Things you wish a game dev would do

[ElArabDeMagnifico]

To All Devs:Not treat console gamers like they are all handicapped severely.

-and to Ubisoft: Make a decent PC port, and stop flaunting your franchises and promising more than you can deliver.

To All Devs: Release multi-plat games simultaneously, I mean, PC gets GTA in OCTOBER, and Mass Effect is coming to PC in may, and Assassin's Creed JUST came out, and the PS3 and 360 got UT3 late, and OB came late to PS3.

To Microsoft: Stop trying to compete with everyone, you are on the borderline of breaking Anti-Trust laws, stop being so greedy Monopoly$oft.

 

[Ultrajoe]

Ok:

here it is, my dream game.

A huge, massively accurate facial generator, so i can create in game, anyone i want.

Then i select from:

1) Ninja
2) Pirate
3) zombies

to kick their ass in any of a million environments and ways, never the same kill twice


sweet

 

[Novajam]

Perhaps a breakout from the tired old Fisrt-Person Shooter formula? The Standard formula being:
Take this Rifle/Shotgun/Powerful Sword into that Hospital/Office Block/Casino and kill all the Aliens/Zombies/Terrorists before they blow up the City/Dam/World.

 

[Fire Daemon]

Did anyone read the story Inside David Jaffe's Heartland by N. Evan Van Zelfden for this weeks article. I would like Devs to make games like the one described in this story.

 

[TheMadDoctorsCat]

How about NPCs who have modes other than "Kill the player now" and "Ooooh, the player is my best friend?" How about something in the middle? How about NPCs who change their reaction to the player based on different circumstances?

It just annoys me that in thirty-plus years of role-playing games we still haven't got past the point where every freaking wild dog or rat you meet automatically goes for your throat... wouldn't they normally just run away, or ignore you? Apply this to other human characters and it gets worse. Can we please have a little realism in how they react to you?

 

[ElArabDeMagnifico]

How about NPCs who have modes other than "Kill the player now" and "Ooooh, the player is my best friend?" How about something in the middle? How about NPCs who change their reaction to the player based on different circumstances?

It just annoys me that in thirty-plus years of role-playing games we still haven't got past the point where every freaking wild dog or rat you meet automatically goes for your throat... wouldn't they normally just run away, or ignore you? Apply this to other human characters and it gets worse. Can we please have a little realism in how they react to you?

This is one of the reasons why I think Bethesda is gonna **** up Fallout 3, NPCs are just "NPCs" - their reaction to you basically doesn't matter.

The Witcher was pretty good at this though, but, random animals still wanted to kill you, I guess it made it easier to hunt for them.

 

[blah795]

Devs today should just try some new and interesting ideas, and use some of that money from all their rehashes to make something new, even if it does sound batsh*t insane. I mean if Miyamoto showed up on the scene today and said "Hey guys I know, lets make a game about a plumber who jumps on turtles and eats mushrooms that make him huge" they would tell him to get off whatever drug he is tripping on and fire him.

In short basically stop being so scared to try new stuff.

 

[Haliwali]

PC games, stop being jackass' about copyright

QFT.

Other than that:
- Stop using that stupid real-time semi-turn-based combat system in every RPG out there, except for JRPGs. If I have to pause the game every 2 seconds to give new orders anyway, I could just as well be playing a truely turn-based combat system. I don't see what's wrong with having a traditional turn-based combat system with a grid of tiles, action points for every character and so on... worked just fine in the older RPGs. Now we only get that real-time turn-based abomination that fails at both. Oh, and while I'm talking about RPGs: give me a proper character system? It's not that hard, there are dozens of RPG system out there to choose from. Or just roll your own, but put some thought into it.
- Don't treat gamers as if they're all mindless idiots. The idiots among gamers already have thousands of games to choose from. How about supplying the intelligent ones with games that aren't dumbed down in almost every possible way?

 

[Credge]

1. Develop something.

Very few developers actually develop anything. They take old, terrible mechanics and rehash them as the new focal point of the game. Stop this. Only do it if the mechanic is actually worth pursuing, such as the FFT class system. However, if you are going to pursue something like this, DON'T RUIN IT LIKE YOU DID WITH FFT:A. >=(

2. WW2. Stop it now. I don't care about new locations. I don't give a shit about bombing Japan. I'm tired of using...

3. Guns. Can we get something else here? Anything? Star Wars has shown us that it is absolutely acceptable, and popular, to not have things revolve around hand held weaponry. Swords, magic, etc. Combat is almost always more fun when you beat the crap out of someone with a weapon. Note: Gears of War chainsaws. Note: Crowbars from Half-Life. Note: Swords from... no, the swords in Halo 2 are stupid.

4. Make more games like:

A. Bioshock. Extend the game by adding more to the story either through more characters you meet on your path or with just making it longer. Add multiplayer COOP akin to System Shock 2.

