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General discussionGames ruined by too much community feedback?(44 posts)(44 posts)
(44 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted February 17, 2017
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fronzelneekburm: Moebius
pea-brained design choices
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Darvond: Go on, do describe these.
I'll name the most glaring one: In the beta, you could pick up objects as you saw fit. In the backer feedback forum (which were nuked when Pinkerton Road closed shop, unfortunately) there was one special snowflake poster in particular (there may have been others, but this one poster stands out) who wrote lengthy, mostly useless and nitpicky feedback. That backer heavily objected to the player being able to pick up objects whenever he felt like it. "Why would he want to pick up item X?!? It makes no sense!" Someone should have had the balls to say: "Because it's a friggin point-&-click, you imbecile!" Alas, they implemented a sort of "block" instead. You couldn't pick up any more objects unless the game gave you a "valid" reason to pick it up. Needless to say, this sort of backtracking annoyed a lot of players and was pretty much universally derided by critics.

A more minor issue was that they changed the name of a secret government organisation in the game from FIST (which was lamented as being to gimmicky) to FITA (which sounds absolutely awful, but at least the snowflake was quite pleased with himself that it got changed).
Posted February 17, 2017
My opinion may be a bit controversial but I believe that case of Armageddon’s Blade, the first expansion to Heroes of Might and Magic III, is a good example of how the more vocal part of community can enforce their will on developer. The first expansion the game was supposed to contain Forge faction ( [url=http://mightandmagic.wikia.com/wiki/Forge_(town]http://mightandmagic.wikia.com/wiki/Forge_(town[/url]) ) The faction that was part of lore, introduced in M&M7 (and fit the fantasy/sci-fi setting of M&M) was replaced by Conflux. Art that and story elements from campaigns that made reference to Forge had to also be removed/altered.
It did not ruin the game but made development more costly and, in my opinion, the scraped faction could be an interesting both in terms of game mechanic and aesthetics.
Post edited February 17, 2017 by Sulibor
Posted February 18, 2017
I picked this from another forum about the Tribes games.
The debacle with Tribes 2 was due to two major reasons :-

1) It got pushed out the door about four months early. Shortly after it was released, like six months or so after, Dynamix was closed. Because it was released early the game was fragile and had serious compatibility issues - hell the game got released without much optimisation so things like simple visibility culling hadn't been coded in making the thing a serious resource hog. At the time of Dynamix closing the game was pretty stable - Garage Games then was contracted to do a final patch which has improved the game engine dramaticly.

2) Tribes 2 altered the game balance in favour of team co-ordinated action and vehicles. This made the T1 purists unhappy because skiing got toned down a bit to stop the obscenely fast Heavy armour Offence that dominated and largely ruined tactical diversity of the first game (and was never intended in the original game design anyways). It further peeved them because the T1 days of a lone flag capper being able to sneak in and capture a flag unaided were no longer possible. You needed co-ordinated team action to suceed.

Thus ensued much moaning and wailing at Dynamix of how the game sucked and wasn't any good - by some of the T1 fans anways. It also suffered that public game play, without formal team organisation, suffered from all the usual problems. Team killers, no one wanting to do defence or repair roles and the need for cappers to be given support mid field to make caps work was all moaned about.

Personally the requirement for team play, the tactical aspects of the game and the new emphasis on vehicle support really opened the game up and made it a new experience over the somewhat played to death Tribes 1. Sadly Dynamix listened to the moaners a bit too much and eventually, just before closing down, adjusted the gameplay back to something a lot closer to Tribes 1. Which satisfied no-one as the T1 purists were still unhappy and the T2 players who been with the game from the get go watched the gameplay shift back to being awfully close to T1.

Truely Tribes 2 was a wonderful game, well ahead of it's time with a very ambitious design. Subsequent games have taken the path T2 paved and done nicely for themselves with Battlefield 1942 being a prime example. Tribes 2 in clan games was something else - when you have two organised teams working matches tended to be tenacious brutal affairs with pincer attacks, counter-attacks, desperate rebuild the base and _try_ to hang on to your flag actions, flag runners being chased over the map as the defenders try to recover their flag - the game recordings were small movies in their own right complete with special effects once we had PCs capable of running the game at full detail levels.

