Edge has a piece about EA LA Lead Designer Randy Smith's least favourite video game features.
Fighting is the only way we can think to get the player involved: Violence is bad. World leaders are blinded by bloodlust. Watch this half-hour movie about nuclear proliferation. OK, now strangle and knife a bunch of goons from behind. Shoot everybody. You’re saving the world.
Randy no likey.
I no likey EA's sweatshop-bred sausage factory games, or their horrendously flakey game servers, but Edge hasn't published my bit yet.
2 comments:
So Randy, what are EA going to do about these gaming disconnects, these final chasms seperating us from complete immersion in your virtual worlds?
Oh, right, roll out another FIFA franchise next year? Greeaaaaat.
Actually, he's 100% right. But I can't think of a single one-hit solution to any one of those problems? Health packs are a prime example.
Take a character and give him about as much resilience, fortitude and stamina as an average human or even, let's be generous, a well trained soldier and drop him into a standard FPS.
How many shots are you going to take before you actually can't get up again? How far are you going to run before you drop from exhaustion. How many days are you going to go without sleep, or peeing?
The trouble is the more life-like you make a game, the less fun it becomes.
That's how I feel, too. It's a game. When I want to play, I play a game, when I want to do real life, I, uh, do real life. YKWIM.
Sure, a lot of these gaming metaphors are tired, but they exist because they have become tools that games use to make the game itself work.
In the case of health packs, I'd rather have an instant pick up as a reward for getting so far or as a way to buy more play time, rather than the RL version which involves sitting on a plastic chair in A&E for seven hours whilst being coughed on by some half dead coffin dodger and ignored by the reception monkeys before seeing a doctor who tells me that in order to avoid scarring I should have got there sooner.
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