What makes a game bad?
Check out this piece and the associated comments on Scott Miller's Game Matters blog.
Tough question, since every bad game is bad in its own way. Since I know strategy games better than any other genre, here's a quick and dirty guide to making a bad strategy game.
1. Bad interface - this is the real killer. A good UI can pass by almost unnoticed - look at the elegance of Rise of Nations, for instance. A lot of strategy games confuse complex with complicated and make an interface that tends to the latter.
2. Backwards priorities - Think about this year's Superpower 2. Deep and complicated domestic model with a lot of detail on social and economic policy. Now look at the foreign policy/military model - terrible. People play world politics sims - mostly - because they are interested in wars and diplomacy and all that stuff. By putting more energy into how many options were open to a player who liked variable tax rates, Golemlabs completely missed the boat. The result was one of the most disappointing games of the year.
3.Quick copies - no game can become a success without seeing a spate of copycats in its wake. Soon after Civilization became a hit, 4x games were all over the place. One of the most ignominious was Activision's Rise and Rule of Ancient Empires. It had research, city building, warfare - all the stuff that Civ had. But it had only two sides, terrible graphics and no real sense of discovery and expansion. It short, it was Civ-Lite. Look at all those Tycoon games. How many are actually any good? Two? Three? Even Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 and Railroad Tycoon 3 were middling games - and they have real legacies behind them. National Lampoon's University Tycoon? Rarely have I needed to play a game less to know how much it stinks.
Feel free to contribute more suggestions. This list is hardly exhaustive.
Tough question, since every bad game is bad in its own way. Since I know strategy games better than any other genre, here's a quick and dirty guide to making a bad strategy game.
1. Bad interface - this is the real killer. A good UI can pass by almost unnoticed - look at the elegance of Rise of Nations, for instance. A lot of strategy games confuse complex with complicated and make an interface that tends to the latter.
2. Backwards priorities - Think about this year's Superpower 2. Deep and complicated domestic model with a lot of detail on social and economic policy. Now look at the foreign policy/military model - terrible. People play world politics sims - mostly - because they are interested in wars and diplomacy and all that stuff. By putting more energy into how many options were open to a player who liked variable tax rates, Golemlabs completely missed the boat. The result was one of the most disappointing games of the year.
3.Quick copies - no game can become a success without seeing a spate of copycats in its wake. Soon after Civilization became a hit, 4x games were all over the place. One of the most ignominious was Activision's Rise and Rule of Ancient Empires. It had research, city building, warfare - all the stuff that Civ had. But it had only two sides, terrible graphics and no real sense of discovery and expansion. It short, it was Civ-Lite. Look at all those Tycoon games. How many are actually any good? Two? Three? Even Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 and Railroad Tycoon 3 were middling games - and they have real legacies behind them. National Lampoon's University Tycoon? Rarely have I needed to play a game less to know how much it stinks.
Feel free to contribute more suggestions. This list is hardly exhaustive.
posted by Troy Goodfellow at 12/20/2004 05:32:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home