The final nail in Tribes 2's coffin was the development of 'constellation' scrips that, like Heavy Skiing in the first game, completely screwed up the balance of the game. These scripts loaded a database of waypoint markers that allowed Heavy Offence units to pre-mark positions on maps and then blind fire a mortar with 100% accuracy at various fixed targets. This meant all the static base defences, sensors, vehicle pads and the like were able to be destroyed from extreme range - the defense perimeter had to be a 500 meter circle around the base and you had to get to the attackers fast to allow the repair crew to get the base assets back up in time to be useful.

Naturally all the top clans used these scripts and hoarded them. Even once the clan I played in found out about them we made a choice to refuse to use these scripts reasoning that blind spamming of fire wasn't playing the game in a fair or fun fashion. Sadly too many clans cared just about winning no matter the means used to acheive it on the ladders. Net result? Inexperienced teams got reamed before they got a chance to learn anything and didn't enjoy the game at all (Tribes 2 balanced things a bit better so new teams still got over-run by experienced ones but initially experience wasn't a vastly over-powering factor like it was in the first game.) so they stopped playing. Without an infusion of fresh blood the game quietly stagnated into the state it is in now. Our clan gave up because try as we might we couldn't offest the huge imbalance these scripts represented - not without using them ourselves.

Other scripts proliferated with automatic flare (to through off guided missiles), automatic missile firing (allows much faster lock and fire), texture hacks to make hidden objects visible (mines become dayglow pink for example) and a panolpy of other cheats came into play.

I lay the blame squarely at feet of the higher ranking clans for this. By and large they have accepted constellation scripts as being fine as well as a variety of other dubious ones. With their win at all costs attitude the fun and camaradire went out of the game and the new spirit of ladder 'rule-fecking' came in. Which is the wonderul game of using the ladder rules to force teams to either lose by default or place them in a position where they couldn't put up a credible fight - we played a japanese team that refused to accept a server with a 200 ping (we had an 80-100 ping to it, so had an advantage but not a huge one) so used the rules to force us to play them on a server with a 500-600 ping. It wasn't a game, it was a slow motion massacre as by the time we saw an enemy to shoot at them they usually had killed us.

It all is very sad as Tribes 2 still is a better gameplay experience than BF1942 with much more tactical depth to it. It also had better tournament modes and voting mechanisms than BF does after five odd patches.

Because the development of the new game has been taken over by people at Seirra who favour the old Tribes 1 style of play and regard Tribes 2 as being fundamentally broken I wasn't looking forward to the third game in this series. But having Irrational on board has made me excited again about it - even if the multi-player is a dead loss the single player should be worth the price by itself.

Philip
Posted February 18, 2017
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Spectre: I picked this from another forum about the Tribes games.
Wow. I've never played Tribes, but I have played the Cyberstorm games.

...Actually, this entire universe would be great for GOG. Who holds the rights?
Posted February 18, 2017
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DaCostaBR: Really? I played Fire Emblem Conquest on normal difficulty, I admit I'm not super hardcore into SRPGs, I beat them once and move on, but I thought the gameplay was fine.
It's a grand FE tradition that normal difficulty is actually the easy difficulty renamed to spare our egos, so balance problems generally don't manifest too badly on normal. One of the bigger problems with the gameplay is it being balanced exclusively around permadeath having been turned off; there's one part in Revelation where there are three sets of two doors and you have to guess which door to take each time, and opening the wrong one causes a bomb to reduce nearby characters' HP to near-death as enemies swarm them. Obviously this means they'll die since dodge-tanking isn't viable anymore. I'll also never forgive the games—Conquest in particular—for including cheap skills to cover up bad design, like the enemies who come with that skill that denies you experience for beating them. What a middle finger that one is, and all so they could cram in the pointless dragon vein gimmicks.