B. Portal. Again, extend the game by adding more to it. Add special COOP missions where it will require a certain number of people to complete objectives.

C. Oblivion. Take out terrible skill system, replace it with a system similar to UO's and give it up to 8 player multiplayer, 4 player coop, and 16 man arenas.

D. Might and Magic. Take the combat, put it into Oblivion. Add COOP. Simple enough.

Mainly, just put COOP in games that should have COOP. Go the D2 route and increase the difficulty of mobs per player in the server if the game is COOP.

5. There are certain formulas that work and should be reused and reused a lot. The first is the D2 formula. The D2 formula consists of simply COOP slaughtering of tons of enemies at a personal, and markable, gain either through loot, skills, quests, or otherwise. Many games have half-assed this formula and have failed. Some have gotten away with it, but those games usually fail in the replayability department (Oblivion, as an example).

6. Stop copying WoW. WoW is popular because it combines a ton of mediocre content into a colorful package. Stop trying to emulate this. Please. Just stop. You can't take players from WoW using WoW. Stop. Now.

7. More bright colors. Use dark colors when the atmosphere is right. Also...

8. Stop using semi-futuristic apocalyptic themes for your games. It doesn't make them edgy or cool. Only Fallout can pull this off.

9. More medieval FPS, less medieval RPG.

10. For the love of everything holy in gaming, redo the FFT class system in a new game with different classes. No, not like FFT:A did it. Just do a copy+paste of the general idea and then put in your own classes and skills. Please.

 

[AngryMan]

Keep doing what they're doing, really. Sure, in any given year a considerable number of games will be ignorable, but there's also a perfectly reasonable percentage of new games per year that are solid gold.

We gamers are a gripey lot. Things are never perfect for us. I say that game devs should work on satisfying their own artistic criteria first and foremost.

 

[richasr]

One and only point; use your creativity.

The point of being to create your own world along with your own characters, storylines and anything for that matter, is that you can get away with it as long as the final product is top notch. Stop re-creating series, end the Final Fantasy series for good, don't do sequels and don't give up on ideas.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Email links to all of Yahtzee's reviews to every single game developer on the earth. Keep bugging them about it until they've watched them all. This should improve all of their products by at least 20% if they take it seriously... Except Fighting games and JRPGs.

Do LSD or some other similar hallucinogen during your planning sessions for original games. The fruits of such an excercise are often worth it.

 

[Cousin_IT]

If Fable 2 doesnt like up to the promises, I hope Molyneux's fellow developers give him a lobotomy to bring him back down to earth & stop shattering the dreams he weaves for us.

other things...
-Hire real (& good) authors/writers to write the stories for games if you want your game to be storydriven

-Rather than spend all your audio budget on one amazing actor, spread it so all your voice actors are good & you have enough of them (looking at you Bethseda)

-Do not mix arcade silliness with seemingly serious portrayls of war (Im lookin at you MoH:Airbourne with ur stupid mechanazi stormtrooper things)

-At least try & make the effort with movie tie-in games (see Escape from Butcher Bay & Punisher: you dont have to remake the movie to make a good movie game)

-If you want to make an episodic game; either make the episodes in a reasonable amount of time or, better yet, just make all of them then release them one at a time (looking at you Valve)

-Dont get worked up over your game being given a poor review. It may not be your fault it sucked but the reviewer isnt wrong for saying it does.

 

[shadow skill]

FPS:
Stop pretending the ability to miss what happens during a set peice is a good thing.
Stop pretending an absolutely silent protagonist coupled with a total lack of dialogue branches is somehow immersive in any way.

Stop using the same fucking guns in every single game. I'm really tired of already knowing how almost every FPS is going to work before I even touch the thing! Real life inventors and engineers who have to worry about physics are more creative than you software developers when it comes to gun designs, it's pahetic. Oh and can the gun damage be more appropriate for the gun types you do include in your games, a shotgun is not exactly a melee weapon.

Give us feet if you want us to do any kind of platforming.

Circle strafing is kind of stupid, it would be nice to see a mechanic that took care of this somehow. Maybe allowing the player some control over the upper body would work.

The ability to dive and/or roll would be a nice addition.


General:
Hire good players, recruit from the professional circuits if you have to, then record their data as they play your game in order to create good AI. (I want to say this is how AM2 made their AI for the Virtua Fighter games.)

Stop spamming the keyboard and thinking that means you are good at making game mechanics work. Half the useful keys on a keyboard should not have to be mapped in order to be able to play the game in question. Learn how to make menus, if it's actually easier to bind almost ten keys to weapons or items than use the provided weapon, or item menu it means you have failed.

If you are making a console game in particular understand that what ever control scheme you think up sucks. With that in mind make sure that the players can change the button mapping to anything they like on the controller. The player knows is or her own body not you. Test the fucking mapping options for the love of god; No one should have to deal with weird bugs in the controls just because they used an option you put into the game!

