You should play some of the games I produce if you like niche stuff, haha. But how do you define quality on a broad scale? Stability? High production values? Gameplay that lasts for hundreds of hours? It's so different to everyone. For me personally, if I can go "Hey, that was pretty cool." after playing a game for a while it's enough for me. I'm very picky about what I will play, but not what I will praise.
It's entirely personal and subjective. I freely admit that. Graphics need to be up to snuff, ideally outside the "uncanny valley." For example, I tried playing Sniper Elite v1. Came out in '05, and it just looks...awful. Even with the highest settings. The reason is that it's that era of 3D where textures looked decent, but models and animations were hit or miss. But, on the other hand, I have zero problem playing old-school-looking adventure games with hand drawn backgrounds and stuff. Those tend to take on a more cartoony look, though, so it's outside the uncanny valley and fully into the "not trying to look real" territory.
Gameplay has to be fun and appealing to me, to the point where I don't find myself questioning too many of the design decisions. Some of that, though, is also about how the game presents itself. For example, Europa Universalis IV presents itself as an "empire building sim." Except, it's not. The abstractions involved are, in my opinion, just as "gamey" as what you see in the Civ games, which, basically, are just animated board games. That's fine, but, you know, present your game accurately. Speaking of Civ, I found the 1 unit per tile decision in Civ 5 to be absolutely a game-killer. Terrible design, and I haven't played it in years. Ideally, I don't want to "see the strings," so to speak.
With TellTale's Game of Thrones game, for example, while I enjoy the game, I think it presents itself as too determinative. As in, your choices determine the outcome (or so it seems), when they really don't. They determine your character's behavior, but the outcomes are largely fixed. That's fine, but sell the game accordingly. When the game says "So and so will remember that..." I mean, no, they won't. Not really. Or at least, not all the time.
I tend to think that there are certain principles that ought to be present in game design, especially within certain genres. Online multiplayer FPS games, for example, shouldn't have maps where either team can be locked into their base (a.k.a. the "fish in a barrel" scenario). That's just...not fun. To the extent it happens, the map design should make it clear that this is intentional. Make it an attack/defend map where the goal is to hold out until relieved. So, yeah, you may be pushed back to the final line of defense, but you're still able to fight back and maybe win the round. I also loathe unlock systems because they reward time-played rather than skill-at-playing. I know I've lost that battle, though...
Anyway, quality is a moving target for me. I have certain consistent themes, depending on genre, but it really comes down to whether I think the game design decisions were good ones.
The Balance of Power addon would likely cost 20X more to make today than it did back then. (Not joking.)
Oh, of course, and it'd be sold basically as a standalone game, probably as an "off-year release" or whatever. So, if your "major" titles come out every 2 years, you have "the other studio" do the "off-year" releases, and Balance of Power would've been one of them. I'd expect a retail price of about $39.99 these days.
For sure, there has been a lot of pointless DLC, but as with all things... no one has to buy them. Have there been any really bad season passes so far? (I dont' know, because I usually never have time to play games long enough to buy additional content.) I DID however buy the 1989 Batman skin for the latest game... totally worth it to run around in my favorite batsuit. (Not that I've had a chance to actually PLAY it yet but...) The SWBF pass seems to contain new levels at least, in addition to them giving away at least one for free.
Honestly, I don't know if there've been bad season passes. I gather some of the Batman game season passes have been mediocre, but I've bought Game of the Year versions for both, so it was a moot point. I bought Battlefield 3's premium...and decided I wouldn't do a season pass again, unless I got it super cheap.
There's also, of course, a question of price point. How much is the season pass? Is it cheaper to buy everything, even if one of the releases turns out to be garbage?
Personally, I still think they're wasted money, but I understand why publishers do them now. It's guaranteed income and, I gather, much higher profit margins.
It completely depends on the title. Any seller of any product will most likely demand as much payment as they can get away with. And there IS always the brand value thing to consider. You will never see a Ferrari sell for peanuts. (Yes, I realize that a game is intangible, but the brand value still exists.)
Right, that's what I figure. Hence why the cheapest you'll see a Call of Duty game retail for is $10 for COD1-COD3, maybe.
It's just so hard to get around the fact that a virtual rock today costs infinitely more to build than it did before and if you're operating on the level that DICE, Bioware and Bungie are, you can't not take it that far. (Imagine if Lamborghini came out with a Budget model. Porche did in the 80's and look how well that was received!) It's going to continue until we hit the barrier of true photo-realism which, at least in terms of terrain and architecture, we're not too far from right now. Once we get there, efforts will go towards streamlining the process and fix other areas (like eradicating the Uncanny Valley, but that's gonna take a loooong time).
I hope so. I'd like to see focus shift towards really, really carefully designing gameplay, and maybe some genuine innovation in game design.
Does less complicated gameplay equal less quality or less value? Creating streamlined (simple) gameplay with depth is a lot more complicated from a design point than just piling on features. With the little time I have to play games these days that I don't work on, I'd happily pay MORE if they were less complex. I LOVE the fact that the new Battlefront is more light and casual... I can pop in for fifteen minutes during lunch and just immerse myself in Star Wars.
Well, to be clear, simple does not necessarily mean bad. The real question is
how is the game simple or complicated. Derek Smart would have you believe that his games are good because they're nearly impenetrable in their complexity. I think that's a really dumb idea, myself. Complexity for its own sake is stupid. But there's a point where simplifying the game, in my opinion, takes away from the fun.
I like a little complexity, but I guess I'd like to see a game like Battlefront have "Arcade mode" (as it currently is) and "Realism mode" where recoil is more a factor than conefire, where aiming down the sights actually matters, where there are multi-crew vehicles on the field, rather than "tokens" (which really just seems like an attempt to cut down on processing requirements).
I dunno. I guess I tend to view a lot of EA/DICE's games as pretty well locked in place. They aren't mod-friendly at all (as compared to, say, Bethesda or Valve games), they don't allow a ton of player customization, and they try to centralize the entire experience. DICE is also super, super slow at fixing
glaringly obvious bugs. And, perhaps more importantly, they're slow to even acknowledge their existence. Like, not even an announcement like "Hey, we're aware people are noticing a higher damage than usual on the grenade launcher after the last patch. We just want to let everyone know we're looking into it, and we'll keep you posted on further developments." Then, like, 2 weeks later, maybe post a "We're still looking into the issue. We're data-mining games where this pops up, and are trying to recreate the problem in-house. We want to make sure that, when we fix it (and we will) that we don't accidentally create a new problem. We're shooting for an early April fix, but we'll let you know as we get closer and have a better idea."
The bigger these games get, and the more expensive they get, the more it's going to be really, really important for these companies to manage their community better. And that means outside of
just Twitter. Right now, it seems a lot of the devs like to just tweet about what's going on, rather than, say, posting announcements to the game's message boards or whathaveyou. I get it. They're busy, Twitter's easy and fast, but still, hire a damn community relations punching bag...er...manager
on top of dev direct communication. The recent fracas with Overkill Studios and Payday 2 ought to be an object lesson in how
not to manage community relations.
Absolutely. Animations as well. We're still pretty far from achieving a truly believable virtual character that is indistinguishable from an actual human. We can get close, for short periods, but not for any length of time.
Yeah, it's one thing to make an awesome static scene, but quite another to have good animations. And, of course, hands will always be a major hurdle, 'cause nobody wants to animate a fully articulated hand.