DarkLord79: But that I guess is the curse of consumerization. I also see this at work in the technical field. People are made believe how easy stuff is, cloud this and that and wireless there but nobody thinks about the behind, the hidden complexities that still exist (and they grow) and the implications there might be (security, administration/maintenance, ...). Sad.
Wish I could say that you're wrong, but yeah.. make something pretty, cut out useful features to get instant response for the least useless functions. Then create something as inefficient and linear as humanly possible, and blame any hiccups on that the customer's hardware is too weak, etc. And you'll be making money.
Start talking about running-time analysis, model for the database, bubble sort algorithms in specific limited datasets while discouraging that use in situations where it makes no sense, structure for effectively moving run-time number crunching to inactive periods from the user-perspective, moving heavy calculations/compression/encodes to "cloud" system type services, have a specific approach to saving data costs and enabling cross-platform use of the tools - things like that - and you could just as well be speaking Sanskrit, to a wall.
What's weird to me is that developers who make an effort and create something interesting, in a context where they don't actually need to defer to some administrative board, or are required to get their solution greenlighted in that type of process - are still acting like they need to be sensitive to this type of "manager-level" administrative context. That if they merely know what they're doing, then that doesn't really matter if they can't also talk crap that impresses technical analphabets.
That is kind of surprising to me. I always thought that certain development studios - like Double Fine, or Obsidian, for example - were as annoyed as everyone else at having to cut down the complexity of their systems, or drop solutions for graphics and so on to conform with requirements on consoles, and things like that. But no, even when they run their own show, they have this expectation that if the games are no just too complex, but don't directly appeal to the least common denominator, as long as that least common denominator is a single digit and preferably 1 - then they don't even need to try. That they've genuinely come to believe that no one wants anything else.
Take the DF kickstarter for Broken Age, for example - they genuinely had hefty discussions with the community guy, who had gathered feedback from various places around the net to prove that any puzzle that potentially had people walk around for a little bit, or have to backtrack because they didn't quite get what the puzzle solution was right away. He in turn was active in their beta-forums actively defending his view about how removing all puzzles in general from an adventure game was required of a "modern" adventure game. Etc. And that's why you didn't see more than one puzzle that needed a bit of out of the box thinking, until the second act. Otherwise, all puzzles can be solved by either clicking on things repeatedly, and with items found in the specific location the solution was to be put in.
So it's not just on the technical side, it goes into the conscious assumption that the audience can't deal with anything that requires any thought. And that if it does, it will be abysmally received. And that's after the designers have made games like Dott and Monkey Island, where the games really do have an "easy mode" path, and specifically are designed to give you hints - specifically to avoid the "run around at random looking for the rubber chicken to put on the pulley", etc.
Same thing happened with for example Zipper over their MAG game. And they're making a shooter. They had this design where any individual player didn't need to have an overview of the full battle if they didn't need that. You could play this game as any other shooter, and have a good time. You could drop the "large" modes and only play the small maps with 4vs4 squads. And even they ended up - internally, long before the outrage on the internet hit them anyway - simplifying a lot of the mechanics in that game. And this is a shooter, with basically one objective at a time highlighted with a blinking box. It requires very little of the player - and even then, they were actually a bit worried that the game would be a bit difficult, and favor older players, etc., because the game had failure conditions you couldn't instantly reverse. Or that it didn't have easy strategies that always countered the opponent, etc.
Because trust me on this one - they weren't starting out with some sort of philosophical thesis problem solving level reserved for the few geniuses who can intuitively rise out of the cavern on their own, or something like that. It was already at the bottom level required to just have a game. They basically started out with solitaire, and ended up cutting the number of cards down to one suit of 12 cards. To avoid complex design where it didn't serve the overall gameflow.
And early testers of that game are just standing there and throwing a ball to each other, basically. And the internet noise comes in and calls us snotty and arrogant for not understanding that the whole "throwing the ball" thing is too complicated for the mainstream to understand.
..sorry.. rant of the week. All good now.