Include closed captions in your games and make sure the player can change the size and colour of the text. Nothing is worse than having captions or some other text that is unreadable because it is too small or it matches the background colour such that it becomes nigh invisible!

If you want to make a game in first person where the player has to do any kind of aiming, please put in an option to change which hand the player character uses, especially if there is no reticle. It's absolutely annoying to have to reverse everything in my mind's eye in order to line up a shot, since the weapons are all situated onscreen for a right handed individual. The mindfuck becomes even worse if you are talking about something on the Wii.

Action games and RPGs
Try using types of weapons other than swords.
It's ok to use Guns in an rpg, try it sometime.
Not every RPG has to take place in a rip off of Tolkien's books.
Not every RPG has to be saddled with music from the golden age of classical music. It's ok to use contemporary music styles. (See Persona 3.)
For the hack and slash games please realize that figting is a full body exercise and the engine should attempt to reflect this fact.
Try putting an rpg in a contemporary setting. (Again see Persona 3.)

I think that is enough for now.

 

[RobotLiberationArmy]

Evil Genius 2. Seriously, why doesn't Vivendi make it? And Freelancer 2 as well Microsoft!

I would kill for either of those. That said, the reason no one has made them is both Elixir and Digital Anvil, the companies that actually made those games are dead. A little bit of me dies every time people credit genius to the publisher.

It's not so much giving cred to the publisher, but usually the publisher holds the rights to the product. Thus it lies with them to greenlight a sequel.

Sadly, sequels by different studios tend to be terrible. I'm sure there are exceptions but can't think of any; I can only hope DX3 will be one of those exceptions.

 

[propertyofcobra]

Dear Game Developers all over
Please stop...

- Copying whatever is popular at the time
- Making games in colors ranging between dogshit brown, dirt brown and rat brown
- Making futuristic (near or otherwise) games where you play a space marine or hardened gruff soldier type guy

Please do...

- Use new artistic styles. Say what you want, but Psychonauts and Okami are stunning games from a pure artistic point of view, even if Psychonauts gameplay was flawed at times
- CUS-TO-MI-ZA-TION. Say it out loud and memorize it, guys. For ANY given game, more customization makes it better. Always. And if it has significant game impact, MUCH better.
- Make more horror games, damnit. Good horror games. The world needs more scares.


Dear FPS/Action game developers
Please stop...

- With that darned freaking wolverine healing factor. I swear if you do this again, someone will die.
- Make your game really short and then try to squirrel away because morons like your multiplayer mode.

Please do...

- Add weapons useful for more stuff than "Make bullets fly" and "Make rockets or grenades fly". Look at Resistance: Fall of Man. Now THAT was a good FPS library of weapons, I tell ya!
- Make single player modes lasting over 10 hours. WELL over 10 hours.
- Skills and leveling? Add it. Add it for the love of cheese! Let me improve in some way more than giving me a bigger gun!
- Weapon customization: LOADS of it. Lots upon LOTS of it.

 

[ThaBenMan]

Did anyone read the story Inside David Jaffe's Heartland by N. Evan Van Zelfden for this weeks article. I would like Devs to make games like the one described in this story.

It sucks that they're not making that, it probably would have been really cool.

 

[smallharmlesskitten]

TRY AND COPY THEN IMPROVE THE STYLE AND GAMEPLAY OF DIRGE OF CERBERUS

the customisation was good
the level design was good
Improve the A.I
have more than 3 types of weapons
make accessing all your weapons easier (ps2- L2/R2 weapon shuffle, PC- #1-9 or something)
have a dedicated minimaap that you can customise for either items, enemies or a map
bring back healthmeters (DOC did it even though u start with 780 hp)
have items easily accesible (1 key to shuffle through them another key close to it to use said item)
(as you can see i hate unnesecary menus)
have real time ai that adjusts to your strategys keeping you on your toes
GET RID OF FETCH QUESTS

Replace fetch quests with puzzles that involve killing things
have like a giant pillar full of enemies and you have to destoy them, i know put boxes that can be destroyed and then exploding fuel barrels above that shoot the boxes then the barrels killing all the enemies the reduction of weight causes the pillar to rise unlocking the door there you go problem solved

crappy fetch quests

I SHALL THINK OF MORE, SMALL HARMLESS KITTEN AWAAAAAAAAAAAAY!

 

[ThaBenMan]

The helpless citizens of the world give their thanks, smallharmlesskitten!

ahem, anyway -

Keep doing what they're doing, really. Sure, in any given year a considerable number of games will be ignorable, but there's also a perfectly reasonable percentage of new games per year that are solid gold.

We gamers are a gripey lot. Things are never perfect for us. I say that game devs should work on satisfying their own artistic criteria first and foremost.

This. Are things really all that bad? You all bring up excellent points, surely. But those game devs are doing the best they can. It's not as though any of them are trying to make terrible games on purpose, right?....

right??