[MUD-Dev2] Reasons for Play [was: City of Heroes tangent]

[Sean Howard]

"John Buehler" <johnbue at msn.com> wrote:
> Here's a sincere question for anyone who has been involved with
> developing a published game in the action genre: why are combat systems
> the way they are?

> Is it inertia from the past, failure to find a new sweet spot, simple
> enjoyment of things the way they are, difficulty in producing anything
> much more involved than exists today, something else?

I am not speaking from personal design experience, but I was part of a
team that worked on a snowboarding game, which liberally borrowed from the
previous games. In this instance, it was for several reasons:

1) Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was really popular at the time, which set up
expectations of how the buttons should work. It would've been difficult to
sell a different control scheme to our publishers, much less our target
audience. SSX, for example, changed its control scheme with the fourth
game to be more like Tony Hawk for exactly this reason.

2) The designer and producer weren't very smart. I don't mean to be crude,
but they had very limited exposure to all the other snowboarding games out
there. Naturally, they drew from this limited experience completely. They
also actively worked against broadening this experience and refused
multiple snowboard games after five minutes of play because they were
pre-PS2 generation.

3) Back to the smart thing. They tried to create new gameplay systems, and
even as modest in scope as they were, failed to produce something playable
or fun. Some of these failures could've had moderate success with some
effort, prototyping, and testing, but they seemed resistent to do that and
instead attempted to implement the systems full bore without even thinking
it all the way through. Others were doomed from the start, either being
genuinely bad ideas or unfeasible for the time we were allotted.

4) After these problems and slow progress due to having to constant rework
systems, the publisher eventually started babysitting each design decision
and milestone. By the time I left the company, they were sending out
weekly cds to some designated third party designer in another city and no
longer controlled the milestone progress at all. The game was eventually
cancelled.

In other words, yes. Everything you said is right. It is generally a
mixture of expectations, inability, time, and failure - even if you
conquer one of these, the others may still bring you down. I don't think
it is impossible to create new and unique gameplay systems, but in a
monolithic corporate entity which answers to shareholders and not other
game designers, it is a far, far safer route to do the tried and true. It
is the first resort and the last resort.

-- 
Sean Howard