I was looking through a the youtube comments on a couple of Indie games, and it kind of surprised me how many people were telling the developers that they should add/remove “x” without having even played the game. Or just saying things like:
“Enemy X should move slower”
“The sword should kill in 3 hits”
“Add a cross hair”
“Car X is way too fast”
I mean, wouldn’t the developers have included/excluded something for a reason? But, then again, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what the developers intend; the only thing that matters is the opinion of the player.
What do you think about this? How much stock do you put in the opinion of someone who is looking at the game?
If it’s a good idea that fits the game, then adding it would be good. However, I don’t think a dev should change the vision of their game just because the few don’t like it. It’s their game, their expression of how they think, who they are, and what they want to do. That shouldn’t be changed at the core, no matter how much people bitch.
As far as I’m concerned, if others wanted something like “that” in a game so badly, they need to go and make it themselves.
Getting player feedback is key to making a game that players actually like. But taking their suggestions verbatim is often a bad idea.
I listen to suggestions and feedback, but the overall response is more important than the words themselves. Gamers often don’t understand game design (that’s not criticism… game designers also often don’t understand it!), so the specifics of their feedback often aren’t important. But if someone complains that “the sword should kill in 3 hits”, what you should hear is “the combat system doesn’t work as I expect it to”. And that’s something you can work from - what does the gamer expect? Why do they expect it? Should you change the system to fit their expectations, or their expectations to fit the system? And so on.
I often get the most out of simply handing control of my game to someone who’s never played it before and seeing how they respond. Not in words at all, just watching. What bits of the game get positive/negative reactions? Is there a common event that causes them to hand the controller back? How engaged are they? How long do they play for?
How do you know all the people making those comments aren’t designers? I mean, odds are they aren’t, but at the same time I’m sure a lot of professional game designers go around looking at indie game videos trying to get new ideas. They might just be trying to help.
Ultimately, it’s up to the people actually making the game to decide whether it’s a good idea or not. If it’s easy to test it out - do it. If not, then put some thought into whether or not you can come up with some good reasoning for it or not.
You have to be VERY careful about gamer feedback. For example the controls in the other brothers are constantly criticised even after the fix. After a while it dawned on me: they thought it was the controls but really, it’s just the unyielding difficulty (can feel hard to cope with) in addition to controls not having enough “padding”. You can’t expect them to work out the right terms or say it in ways you expect.
So the next patch will fix up the difficulty curve and padding.
Yes: listen to feedback… but read between the lines. Gamers don’t know what things are balanced with other things, they don’t read that far into your game’s code/methodology. Obviously there will be obvious things to fix they point out, but for gameplay, you need to figure out what they really mean.
Feedback about control mechanisms is definitely useful. What players would like to see more of is also good, if you’re doing some sort of open alpha test. In fact, most games should give players a glimpse of it before final release and get some feedback on the essentials. Things which are easier to tweak than completely rebalancing vehicles/characters/horses, that is
I think you missed the point, it is not about how hard it is to fix, it is if it is actually a problem. Gamers don’t know what they want, they just guess… In the same way people want more cores, and high clock rate on a CPU without the slightest idea what it really needs, or the way people want a car with a V8 and lots of horsepower.
Chances are if you like it, somebody els will. I find this kind of frustrating when viewers criticize without reading the info, they all assume we click a button and everything molds to their image, when in reality changing one element breaks another, the domino effect. Balancing a game such as a FPS is a nightmare!
I read somewhere that 90% of the time, the players opinion is right? Not sure how I feel about this but I do agree its very important to consider all feedback. Just remember not everyone is into the same gaming genre.
I’ve often thought that game development will trend towards development as a service whereby you ask the audience to basically design the game and you provide the service of building it. That would be like crowd-sourced game design. I’m sure there will be some who jump on this bandwagon and find that it proves hugely popular, since it gives the gamer exactly what they want. In a way some of the crowdfunding sites provide some of this opportunity when developers offer to put xyz in the game suggested by the funders. Also as an example of openness, Ouya for example has been very open with their community about what they want and what features are good and what sucks and what needs fixing, and they’ve listened and are making the platform better as a result. It’s in a way similar to Open Source, where it’s that openness that drives a lot of feedback and insight that you as a developer may never have come up with by yourself. There can be tremendous value in that for sure.
As we know though, with procedural content generation and user-generated content, if you leave it up to processes outside your control then you will get some very amazing stuff (good designs in Minecraft for example) and also a tonne of crap stuff. So you can’t overtly trust that the audience is capable of coming up with great design, attention to detail, cohesion, etc… they may not be able to express or conceive of the kind of experiences that they themselves would most enjoy. Many rely on others to create for them so that they are a consumer - I mean, who in the audience would be able to create an iPhone all by themselves? So always take what is suggested with a grain of salt and it’s always useful to have some kind of a vision even if it is a very open one, to moderate the submissions, if you want there to be some kind of order to it. Think about Wikipedia also - the crowd submits the content and in general it’s a good thing but they may also submit rubbish.
Then there’s the really open end of things - think Minecraft for example, blank canvas onto which people can express themselves and create emergent gameplay that the designers couldn’t have come up with… without judgement and without saying that you’re not allowed to create xyz… even the bad creations are welcomed and accepted and everyone can create according to their own abilities and be heard by not being censored and rejected. There is great appeal in that all by itself, but your game might not suite the blank-slate sandbox kind of style. So I think in most cases a mix of management/guidance/vision/moderation and freedom for the audience will produce good things. But you also have to be willing to let go of a lot of control, which may be risky if you’re trying to force success to happen as a business. Some can see the business sense in it, when it makes sense, but some can’t. So you yourself, as a developer, may be the worst enemy of your very own project if you yourself have come up with a sucky idea ;-D
My history was in the HL modding scene where many of the mods were community involvements of developing and directing how a game comes out. So I think this is generally good and normal, just that you know it does have to filter through a final decision maker.
You know a developer can get there head so deep in the code, and become blind to things because they been looking at it for so long, or are so deep in it. That getting just immediate ‘first-sight’ feedback is really useful, it presents to you things that you would not have seen that can be very important.
However it’s not like a dev should just do whatever users tell them do. But rather a dev should take into account what users say and consider it.
I think the more knee-jerk reactions you can get to anything is generally a good thing.
