"If I'd have been a play-tester for this game I'd have told them..."

"why can't I climb over this little stupid rock, can we at least have a slightly more believable barrier here"

"why is there a boss fight that is so likely to require level grind positioned right AFTER a room that only has 2 types of enemies in it"

"why do you let the AI cheat constantly as if I don't know that car's maximum speed"

"why didn't you hire a single native english speaker to even skim and copy edit the strings for localization"

"why is it that the most boring possible means of getting ahead also happens to be the most cost- and time-effective"

"why is the gamma and contrast correction so shit that the models and landscape are only differentiated by neon indicators and shadow movement"

"why can't I mute or at least turn down the volume of this annoying 'music' without having to ditch the gameplay-crucial sound effects as well"

it's even worse when you start gaining rapid speeds, the car moves ridiculously up the screen and the angle becomes almost impossible to see whats ahead of you.

Also, why do game desigenrs think that adding extra levels of nuisance somehow counts for "depth?" e.g. I read that the Lunar game for DS actually takes down your HP if you RUN too much. Essentially forcing you to walk through the entire game. Why bother having the option?

I'm trying to figure out why some types of limit enforcement are OK while other ones are horribly annoying and I can't really.

I will go get PlayfulPuppy and see what he can tell us.

NICK TO THREAADD.

ALL GAMES SHOULD:

Boot up to a title screen ASAP. (Credits can go here if needed; cinemas and demo can follow the title screen if no button is pushed).

Have a "default" version of game playable at the title screen by pressing start.

If they have cinemas/etc , they must be skippable. And no, a cinema that can be skipped only to land you in a second on isn't kosher.

Fully customizable options. Map any button. Adjust sound and effects (pretty common these days). Ability to turn autosave OFF. Adjustable difficulty or even level skips--something to give the player who is disappointed to unable to get any deeper into the game a way to experience the whole thing you paid for (I know, I know... Sometimes it's a bad thing, the temptation--but it ought to be in there somewhere...)

Been gaming 'bout 20 years now. With all the great games made nowadays, it's a real breath of fresh air when someone actually does this kind of stuff, instead of making me suffer a requisite amount to get to the fucking enjoyment of the game. Phew. I mean, none of this is anything new, but, jesus, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City takes TWO AND A HALF MINUTES from turning the PS2 on to actually playing the game!

THANK YOU

time for a resurrection

Gonna figure out how to answer as many of these as possible w/o getting in trouble

1. "why the fuck does he do that goddamned stutter step instead of jumping unless I PRESS AND HOLD"
Because Mario so gracefully and effectively affected analog through timing of button presses, everyone else figured it was a necessity to have a game "feel" like you have non-digital control -- there are just very few devs with the finesse to make jumping half as good as in Mario.

2. "why can't I climb over this little stupid rock, can we at least have a slightly more believable barrier here"
Gamers get the innovations they deserve. Making the barriers more believable would cost X$ in development and create (X*0)$ in increased revenue. Also this issue only occurs in "outside games" really b/c "inside" games just have walls, right?

3. "why didn't you hire a single native english speaker to even skim and copy edit the strings for localization"
This is the question with the absolute craziest anwer, because loc qa is one of the most utterly bizarre parts of the industry. Short version: it's expensive and difficult to hire a proper copy editor. It's cheap and easy to hire an outsourcer. Qualifications to be an outsourced loc QA person: prove you can speak the language to a person who does NOT speak the language. Also: it is NEVER EVER EVER as easy as "copy edit the strings", I have never ever ever seen a game script, let alone one that cd actually be injected back into code. Jesus once they sent a game manual to us when I was at this awful 3rd party company doing QA to "do a QA go-over" on it. Which meant copy-editing. The thing was a fucking mess, they only sent us PDFs, we were not equipped to edit PDFs, and my ENTIRE TEAM was comprised of either non-native English speakers or dumbasses. Management pressed me to find a way to get it done so I had to copyedit the whole thing despite having an unfinished BA... in something that isn't English. And the thing was RIFE with mistakes. AND IT WAS WRITTEN IN AMERICA. (they got mad at me for needing three runs to completely clean it up, but, fuck, I'm pretty ok w/ English but I am NOT a professional copyeditor!)

