MIASL: Quality vs. Scope Redux

So, let's see, not a lot of people are buying my off-the-cuff "less is better" theory -

The division between "more" and "less" seems  bogus to me. They can all be phrased to suit your point (by saying "more frames per second" instead of "less inverse frames per second").

And that's true.  I suppose even something like "more enemies" could be rephrased as "less repitition of the same enemy" - although if you have too much repitition you should simply make a shorter game.  Here reviewers can take a little blame for our quality vs. scope problems, because "amount of gameplay" is something they frequently ding us on, and some games take what's fun in small doses and turn it into marathons that are more chore than game.  (Nintendo in particular, ordinarily beyond reproach, has fallen into this trap with the Metriods and Zeldas which just slog at times.)  But we should shoulder most of the blame - Geometry Wars and Tetris make a little go a long way.

So I'll have to stick with the "I know it when I see it" defense.

Another good comment:

"Between a design doc that describes a few high quality features or one that describes a lot of poorer ones, the latter seems more exciting."

Yet another reason why waterfall doesn't work!

This reminds me of Rock, Paper, Scissors, Spock, Lizard - perhaps the quintessential example of how adding features does not make a better game.  Even though RPSSL comes with
  * two new weapons!
it's less intuitive (paper disproves spock?) and harder to play (some people can't even do the "live long and prosper" symbol).  A good game to remember when you find yourself saying "it would be so cool if we added x."

Greggman mentions Halo and says its framerate sucked.  Ok, maybe - but Halo absolutely oozes quality on almost every other axis, and is a great example of weighting quality over scope.  (We'll give them a pass on those flood levels which do drag... ) I think a lot of people said of Halo "What's so special about it?  Isn't it just another shooter?" because of this - because rather than adding more enemies, weapons, vehicles and features they focused on feel:  the way you accelerate into the turn as you push the right stick;  the way projectiles home in on the enemy but don't feel like they do;  the perfect harmony of sound, visuals and controller feedback when you fire your weapon;  the nice, saturated colors;  the field of view;  the fluid enemy animation;  the convincing enemy AI.  As for the high texel density - Halo had some of the highest texel density for a shooter around when it shipped - is that a "more" thing or a "better" thing?  Tough call.

Comments

[greggman]

I do agree 100% with one thing and that is, most western designers are like little kids who just want more more more. Ask the average 8 year old what the ultimate video game would be and they'd say something like.

"It should be like God of War but the fighting should be as detailed as VF5 but then you should be able to get in vehicles like GTA except the racing should be as detailed as Burnout but you should have all the cars from Gran Turismo but the cars should have guns and morph into mechs and fly like fighter gets and then when you should be able to add soldier units to your party and oh yea, zoom out and give them tactical commands like C&C and if it was all online, yea, that would rock" :-(

God of War is in fact a good example of less = more. Less (it's not open ended, there is almost no exploration, you have no control of the camera, you can't go where you want generally or decide to do all kinds of different things. What they got because of that is the ability to make the most beautiful game on the PS2 ever with great feeling viseral brawler style combat.

Ask 9 out of 10 desginers in American studios though and they will not let themsevles be restricted in any way. They want it all "Make it as pretty as God of War but as big a world as GTA:SA, you should be able to see to the horizon and have 100 people on the screen and full physics on everything over the net."

[kwa]

Look at the GTA series as a counter to your argument. They have a lot of content and a lot of gameplay elements (racing, shooting, flying - heck, they even have rhythm games!) In my opinion a lot of these elements are not high quality, but that hasn't hurt reviews and sales.

I do agree that just adding more of something doesn't necessarily make the game better, but it can help in certain situations. But I think it depends on the type of game that you're making. If you're making an open world sandbox type game, players expect more content (i.e. they expect their immediate actions to have reactions, everything in the world should fall over, speak or make a sound, have interesting physics); if you're making a casual game where gameplay is king, then you should concentrate on making what you have the highest quality.

[Nathan McKenzie]

When I heard the designers of Ico talk at GDC, they claimed that their entire design process revolved around removing as many elements as they could from the game until they couldn't possible remove any more and still have the game work.

Not sure how that fits into your scheme - it seems like there is a qualitative difference between "this game will have three weapons rather than five" and "this game will not have any dialogue / HUD / experience points / what have you".

I actually talked about some of this stuff at length in my Games / Learning / Science presentation last summer (http://hosted.mediasite.com/hosted4/catalog/?cid=12038d65-bcea-442e-a9ae-8079ad3953e0 - then click the presentation labeled "Interactivity & Choice in Games" - I'm the second presenter, around the 40 minute mark. If the video player asks you to install crap, I think there's a second like that let's you skip that, and it still works)

[Jamie Fristrom]

"Look at the GTA series as a counter to your argument. They have a lot of content and a lot of gameplay elements (racing, shooting, flying - heck, they even have rhythm games!) In my opinion a lot of these elements are not high quality, but that hasn't hurt reviews and sales."

That's very true. But I think the GTA team consciously goes for size at the expense of quality. (In fact, sometimes I think they keep that crappy jump animation in there just to rub it in our faces.) If you set out to say, "Let's get a lot of STUFF in there and we don't care if it's all that polished," and then achieve that, great! What I'm really railing against is not being able to tell the difference.

That said, isn't GTA an anomaly? Most games that are big-but-sketchy do get relegated to the land of poor reviews and low sales...

[Stephen Madsen]

Hi my name is Stephen Madsen; I am currently working on my Bachelor Degree of Science in Game Development at Full Sail. I have been following your blog and it has been very helpful. I am in one of my last classes now and one of the goals is to network with a professional in my industry. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about your life in the game industry. Thanks for your time and your wonderful blog. My email is madsen.stephen@gmail.com.

Sincerely,
Stephen Madsen