Developers sound off on what games scared them. Curious to see the number of people being scared by their own games - I’d have thought that would work out the same as attempting to tickle oneself. For my part, I’d name Thief 2: The Metal Age (which I played before Thief 1). It’s the only game I’ve ever had to stop playing and take time out to convince myself that it was just a game. I tip my hat to Eric Brosius for his outstanding audio work on that and many of my favourite games.
Monthly Archive for October, 2005
“We noticed that in CoD1, people would basically stop playing the game to spend 2-3 minutes to backtrack through the level and play ‘hide and go seek’ with the health packs. This pulled players out of the immersion we have crafted. So for CoD2, we wanted to eliminate that break with the new health system.” Some members of the Call of Duty 2 team comment on their game’s health system.
The final destination of feature creep: you add so many features that it completely smothers your product’s usability. How do you tackle this complexity? Consider productivity software. Some have the niche market-provided (/created) luxury of using simplicity. But that doesn’t cover everyone’s needs, so if you’re the market leader, you need different ways of approaching accessibility. One of the team on Office 12 has a journal giving great insight into how they’re tackling this problem. Mezzoblue picks out some of the best entries.
Playing it again recently, I found it quite remarkable how easily I found myself first enjoying Zombie Horde. Normally the process of getting to the point where I’m playing a new mod is:
- hear about mod from somewhere
- seek out more info about mod
- decide to download mod
- wait for download to complete
- remember to install mod
- remember to load up mod rather than going straight into my normal game
- hope I can find a server with a good ping
At every step along the way, there’s big potential to lose me as a ‘customer’. I’ve gone and looked at webpages for mods and not got round to downloading them. I’ve installed mods and forgotten to ever load them up and then when I do, my version is out of date. Et cetera.
Compare to how I ended up playing Zombie Horde: I’d loaded up Counter-Strike and was about to join a server and start playing as normal when I saw a server with “zombie” in the title. Curiosity lead me by the nose and it only took me a double-click (which I’d have done anyway to join a different server) and I was playing.
Wow. What a big difference that is. What a massive impact that must have on the size of their playerbase.
Continue reading ‘The accessibility of amateur game content’