4. "why can't I mute or at least turn down the volume of this annoying 'music' without having to ditch the gameplay-crucial sound effects as well"
Most games I have worked on or played have had separate sliders for music/sfx. Unless you mean incidental music in which case it's because if it is passing thru an "environment" filter it'd be a MASSIVE pain in the ass in most popular engines (cough UE cough) to make it controlled by the music slider.

I could copy-edit strings. Game people, send me thy code.

Awesome, Will, answer some more if ya please.

Huh I never did get Nick to post on this thread. I wonder if I still can. Maybe he feels he cant speak out of turn, I dunno.

i am not saying anything super duper secret but some of even what was in the prev post could techincally get in trouble. gonna try to keep giving insight but would definitely love a deindex on this thread.

deindexed

fwiw I made a small platform game that had far superior jumping to Mario.

imho

they should hire you to work at Media Molecule

Boot up to a title screen ASAP. (Credits can go here if needed; cinemas and demo can follow the title screen if no button is pushed).

To give an idea of how impossible this is in 2012, consider:

1. You're booting from a disc, which always means it's going to be slower.
2. I can't precisely remember the rule for all consoles, but using one as an example (I won't say which but you'll figure it out probably) there's a legal rule that 11 seconds need to be eaten up with a non-skippable warning. 0.5s fade-in, 0.5s fade-out, and 10 seconds of static image.
3. Most publishers require that all pubs and devs splashes appear before the first interactive screen. Most also require that they are unskippable (less so on PCs, and you can mod that out anyway).
4. Attract Mode (aka cinematics etc) need to start playing w/i a certain amount of time turning the console on. Sometimes devs skirt the rule by going straight into cinema. And then skipping it causes another few secs of load.

Basically to get the "turn on and play" thing you either need to play a super nintendo or get a really fast computer and be picky abt what you play. At least w/ the GTA games the 2 mins loading time was the ONLY laoding time...

Map any button.
can't happen. multiple presets are a big enough struggle to test. first problem with this is that on eg. the 360 controller you have like 3 diff. types of inputs -- digital (pad, ABXY, LB, RB), 4 analog axes (LS x/y, RS x/y), and two analog buttons (LT/RT). Plus if you press them in tandem they sometimes react strangely. if you wanna make A shoot in call of duty or something, how does the game handle the digital input instead of analog? sure a gun trigger is only PULLED or NOT PULLED irl but the game's code expects a certain kind of input. never mind the fact that most consoles have rules about what MUST be the "confirm" button (360: A, PS: X (although they used to, perplexingly, REQUIRE that X be confirm in America and O be confirm in Japan!!!! SUCH MADNESS)), what must be 'cancel', no action commands on start/back/select/guide obv, blah blah blah the point is this would be such a headache to put in, and make sure it works, that it would cost a LOTTA LOTTA money.

San Andreas - Why the low car angle? Why is the car halfway up the screen, I can hardly see what's ahead of me most of the time?
I can't speak from direct knowledge but my guess? At least 8 people incl. designers, producers, QA, artists, blah blah blah etc were fighting over how this should be and they didn't all have the same perspective (ha) on why it needs to be the way they decided (artists talk abt composition, qa abt playability, programmers abt limitations on sight distance blah blah blah etc) and they probably picked the one they did because everything else ultimately made the framerate grind to a halt for some INSANE, UNEXPLAINABLE REASON which the programmers probably blamed on "the engine" and QA just said "god fine at least i can see the car" (because why fight? you're QA, your job is to lose every argument w/ design, tech, marketing, legal, etc) and then the designers were like "how about we add more angles to the back button functionality" and the producers were like "we need to keep the UX simple and too many camera angles will confuse people" and the programmers said "yeah that" and high-fived because they wanted to work on another thing anyway.

my char level is such as to make me a god, why is this barman still talking to down to me.
Gonna refer back to answer 2 from my first post upthread. This doesn't get more purchases, or higher metacritic points, and it costs money at every level of dev -- not exactly what game makers wanna hear.

