 ) <kenny@nOspaM.standsolid.com> on Monday June 28, 2004 @12:46PM (#9551787) Homepage
    One might enjoy a game like Super Off Road because of it's simple, yet addictive gameplay.

    When you see hte sequel, Super off road baja, you wonder WTF happened

    On the other hand, tho, You have a game like Zelda: Link to the Past, which is a FANTASTIC game -- Then you compare it to Ocrina of Time... and you can see how "Features" can improve a product.

    • Re:for example (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Whether it was an improvement or not is debateable, but the key with Ocarina of Time was that they maintained the outstanding feel of the gameplay. But even so, there weren't many truly new features in Ocarina of Time. The gameplay was for the most part consistent with that of Link to the Past.

    • On the other hand, tho, You have a game like Zelda: Link to the Past, which is a FANTASTIC game -- Then you compare it to Ocrina of Time... and you can see how "Features" can improve a product.

      An excellent example, as it also illustrates how new "features" can ruin the feel for certain people, since "feel" is a very very subjective thing. I know at least a few people who think Link to the Past is better than Ocarina of Time, and usually they just say that in 3D "it isn't the same."

      • An excellent example, as it also illustrates how new "features" can ruin the feel for certain people, since "feel" is a very very subjective thing. I know at least a few people who think Link to the Past is better than Ocarina of Time, and usually they just say that in 3D "it isn't the same."

        Count me up. While I think that Ocarina/WindWaker are great (I have not played Majora's yet), I think the game lost a lot in the 3D transition. The 2D games (TLOZ and ALttP, I'm not talking about AoL here) were more f

  • Riddick (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fozzmeister ( 160968 ) on Monday June 28, 2004 @12:56PM (#9551875) Homepage
    1st game that I believe has been very good in more than one department, fps (loads of action, powrful enough weapons and sometimes weak enough baddies to give a feeling of Doom. Dark area's combined with amazing atmosphere, ability to shoot lights and lure enimies makes it nearly as good as splinter cell (it has more accurate lighting too) and better than manhunt, gr8 story (as far as i have got) and good RPG elements.

    Its a film license, how did it not suck!

  • N to the ethack (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MilenCent ( 219397 ) <johnwh@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Monday June 28, 2004 @12:57PM (#9551886) Homepage
    Yes, it's time for the mandatory Slashdot mentioning of Nethack, brought to you courtesy of ThinkGeek and Invisible Lallapalooza....

    Nethack is an example of a game that rides its complexity to greatness. It makes it hard to learn, but once you learn it, it's wonderful.

    Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about it lately....

    • Those frustrated trying to learn Nethack's large library of instant-kill one-trick jokes may try Crawl, and struggle instead against its large library of instant-kill out-of-depth monsters.

      Seriously, from the point of view of the original article, although Crawl is a turn-based roguelike game it gives a convincingly frenetic fast-action feel. You have time to think between moves, but mistakes are punished harshly. The game's principal flaw is that, until you become VERY good, only about 10% of your chara

      • Re:N to the ethack, and Crawl (Score:4, Interesting)

        by MilenCent ( 219397 ) <johnwh@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Monday June 28, 2004 @03:26PM (#9553550) Homepage
        Those frustrated trying to learn Nethack's large library of instant-kill one-trick jokes may try Crawl, and struggle instead against its large library of instant-kill out-of-depth monsters.

        Actually....

        Lately I've had opportunity to do a lot of thinking, and a lot of reading, on Nethack. And I've come to the conclusion that it's not nearly as deadly as new players believe.

        These are the things that kill most new players:
        • A monster. As in, loss of hit points from getting attacked by a monster. This is the biggie; probably 95% of deaths are due to this, and even experienced players die most often to these.
        • Starvation. But once you know you can eat monster corpses, and once you know about everyone's friend, the #pray command, this almost never happens. That leads us to....
        • Food poisoning. But again, once you know never to eat a corpse that hasn't been killed in the last, say, 20-or-so moves, this never happens.
        • Choking on food. Again, just never eat when full.
        • (Actual) poisoning. Whether from poisonous monsters, poisonous arrows, or poisoning traps (arrow, dart, spiked pits). This is the second most common cause of death, even among experienced players. Gaining poison resistance is an important early-game goal.
        • Paralysis from smacking a floating eyte. If you ever see a cause of death that reads "Killed by a newt, while helpless," this is why.
        • Monsterous insta-death. Primary among these sources is the lowly, yet potent, cockatrice. A little care goes a long way in dealing with these.

