But you got a really nice point in here Alexander, gaming is just all about violence, there should be more to it, I am sure there are other enjoyable things than just punching some guys into their faces or bloing thei heads off.

I’m glad you mentioned the Right stick combat, because it’s a better example than you’d think. I hated it. Like, loathed it, you can ask any of my roommates, I swore constantly while playing, wishing I had the finite control a button press offered.

But, some decisions aren’t going to make everyone happy, risks especially.

I would like to point out, that I wasn’t really defending not making original games, or really stating an opinion one way or the other, I just wanted to say that I can see where he’s coming from with his statement.

I do agree that, when under a production schedule, you do occasionally have to cut out the harder concepts to implement. It simply means cutting out something that may be innovative.

I’m not one to love sequels. I tend to praise originality over polish. This, however, means I play a lot of mediocre games in order to enjoy something unique. The Right-stick attack Too Human gameplay was really cool. Did it pay off in the long run? Not really, but I would love to see it done again.

What I think he is making a statement on, and I do think this plays into your overall point, is that gambling on a feature in a game is a hard decision to make. From a concept point of view, something can sound like a great idea, but then in implementation it becomes a lot more of a burden than it is fun, despite it being a cool idea (I’m looking at you, Too Human). In most games that don’t take a decade to produce (Dyack’s ears must be ringing as I type this) a lot of features don’t make it, because you only have X amount of time to finish a game, and you want to make sure that the parts of the game that aren’t a gamble are polished.

Just to give a couple design issues here with the feature in question, lets say I program some type of timing mechanism that determines amount of time spent looking at NPC X, and after a certain amount of time, a flag is raised where I’m now in trouble. But is it based on character orientation? or camera orientation? what’s the view radius of the character, is being in Line of sight counted as staring? what’s the appropriate stare distance? How do you determine the difference between looking at menus on the screen, reading something else, talking to someone in the other room while you’re playing, the cat trying to get on the counter, and someone actually starting at the NPC in game? Obviously there is probably a right answer to all of those questions, but the real question is, Is all the of the effort to solve and test the design issues for every situation worth having the feature in the game?

Just my point of view on the subject.

Digging the site though.

I still remember how betrayed I felt during my first play-through of Dragon Age when Zevran left my team. I had used him during a couple of missions but I hadn’t befriended him enough while I was in camp. Because of this, he was convinced by an old friend to get back into the assassin business and tried to kill me (again) so I ended up having to kill him.

In the case of Mafia, I can understand how difficult it could be to put some of those elements into the game. If the player decided to go around and try to sleep with everybody elses wives then everybody would be trying to kill him and would ruin any narrative the designers might have had planned. At the same time, the game might be brilliant if that was the case. I mean, Fallout 2 allowed you to do things in the game which ultimately made it impossible to finish, which was fantastic.