WHAT ELSE, ILG?

every credit sequence needs to be skippable.

if a cutscene is masking a load time i want to know exactly when the load is done so i can skip it.

anything that can be user-changed needs to be available in the first set of menus -- i recently discovered that some things on max payne 3 multiplayer can only be accessed in the in-game menu! come on.

if a camera is mapped to the right thumbstick always have options to invert both axis.
i rented Alpha Protocol & it only had the option to invert left-right. game was unplayable for me!

why not put super simple minigames ala galaga or pacman in any loading screen ever

because galaga is more fun than about 75% of videogames released and they don't want you to realise that

fuck a pacman tho

Didn't Konami patent that or some bullshit?

every credit sequence needs to be skippable.
I agree wholeheartedly. Fun fact tho: credits are almost always added right near the end of development -- even after the point where new things are supposed to be added -- so there's usually a really, really small amount of time to actually check it. Most of the focus goes to checking that nobody's name is accidentally replaced by their title eg "Executive producer: EXECUTIVE_PRODUCER" etc. And since credits usually work differently than in-game video, skipability is often overlooked for lack of time (and I am sure some companies don't WANT you to be able to skip the evidence of their hard work). I usually watch em these days just to see if anyone I know worked on em so I can't actually say how many ARE skippable in 2012.

if a cutscene is masking a load time i want to know exactly when the load is done so i can skip it.
Like with a button prompt? I can't remember what game I was playing but there would be nothing on screen until you hit a button -- and something would pop up either saying "skip" or "loading" depending on whether you could skip at that point. You could just push the button every 5s until you found out it was skippable, and then skip it. That was pretty cool. Forget what game tho. I don't feel like a lot of cutscenes are ACTUALLY masking load times but they themselves are fairly hard on the hardware, skipping cutscenes CAN cause a lot of stability issues which is why some games don't allow you, as far as I can guess -- they had some problem with skipping vids and decided near the end of the project that the safest thing to do was release w/o allowing skips.

anything that can be user-changed needs to be available in the first set of menus -- i recently discovered that some things on max payne 3 multiplayer can only be accessed in the in-game menu! come on.
That is bonkers and unforgiveable. And sadly common. also games where you can only change controls in the main menu, or games where if you change controls in the in-game menu it threatens to erase your progress. WTF. Indefensible.

if a camera is mapped to the right thumbstick always have options to invert both axis.
This makes sense to me, but I think a lot of people just... don't think of it. The L/R invert without U/D invert seems insane to me though. It's like, if you thought of it, why not do the whole thing? There must be more to that story.

why not put super simple minigames ala galaga or pacman in any loading screen ever
There's a maximum length for load times that aren't animated and a maximum length for load times that are animated. Interactive loading screens count as "animated" but they would add to the load time, and therefore possibly make the game fail the console's "rigourous requirements." Plus this goes back to the ol' "how much it costs to add" vs "how much it'll bring back in sales/ratings/etc" argument.

Didn't Konami patent that or some bullshit?
Never heard this. People get around patents, though. I mean, the D-Pad is Nintendo's.

PS: X (although they used to, perplexingly, REQUIRE that X be confirm in America and O be confirm in Japan!!!! SUCH MADNESS)

Huh, I remember O being confirm on something I played about half of the time on PS1 - possibly FFVII?

You could just push the button every 5s until you found out it was skippable, and then skip it. That was pretty cool. Forget what game tho.

Arkham City definitely did this, probably Asylum too. Very cool.

re: sony's o vs. x buttons -- it wasn't until after ps1 (as far as i remember) that they decided to make this a STANDARD -- for ps1 most j games wd use O as confirm and most american games would use X as confirm. there was probably some insane vaguely racist justification for this (AMERICANS HAVE BIG MEATY HANDS AND IT IS MORE COMFORTABLE FOR THEM TO REACH FURTHER ON THE CONTROLLER) but once the ps2/psp came out they codified that insane rule. meaning games released in both -j and -a had to CHANGE THE CONFIRM BUTTON for the 2 different releases -- X/O confirm/cancel here, O/X there. i don't 100% remember if this was the case on ps2 but I am pretty confident it was the case on PSP.

see what blows my mind is that they made devs do this legwork, AND YET they didn't make it a player's choice? like, psp shipped w/ firmware. they coulda made it a player's choice to go O or X for confirm. imagine how nice it'd be to be able to map face buttons AT THE FIRMWARE LEVEL! well, they missed the boat, so nobody will copy them.

D-pad patent expired by the time of the Dreamcast, I think, which is why it had one