Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Game Design: Too Powerful Option? A simple Analysis

As i played Forza 3 some of my friends seem not as satisfied with the rewind function in the game. He could undo all his mistake when he is racing against AI opponent just by pressing the select button and there is no limit of rewind function in the game. The only thing that Turn 10 (Forza 3 Developer) will punish you is that your ranking in leaderboard will be less than other that dont used that features. He said that this is a terrible game because it made player have too many power and not to be able to become a better racer like most of the sim racer available.

Fun?

Which his statement is just riddiculous. Game are meant for people to have fun. What i said is if you think that feature is bugging you then just dont use it. if there is some option that will make the gameplay imbalance or not enjoyable to you then dont use it. If you think that the sniper rifle is really imbalance in wolfenstein then just dont use it...try play metal gear solid 3 just by using microphone not with the radar and you will be much more immersed.

The power of choice that given by developer may or may not abused by the player they made it available so that player can have their choice of playing which in turn made it suitable based on what kind of fun each gamer has(hard? or just for relaxing).

Default
The art of enforcing user/gamer to feel the right feature is to configure the default difficultyso it caters to their target audience. It is posible to make your game to cater to a wide target audience but you have to make sure you have the core target audience then you started implementing helpfull feature and determine what kind of default difficulty are you going to implement. A dynamic difficulty like in Max Payne 2 is also good for this job.
What forza 3 does is they made the player gone through a series of question and test race to make sure that player are playing in their right configuration. They also made effort in designing their game and their marketing strategy to make sure that all the option/feature available in the game does not make their game dumb down for hardcore racing gamer but it is to make user/gamer/target audience to have more option so if they are comfortable on their current difficulty they could make it harder. this is a sort of learning you will hope for the next game because as a game it meant to provide entertainment.

as a puncline to this post i guess there should be further investigation on how do game designer design their game...

CHAO

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