(The stories were definitely the nail in the coffin, and Conquest's story gets even worse once you get context from the other games that makes Azura seem truly brain damaged, but I really do think that fans will one day look back on the Fates mechanics with the same contempt many have for the warp tiles in Thracia 776.)
Posted February 18, 2017
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227: snip
I know I played Awakening on normal, but now that you talk about it I think I did play Conquest on hard. If I recall correctly it was going around that the game was too easy this time around, even compared to Awakening, and you had to notch it up to hard to get a better experience. But I definitely played it without permadeath, because I'm the type of person who would immediately reset the mission the moment anyone died, and I wanted to preserve my sanity, it's the only reason I was confident enough to play hard mode in the first place.

I know that completely changes how the game is played. You might use a character as bait for an enemy in order to kill it. So I bet I might have missed some of the worst gameplay parts on account of that.

I did buy Revelations afterward, because I thought the game was more disappointing than outright terrible and the discount was very good. I only played a handful of missions though. Considering that's the one where you can fight as many skirmishes as you want at will, it's likely an indication that the gameplay is indeed not that great.

EDIT: Oops, meant Birthright here, Revelations is the third campaign, or at least it's meant to be.
Post edited February 18, 2017 by DaCostaBR
Posted February 18, 2017
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DaCostaBR: But I definitely played it without permadeath, because I'm the type of person who would immediately reset the mission the moment anyone died, and I wanted to preserve my sanity
Ah! You've the soul of a classic/reset player. One of us... one of us...

It does make the gimmicks especially annoying, though. Like that one that splits your army into two parts. It was frustrating finding out that skills like Renewal don't work for the clones if the originals are paired up and acting as a backup unit, even if the clones aren't. Losing a character to random stuff like that can be maddening. Playing the other games and resetting after losing a character can be maddening, too, but it at least feels fair about it and forces you to learn a consistent set of rules. For Fates, the rules seem to fluctuate with every gimmick, and it makes playing with permadeath on that first time feel really unbalanced and random. If they spent half as much time balancing all permutations of the difficulties and permadeath on/off as they clearly spent filling the game with waifu features, though, the gameplay could have actually been decent.

Except for the story, obviously. Though the main character actually has a spine in Birthright and acts in a semi-believable way. I think that might have been the first game the writer worked on, and then they got tired and phoned it in for the other two.
Posted February 18, 2017
Team flying Fortress 2. The fact it's nicknamed Hat Fortress 2 should hint at the main (but far from only) reason for that. Seems to be doing quite well for itself, I'll admit... but then again so does Bieber, both seemingly aimed at the same age bracket. Haven't even felt like touching the game in years.

On a similar vein, although it's not quite *ruined* as it's still a really fun game to play... I think the Counter-Strike series could have been much more than it is, if Valve hadn't listened so religiously to the portion of the fanbase obsessed with keeping the series stuck in 1999.
Posted February 18, 2017
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Draek: Team flying Fortress 2. The fact it's nicknamed Hat Fortress 2 should hint at the main (but far from only) reason for that. Seems to be doing quite well for itself, I'll admit... but then again so does Bieber, both seemingly aimed at the same age bracket. Haven't even felt like touching the game in years.

On a similar vein, although it's not quite *ruined* as it's still a really fun game to play... I think the Counter-Strike series could have been much more than it is, if Valve hadn't listened so religiously to the portion of the fanbase obsessed with keeping the series stuck in 1999.
Or the part of the fandom who insisted that the various skins and things be unlockables, thus creating a lucrative gray/black and illegal gambling markets.

As for Hat Fortress 2, I think it's come to a point to where maybe they should start cycling out content, especially like hats that maybe have been used less than 1000 times weapons nobody used anyway, and such.
Posted February 18, 2017
Dirt Rally would be my addition. If I remember correctly Codemasters were initially going to add much more content to the game, which is highly sparse. However the overwhelming feedback for the game, predominantly by Fanboys in my opinion, meant that Codemasters thought:' Wow, this shit is selling like butter, we don't need to add anything at all !! let's save the extras for Dirt 4 instead'.

Without the Fanboys' brown-nosing I feel Dirt Rally would have had much more content, which is the big issue with the current game, it does not feel like a full or complete game to me, it still feels like a test version.
Post edited February 18, 2017 by Ricky_Bobby
Posted February 18, 2017
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Ricky_Bobby: Dirt Rally would be my addition. If I remember correctly Codemasters were initially going to add much more content to the game, which is highly sparse. However the overwhelming feedback for the game, predominantly by Fanboys in my opinion, meant that Codemasters thought:' Wow, this shit is selling like butter, we don't need to add anything at all !! let's save the extras for Dirt 4 instead'.