        Those are the biggies, but they aren't really that many of these. No one ever dies by "an imperious order," or "fell hundreds of feet to his death," in normal play. The vast majority of deaths come from getting killed by a monster, getting poisoned by one, or by cockatrice or other monster with a method of instadeath (and there are not a large number of them).

        In particular, new players are best served by being wary of soldier ants. Check it out. [alt.org]
        • I don't play nethack much any more for some reason, probably has something to do with ut2004. Anyway, my 2 stupidest deaths, that aren't in your little list:
          • Playing as a knight, I tried to mount a horse. I slipped and fell off. Thinking that this was just a one-off thing. I tried again. Fell again. One more time. Fell and died.
          • This one was unfair. I entered a room. A rock fell on my head. I moved another square. Another rock fell on my head. This happened a few times, and then I got killed by a rock. Thes
    • Those wishing for a more consistent Roguelike world -- indeed, it has an extensive overland map -- and a pretty interesting story besides (if you survive long enough to start to learn it) ought to try Thomas Biskup's Ancient Domains of Mystery [www.adom.de], or ADOM for short. As devious as Nethack and SLASH-EM can be, I'm always pulled back to ADOM's imperiled world, which is also ridiculously deep and as such a blast to learn. Note that while the game is free, the source is closed (largely in order to prevent the dev
      • I've played a fair bit of ADOM, and while there are definitely things to like about it, I don't get the sense of richness that Nethack provides. The closed-sourceness of ADOM is probably a big reason for this; with only one person supplying ideas for it, even if he *is* pretty sharp overall, there's just not that much variety to the game, and some of what there is is outright cribbed from Nethack.

        Another thing about ADOM is the sense I get that it cheats. It biases item generation depending on player cla

  • A little too complex... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jammac ( 588679 ) on Monday June 28, 2004 @01:01PM (#9551943)
    I had been anticipating the release of Morrowind for quite a while before it finally released. The complexity and non-linear style of gameplay seemed to be exactly what I thought I wanted. However, after purchasing and playing it for several hours, I realized that despite the apparent complexity of the game, it was in fact TOO open-ended, so much that I felt lost and overwhelmed at times.

    What I'm trying to get at is that for myself I would rather see a simple, yet potent game (Ikaruga is a great example) than a more complex do-whatever-the-hell-you-feel-like style game. A complex game like one of the Baldur's Gate games is much better than Morrowind, as the latter's complexity is better suited as a MMORPG.

    • Re:A little too complex... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Monday June 28, 2004 @01:17PM (#9552111) Homepage Journal
      the trick to playing morrowind is to not care about that.

      of course it's kind of hard if you expect it to be like all the other games that come now that give you very direct orders on where to go with little choice.

      and then when there's no choice they still say that it's a 'free world where you can go anywhere' - yet in farcry, where that's mentioned often(in reviews, they make a big deal out of it that you can walk around the 'open' levels), has limits on the levels you can't pass, so it's NOT up to you to choose the route(you can't use the waterways like one would want for example, and there's no plantation on areas you werent meant to reach)..

      though, even in morrowind it's good to have certain goals you're pursuing - but the game doesn't force you to that(since most of the time you have couple of alternative goals you might wish to reach).

      • However, I think the poster's original point is that a game like Morrowind is basically unplayable until you've decided upon which of the range of offered goals you want to pursue. If you aren't the sort of player who goes into a game like that knowing what general sort of thing you'd like to do, the range of choices is more confusing than empowering. This phenomenon is why I inevitably put "sandbox"-style games like Morrowind down after tinkering with them for a few hours... I have fun, but just don't care
        • well, each to his/her own then.

          but that's what kept me playing morrowind for weeks, instead of the usual DAY it takes to finish games these days.

          morrowind has a general plot, but you can put more time into the various optional quests than what you could put into digging through for example KOTOR completely(and I mean _really_ completely). with morrowind you also tend to always have some kind of objective from somebody. in this sense morrowind is a lot like fallout's, one 'master plot' and a shitload of ot
          • This conversation makes me really, seriously wonder if there aren't just two basic sorts of games, and two basic sorts of gamers who will tend to prefer one type of game over another. I can acknowledge when a "sandbox" style game is good, but it's not my preference; similarly, you acknowledge that Ikaruga is good for the sort of game it is, but it's obvious not your preference.

