That's Choice

Looking back at my last blog post regarding hysteria for the Swine Flu; looks like it was a pretty mild thing. Consider this; write down your predictions for future events (generally big things, like "Where is Iran headed?", and look back at them a few weeks, months, even years later. You get some interesting patterns based on how you view the world. With me it's always "People keep surprising me", both in all the good things they will do, and all of the bad. I'm very glad the Good seems to consistently be winning, no matter how prominent or loud or advertised all the Bad is.

But moving on! Today I've officially designated DETOUR "Content Complete". Now for that pesky left-over testing, code-work, localization, and so on. We can see the destination but we still have to walk to it. As for DETOUR itself, it is just looking great. The visuals are shiny and the gameplay has put a smile on my face on many occasions as of late. The Sandswept team has pulled together a very nice experience.

With DETOUR we've hit a mark somewhere between the three points of Comedy (both in dialog, SFX combined with visuals, and overall parody), Strategy, and Agility (ability to move your hands and brain in a synchronized destructive forte of art and class). We have found ourselves calling this an "Action RTS", both for it's fast-paced action and relatively short games, and the amount of cunning and strategy that really affects the outcome.

There's a few games out there, even RTS games, that seem to tip-toe around being a game where the really letting the skilled, smarter players always win. In attempts to make a "Casual" game, many developers seem to shy away from making the game a real challenge, and instead make it more of a fun la-dee-da cakewalk for everyone. Is this so they don't scare away the lesser skilled players? Is that really necessary? There are plenty of Triple-A titles (perhaps all of them?) that are focused on a very competitive experience, but leave plenty of room for goofing off and having a fun experience if you so choose.

That really brings up another thought; Choice! Lots of games brag about choice, multiple paths, and how these choices will effect your game experience throughout the story. What about the more fundamental choice, such as editing game options? When developers force the players into "the right way" to play a game (and generally most games can be played differently if the effort were put into allowing that), they take away the player's real choice. Good and Evil choices are solely based on the story and character development. What about the choices to play the game a completely new way, a la Warthog Jousting in Halo or Tower Defense in Starcraft? Completely unintended, but the customization, physics, and open-endedness of editors have given players so many ways to play the game. The two games I just mentioned are amazingly successful because of that bit of extra choice, customization, and modification. The games that wear out quickly are the ones in which players can't change the way they play. (And yes, those games are also beautifully designed and very fun, but a large part of the fun and design is the ever changing ways to play)

Competitive players might analyze a game to a deeper level, and decide that by enabling/disabling certain rules, they can get the game to where they feel it's "more skillful". Casual players might want to just goof around with ridiculous variables and have some crazy fun. The games that let these distinct groups (who can never seem to agree!) will be (and have proven to be) the successful games.

To put the example more in perspective (and looping back to the earlier topic), with DETOUR we're allowing customization of game options, ranging from something simple, such as Score, to allowing the players to toggle on and off various items and their attributes. All developers should be able to say this; You don't like the way we balanced it or set things up? Great! Change it!

That's choice.


Pardon our Dust.