Without the Fanboys' brown-nosing I feel Dirt Rally would have had much more content, which is the big issue with the current game, it does not feel like a full or complete game to me, it still feels like a test version.
Well, why save the extras for Dirt 4 when instead they could make a sequel to Dirt Rally?
Posted February 18, 2017
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Ricky_Bobby: Dirt Rally would be my addition. If I remember correctly Codemasters were initially going to add much more content to the game, which is highly sparse. However the overwhelming feedback for the game, predominantly by Fanboys in my opinion, meant that Codemasters thought:' Wow, this shit is selling like butter, we don't need to add anything at all !! let's save the extras for Dirt 4 instead'.

Without the Fanboys' brown-nosing I feel Dirt Rally would have had much more content, which is the big issue with the current game, it does not feel like a full or complete game to me, it still feels like a test version.
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Darvond: Well, why save the extras for Dirt 4 when instead they could make a sequel to Dirt Rally?
Their plan was always to make another Dirt 4 game, Dirt Rally was more or less a test project for a new physics engine that somehow became a game along the way, especially as the early-access funding exploded.

While 450k units sold (if Steamspy is accurate) is not that much when compared to other genres, for a racing sim on PC it's a very high figure. I think it's only beaten by Project Cars. The sales on console have been even higher.

Dirt Rally is already mainstream as it is, but to reach even more consumers they have to add far more content, far more variety and include more arcade-like physics as an option. So from a business perspective it would make more sense to make Dirt 4 rather than another Dirt Rally game.

As a whole their Dirt series has been much more successful than their F1series, especially with Dirt 2 and 3. So again, I think they are very eager to make another Dirt # game.
Post edited February 18, 2017 by Ricky_Bobby
Posted February 18, 2017
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Ricky_Bobby: Their plan was always to make another Dirt 4 game, Dirt Rally was more or less a test project for a new physics engine that somehow became a game along the way, especially as the early-access funding exploded.

While 450k units sold (if Steamspy is accurate) is not that much when compared to other genres, for a racing sim on PC it's a very high figure. I think it's only beaten by Project Cars. The sales on console have been even higher.

Dirt Rally is already mainstream as it is, but to reach even more consumers they have to add far more content, far more variety and include more arcade-like physics as an option. So from a business perspective it would make more sense to make Dirt 4 rather than another Dirt Rally game.

As a whole their Dirt series has been much more successful than their F1series, especially with Dirt 2 and 3. So again, I think they are very eager to make another Dirt # game.
Admittedly with the F1 series, there is literally only so much you can do to perfect the engine, especially when, (at the time as I understood), the bigwigs at F1 were basically being killjoys absolute.
Posted February 18, 2017
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Ricky_Bobby: Their plan was always to make another Dirt 4 game, Dirt Rally was more or less a test project for a new physics engine that somehow became a game along the way, especially as the early-access funding exploded.
...

As a whole their Dirt series has been much more successful than their F1series, especially with Dirt 2 and 3. So again, I think they are very eager to make another Dirt # game.
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Darvond: Admittedly with the F1 series, there is literally only so much you can do to perfect the engine, especially when, (at the time as I understood), the bigwigs at F1 were basically being killjoys absolute.
That is so true. I'm sure Codemasters wanted to do more with the F1 series, but Ecclestone & Co had such a strong grip on everything related to F1 that they were extremely limited in what they could do with the license.

I'm really glad, on so many levels, that Ecclestone is gone and there's an American company in charge. From what I've read about their wishes so far they want the same things I do when it comes to the F1 motorsport, and I hope some of that will transfer to future F1 games as well.

I mean, the F1 games have sold between 80-350k units on PC, which is really good for a sim racing games, but quite bad for a Codemasters game. I can't imagine them being particularily happy with these numbers.
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This is my favourite topic
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General discussionGames ruined by too much community feedback?(44 posts)(44 posts)
(44 posts)