Game Philosophy

What causes a game to be successful? Do you need an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure it out?

To what extent is a game's success based on:

1. Visuals/graphics
2. Story
3. Action
4. Explorability
5. Good AI
6. Other

What do I mean here?

Visuals/graphics: the very best-looking games these days are things like Skyrim, CoD, etc. Fabulous 3D world to wander through. I love Skyrim (altho I think I like Oblivion better, for reasons of greater variety); visually stunning. But other games, less good, have decent graphics, too, and some interesting games have fairly limited graphics. I've replayed Total Annihilation recently (from GOG, despite my having the original install disk), and heck, that's only just barely 3D at all, it's 8-bit color, etc, and yet that doesn't matter in the end--it can still be quite difficult.

Story: Skyrim etc have pretty good stories in them. There's a main plot, and some relevant/valuable major sub-plots, and lots of little tiny things. This all works great. In fact, those little side projects work so well, I haven't even started the main plot yet, and that's after several hundred hours of game time.

Action: Quake 1-3, Unreal Tournament, etc, are all about the action. The 3D-ness of the maps is interesting, but not critical. There's no story whatsoever. For me, this makes for limited interest. Replayability is all about improving your twitch skill. I enjoy the speed and action, but the only real interesting thing about replayability is that you can do it in relatively tiny increments, like 5-10 mins.

Explorability: Half-Life 2 is a great game, but it gets a zero on this scale. It's very linear. Too linear. Dungeon Siege 1 is equally linear (well, nearly so), but you have a lot of leeway in how you play your character/team. Skyrim etc are anything BUT linear--you don't EVER have the play the main story. I like this aspect--I really don't like being locked into playing a game only one possible way, being locked into a developer's limitations--they might as well do machinima of it for you. I'm not suggesting that linearity = ease of play, it means no opportunity to meander around and look at things.

Good AI: This doesn't even apply to a wide range of games. Team Fortress 2, UT04, Quake3, etc. The AI is other humans. Alpha Centauri, otoh, is mostly AI, and can be really hard to take on.

Other: not sure what I think this is, but maybe it's something like you can find in MMO games, where you can participate without exactly being a quest player, like by being a "crafter". This doesn't interest me. I actually felt more distracted by this whole routine. DLC is a new aspect.

Think back a bit on all your games...Pong, 40 years ago, was the absolute minimalist graphics game, but was not at all easy--it was action-only, no AI, playable in tiny increments; Tank was much the same, only very slightly more complex. This was the era when graphics were super-limited. Think of other games where this is some better, but still the game has to be dominated by something else--while better-looking, Diablo is a little less about action, it seems more about the process of managing loot and such like. There's some story of sorts, but I wasn't really keeping track of that too well--despite the maps being mostly unique each play-through, it's still fairly linear.

So where is the trade-off sweet-spot? I'm sure there's a range. Could we describe it, put some bounds on it? Maybe more by example than by measurement. Reason I ask: I have developed a game or two in the distant past (known as the 70s), and have contemplated making one again, but I find myself debating what flavor I would create. Certainly it would avoid things I dislike, like the repair/crafting stuff. I'd want auto-generated maps to maximize replayability. I'd want to have some reasonable amount of action, but not where it devolves into a twitch game. I'd want some reasonable amount of story; I think I'm more story-driven than most folks. My son is more action-oriented, it seems, he can play TF2 for hours/days; he has, however, played Oblivion et al about as much as I have, HL2 more, Mass Effect, Fallout3/FNV more...he does have more time right now, but that won't last.

How much work goes into making a good story? Is it really all that much? If it's not, you should be able to take one of the free "game engines" and make a game. How difficult is it? How do you make it a story you can actually participate in, as opposed to just following a script? Think of making a game from a movie: seems over-constrained.

It seems to me that good story is what really makes a game--for the kind where there even IS a story. Think about it--I think we tolerate less-than-photorealistic visuals for a better story.

So how hard is it to make a really good story? Do you need more than one? Is it even possible to have more than one? They'd mostly have to be disjoint. Perhaps retirement is the time for me to tackle creating a better story for a game. The problem with that is that it is probably going to still feel too linear. If you allow much variability it's going to become very hard to manage reaching a pre-defined endgame conclusion. My goal would probably be to aim for a much less predictable outcome: create a starting point, play rules, and run it more like a simulation, and watch to see what happens.

I need to re-experiment with some AI activities. Can I make something that is largely emergent-behavior and interesting?