Audience Priority
brownymaster
Join Date: 2009-07-11 Member: 68110Members
Join Date: 2009-07-11 Member: 68110Members
<div class="IPBDescription">what do you think</div>How do you think the focus of the development should be? Who gets priority on balance (and what mode/settings)? What aspects of the game should be implemented first then later? What needs to be finished right after the core is done? Is reaching the widest audience possible important, or is getting the large and loyal audience?
I just want to see people's general opinions on this and maybe a dev's. I think picking a path is pretty important early on, and I just wanna see the "active" NS people's feedback.
I just want to see people's general opinions on this and maybe a dev's. I think picking a path is pretty important early on, and I just wanna see the "active" NS people's feedback.
Comments
Screw this! I don't want vampires in this game!
that's a great idea, redesign the entire game around a highschool, make the skulks pink and have the fade glitter when sunlight hits it ><
chatroulette ns style. ugh!
Haven't the foggiest who that is though, market research is not something I do for fun.
Pfft. 3/4 of the time it'd just be close-ups of hives.
i lol'd.
perhaps the target audience should be those withthe best K/D ratio.
cos you know... they would clearly be the best players with the most insightful opinions on gameplay.
:D
while i can appreciate the spirit of this thread and the reasoning behind it, i feel that it is somewhat doomed to fail.
On a personal note, UWE have not let me down in the past when it comes to creating an entertaining game from a visionary Lead Designer.
there are plenty of opinions flying around the internets, and i trust the devs to use their own judgment when it comes to who to listen too, and who to ignore.
The answer is neither and somewhere in between.
If only five people like it, but are having vision quests every time they load the game, that's a commercial failure. And not a lot of happiness is generated.
If everyone kinda likes it (sort of like Pong or Tetris, I guess), then that's less of a commercial failure and generated not much happiness is generated.
A good compromise would be not many people liking it (People who don't like PC games or FPS's) but those who are liking it like it a lot, but its not the most fun they've ever had.
The best version would be everyone likes it, and its the best game ever for everyone. But that's idealistic, not realistic. So I think few people who really like it is a good idea.
That means not every aspect of the game involves intense theoretical analysis on the part of the player (a hard-hard core gamer's dream) but DOES have some theoretical analysis so gamers don't learn everything possible in five minutes and get bored because its too simple. Then again, the basics of Tetris can be learned in five minutes, but it takes weeks to train and beat a very high score. So I suppose it should be simple to learn (Follow the Comm's orders and kill anything human/not-human) and hard to master (Killing a marine without ever getting shot is going to take some finesse/Killing a skulk while perfectly dodging its bites is going to take some finesse).
So to please the most people, there should be different tiers of understanding which correspond to different levels of efficiency.
IE:
Level 1: Point to attack. Aiming is a good thing.
Level 2: Resource towers give one's team money. Money is good. Get resource towers.
Level 3: Instead of leaping AT a marine, leap over them and at the wall behind them.
Level 4: Leap range maximizes when leaping at a 45 degree angle to the horizontal.
Level 5: Advanced movement techniques
Level 6: Knowing the current meta game
Level 7: Predicting how the meta game will evolve and training for it.
The game is playable at all levels, but the gamer has lots of content to play through which gets more and more difficult. That would be cool for NS.
Of course this means a newbie will have to be able to play and do well even when they are just barely learning stuff. This works great in single player because difficulties can be ratcheted down in the early stages. In an online game, ratcheting down the difficulty without violating expectations requires matchmaking, pure and simple.
Rather than make a game that isn't very commercially successful and doesn't let them do that and instead the company gets stuck making more of the same mildly profitable games for the rest of time until they eventually sink.
That and I find it hard to wish people anything other than huge amounts of money because having huge amounts of money is possibly the most important thing in life. It's not really fair to ask people to do anything other than make huge amounts of money if they can.
You have much to learn about life. Money is a moment, legacy is forever. Does anyone (Carmack included) really care how much revenue Quake, Doom, or id in general has brought in (besides Activision)? Many game programmers, the early ones especially, are spawned from hacker culture where money has little or no influence. Just from everything we've heard about engine rewrites, mod-ability, and long release dates, Max & co. definitely strike me as hackers more concerned about the game than the money, otherwise they would have simply done what everyone else does in this industry and dump it on pre-made engine (Source or UT), release an unfinished product, and ###### it out with achievements.
It's true money is a practical need, but instead of wishing them lots of it, wish them a good game, the rest will come in kind.
Personally I'd prefer to be filthy stinking rich and make games that sell lots of copies. My personal interests are exactly that; personal. Nobody else would be very interested in them, and certainly nobody with half a brain would pay me to make the kind of games I like to play.
Besides, legacies do bugger all because they last a very short time and don't keep me in neon lights for my ridiculously overpowered computer or more monitors for my giant 16+ monitor display, or more joysticks for my collection of peripherals I'll never use, or any of the other things that obscenely rich game nerds are supposed to buy.
I doubt UWE could have become UWE without being pretty monetarily minded, and I also doubt anybody on it cares more about 'the art' than they do about having a job and paying bills. It makes a lot of business sense to not release a crap game as your flagship product, and making your own engine has considerable applications for licensing, as well as making later developments easier, so if you can do it (which max obviously can) you certainly should. Your first game is vital, if NS2 doesn't do well it sinks the company, and as there isn't any real advertising going on, or probably that much of a deadline in comparison to what you'd get if you signed up with a real publisher like EA or activision, there isn't really much compulsion to release it half finished, so I'm inclined it to think it has as much if not more to do with making money as it does with making quality art or whatever, although in this case the two are hardly exclusive.