            The two big trends in American gaming now, as far as I can see, are retrogaming and MMORPGs/"sandbox"-type games. I wonder if most
            • well, gamers who want simplicity AND replayability are kinda shafted.. except that there's games like neverball [icculus.org] for totally free. or the hundreds of flash games on various websites. there's more coders now than ever probably and it's easier to start than ever.. and most 'retro' type action/puzzle games are easy to clone and twist somehow.

              if you just want simplicity there's dozen or so mediocre first person shooters or action jumper wanabe games released every year.. thing is these lack replayability even
            • I'm in the middle. I don't play simple games for long because they get repetitive, but I don't like the big open-ended ones where you can do whatever the hel you want because I don't get a sense of quest. Sure, I'm improving my skills, but I like the story progressing and me being in the middle of it. Even games with relatively little actual story, like Metroid Prime, since new paths open and it's clear where I have to go next, it feels like the story is pregressing, even if it's not there. Just training up

            • Re:A little too complex... (Score:4, Interesting)

              by thrash242 ( 697169 ) on Monday June 28, 2004 @05:33PM (#9554882)
              I definately prefer games (particularly RPGs) with completely open-ended gameplay. I want a simulated world in which I can do whatever I want and play my character however I want. Daggerfall and later, Morrowind were pretty close to this. I've played bibliophile characters who mainly collected books. I've tried play both good and evil characters. I've played thieves who robbed houses as their main ocupation. One thing I haven't done yet, in either, is play the Main Quest the whole way through. I've had too much fun doing everyrything else to get around to dedicating any time to it. The fact that I can do that and still have stuff do do is my favorite thing about the Elder Scrolls series. My only real complaint about Morrowind is that it's not random *enough*. Daggerfall was much more random and more open-ended IMO. There were *thousands* of towns you could go to and it would take literaly over a week (real time) to walk across the whole map. Where Daggerfall was weak was that the towns and most dungeons were randomly designed (at creation time, not dynamically). So they often didn't make sense and had little flavor to them. MW improves this a lot where everything is designed, but I still miss that randomness that was in Daggerfall. If they could combine DF and MW in the next Elder Scrolls game, it would be great. But I think that Elder Scrolls games also cater to gamers who want to "win" a game. They have (from what I've read) good stories that you can follow and participate in if you want. So if that's your style, I don't know why you can't have fun playing MW also. Just don't wander off the beaten path and do what you're told by NPCs.

              Briefly, on the retro game subject, I love retro games also. I've been doing little but playing Doom lately and before that I was playing emulated games (NES, SNES, Arcade, C64) constantly. So I can appreciate a good simple, rigid, and linear, but fun game also.

              I also love Simcity because there are no definate goals defined by the game designer. I wish other Strategy/Sim games were like this instead of having the "missions". Most have sandbox mode, but it's often kind of boring with nothing at all going on.

              BTW, I just got Arena from the TES site and got it to run under DOSBox, so now I can play the first Elder Scrolls game too. :)

              In short, what I often look for is a simulation of another world (or this world, but doing something I wouldn't be able to do), not really a "game" as such.
    • I've actually been thinking about this in relaiton to RTS games, which I enjoy, but it applies to all really. Games can be too complex to be fun. Now where that line lies will vary with the individual. It depends largely on how much time you have to devote to the game. I find Total Annihilation and Starcraft enjoyable and fun to play. I appreciate the depth of Age of Kings and other newer games, but I simply don't have the time to get past the learning phase.