Money gets you anything, including any bizzare personal obsessions you happen to have, so money is better than anything else, because it <i>is everything</i> else.
Hopefully the predisposition to becoming a massive games are art nutcase is not communicable, if it is I may need to hire a psychologist to make sure I'm not catching it, and that would be expensive, taking money away from things like gold plated mice and whatnot.
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I'd like for Unknown Worlds to make very entertaining games and get lots of money. I'd also like for them to become a legacy. But the legacy is optional. Legacies don't last.
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I'd like for Unknown Worlds to make very entertaining games and get lots of money. I'd also like for them to become a legacy. But the legacy is optional. <b>Legacies don't last</b>.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Illuminati, they are on our dollar bills. Example null and void. Money runs everything, and they know it.
/andyesiknowthatwasbadmanneredlolz
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Legacies don't last.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You just won the door prize, come and claim your black pot! Aside from echoing exactly what the kettle said, let's review some legacies: pong is a legacy; doom, a legacy; quake, another legacy; half-life, a legacy that begot many other legacies. Now let's review some titles that were in it purely for the revenue... on second thought, I'd rather not. Here's to NS becoming a legacy, not a cash-cow.
You are not wanted in this thread. GTFO.
Leaving the hurtful words aside...
Fair points. I know about Pong, Quake, Doom, Half Life, among a few others that are legacies but no one knows about (case in point: Marathon).
However, I'm a statistical anomaly. I'm a hard core gamer who has actually done research. If that's not abnormal, even among video gamers, I don't know what is.
When I say "legacies don't last", I mean all the Halo brats don't know anything about the "legacies". The new gamers don't know about the "legacies", aside from perhaps Pong (and the interest in that game is fading from its historic levels). If new gamers don't even know about the legacies, then legacies don't last.
Likewise all the school-age brats know nothing of Plato, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Einstein, etc. New gamers don't define what a legacy is because legacies mean nothing to them. When they become veterans, they'll not only carry forward the legacies of the previous generations, but in-turn knight new legacies (perhaps Halo or Gears of War). This process lives longer, much longer than any revenue stream, and often the company itself. You or I likely did not grow up in the Pong era, yet we still recognize its historic weight 40 years later and will continue to do so for another 40, why? Because legacies last.
We'd have a very cool new culture based on games, which would be awesome.
I can imagine talking to my children now...
"Well, Quake-Sarah III, when I was a small child, I remember playing my first MMORPG - remember those? Ah yes, Day-ahc. That's Dark Ages of Camelot to you nublets. You dont want to hear about Day-ahc, you say? Hmmm. Would you rather hear about the fantastic game known throughout the generations as Quake? Ah, I see you do. Well, Quake-Sarah, the game you are named after...."
Imagine if that was the future...
Did a bit of game history myself, most of it was horrible, pixellated graphics and bad controls, it got to the point that when we were allowed to play doom I was actually really happy, I didn't even think twice about having to aim with the arrow keys and having no up/down controls. And once we reached age of empires 2 I can't remember anything else because I just played that every time instead of what we were supposed to be doing.
Thankfully I have recovered and am back playing normal good games. Playing old games to learn about them is kinda like infecting yourself with bubonic plague to learn about the dark ages. Educational and amusing to watch, but extremely unpleasant.
Hopefully videogames don't completely crash again and we end up losing all knowledge of them and everything has to be reinvented from text adventures. Thankfully if I have lots of money I can lock myself in my gaming dome with hundreds of games and never leave again while outside the world devolves into a nuclear wasteland of roguelikes and space shooters.
NS2 will benefit in every way from becoming a sales driven game. It's incredibly naive to believe games now-a-days are not monetary focused. It's a business as much as a pleasure, and in order for you to keep the pleasure side of things, you need the business side of things. Business comes first. Sales and marketing of your product is first.
UWE will make great games, but they need large financial backing if they want this dream to come true.
NS2 will benefit in every way from becoming a sales driven game. It's incredibly naive to believe games now-a-days are not monetary focused. It's a business as much as a pleasure, and in order for you to keep the pleasure side of things, you need the business side of things. Business comes first. Sales and marketing of your product is first.
UWE will make great games, but they need large financial backing if they want this dream to come true.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Even Artists(and by that I actually meant people who paint for a living) have to sell their work to make a living. And that "field" is all about recognition(NS2 is a Flagship Commerical game; similar situation). So in order to make and continue what you love to do, you have to first impress people and get everyone interested in the work you create.
NS1 kind of gives Unknown Worlds that edge somewhat already. So they have probably the best possible realistic situation for an Indie Developer(ignore the hypothetical scenario that if Charlie won the lotto tomorrow and had millions of dollars so that he could make NS2 to have anything he wanted in it).
UWE will make great games, but they need large financial backing if they want this dream to come true.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Business more than pleasure I think, I like making stuff for games but when I actually have to sit down and do a solid week of work, it isn't fun. It's bearable which is more than can be said for a lot of things, and it isn't as draining as most other activities, but it isn't fun, it isn't something I would do for pleasure, although i would do it because I dislike it less than any other option.
If you're going and doing eight hours plus a day modelling or programming or whatever, five or six days a week, you're doing it to get paid first, and because you enjoy it second, not because you really love spending most of your waking life doing it.