      When it was released, TA enjoyed great p
      • Just to another voice to the complexity sliding scale: I used to get all the big-name RTS titles like Warcraft II & III, TA, Homeworld, etc., but would always find that about half-way to 2/3s through most games the complexity of the games got to high -- too many units to manage, to many avenues of attack -- that the games became no longer fun, either because I was losing all the time, or contantly pausing (Homeworld became a pretty, 3D turn-based game soon after the Gardens of Kadesh for me, even though

  • Best Example (Score:3, Insightful)

    by eamonman ( 567383 ) <eamonman2@[ ]mail.com ['hot' in gap]> on Monday June 28, 2004 @01:55PM (#9552513) Journal
    Would be Tetris. I like all the simple versions like the Arcade and the Nintendo (NES, GB) versions. I've tried the Xbox version and I think it's BS (you shouldn't be able to keep re-flipping a piece to keep it from sticking,) but my point is that the simple, set rules of gameplay have made it into classic game that I can still pick up and play at any time, even though I've been playing it a little more than half my life.
    • Your example actually reminds me of Gorillas.... a classic, but with extremely simple gameplay. A bunch of players lobbing a bunch of explosive bananas at each other one at a time... and its simplicity makes it a whole lot of fun.
  • ... that is, stopping you from continuing the show. I have at least a half dozen games I've put down because of the complexity, regardless of the 'feel'. Then I've had some otherwise cheeseball games - like the "Journeyman Project" games, "Project Nomads" (wait there's a common element there - 'project' in the name!) and several different java/flash games that were appealing not so much for the gameplay or innovative concepts (at the time I played them); but for their environments - the background world
    • And I've stopped playing games for being too simple. For example, while FF1 was great on the Nintendo, since then the bar for RPGs has been raised, and I find the modern FF games too simple to be interesting. If I wanted to watch a movie, most actual movies have better plots, and if I want to play a game I need something engaging.

      A game like Morrowind, while not a perfect game, held my interest for a lot longer. A complex game like ATITD held my interest for a lot longer than a very well-done but very
  • If someone showed me wolfenstein enemy territory back in 1980, I'd think the game has an unacceptably difficult learning curve. Basically only very extreme geeks could understand it enough to play it.

    If someone showed me wolfenstein enemy territory in 2000, I'd think it's no complex than any other game in the market.

    What does that say? Alot about the complexity of games in general in the market going up and up.

  • Too many games offer hours of boring gameplay (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kc78 ( 651501 ) on Monday June 28, 2004 @03:28PM (#9553588) Homepage
    One of the main gripes with video games is that they aren't long enough. I hear this all the time from people. However, I hate it when I play a game and it makes me go through the dumbest hoops just to make the game longer. For example, I recently started playing Champions of Norrath. There's one level I just finished where you have to fight through this ant hill of giant ants until you get to the bottom and kill the boss queen ant that's plaguing the city. I must have killed ants for an hour just going around in a circle until I finally got to the end of the level and then had a tedious fight with this ant. All with no save areas in between. (Granted I could gate out and save at least.) I was so bored and I don't know how many times I screamed, how much further is this stupid thing. Same thing happened when I was trying to make my way through Lord Vanderhosts' castle in that same level. A game that does it right however is Knights of the Old Republic, which I'm also playing right now. I've already played for 11 hours on it (which is a lot for me) and haven't gotten bored once. The levels are laid out, at least so far, with common sense in mind. There's no intricate dungeon just for the hell of it. When you're in a base, it makes sense to be in the base and going through the rooms you're going through. I love this game, and haven't gotten annoyed with it even once. It's not overly difficult, but the story is amazing, and the gameplay is great. I'm not even sure I'll go through the hassle of finishing Champions of Norrath, but I'll play KoToR until my fingers bleed.
  • Anybody that agrees with this article's point should check out my Risk-style game Lux [sillysoft.net]. It has the strategic feel of the boardgame risk, with some enhancements like network play and such.

    I have stayed very true to the feel of Risk, and it has been quite successful!

  • well duh (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Kent Simon ( 760127 )
    am i the only one who thinks this whole thing is just a little ... obvious?
  • I loved to play VGA planets 3.0 back around 1995. The game had a simple interface, but the gamplay could get very complex. Then they added features, hyperspace jumps, gambling ships... eventually the game became just bloated with complexity.
    Also look at the Civilizaion line of games. Civilization is a classic, civ2 for me hit the sweetspot, not much more complex than the original, but a few helpful tweaks. Then Civ3 added more resources and culture, and is much more complex and less fun to play. Then t

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