Do devs hear the legit complaints gamers have? Are higher ups and ridiculous deadlines the problem? Case in point - reddit com/r/AskReddit/comments/4fy14j/gamers_whats_something_lots_of_video_games_do/
We get them, but the most common answers to many of those questions is “the amount of work it would take to do this would not be worth the gain we get from it.” Either that, or we’ve got a legitimate reason to do it (i.e. a statistically significant percentage of players want it this way). Let me show this to you by quickly responding to the top ten “legit complaints” from that reddit thread.
1. Driving games where street signs or small shrubs have the properties of a 50ton concrete block.
Unless the game supports environmental destruction as a general feature, “the amount of work it would take to do this would not be worth the gain we get from it.” Shrubs and foliage especially is very difficult to make work correctly, because bushes and plants deform when you strike them. Making them explode in a shower of leaves is difficult, and remembering that you destroyed them can be even moreso. The real question is “What other gameplay feature are you willing to cut so that you can run over bushes?” and “Will being able to run over bushes and signs help sell the game more than whatever we cut?”
2. Unskipable cut scene before a difficult boss. I don’t want to watch it again…
I recently [posted an answer to a very similar question] which generally amounts to “the amount of work it would take to do this would not be worth the gain we get from it.” Usually it’s because the cinematic system itself lacks the ability to skip stuff (other stuff was higher priority), or it’s covering up asset load times.
3. NPC: “Follow me down this hallway” … NPC proceeds to walk at a speed that is faster than your walk but slower than your run.
This seems like more of a MMOG affectation. In that regard, most of the time NPC movement speed is standardized. You never want the NPC to move as fast or faster than the player’s run speed, because then the player will never be able to run away from NPCs. This will cause a lot of frustration if there’s a death penalty and the player bites off more than he or she can chew, because it means almost certain death (note that this is why raid bosses run faster than players). NPCs also have to move at a reasonable speed, otherwise players will easily kite them to death. Thus, the ideal standard NPC speed generally falls between player walking and running.
4. Insurmountable waist-high fences.
This is actually a legitimate complaint and it comes down to “the level designers and environment artists couldn’t come up with a better way to show an environment without making it traversible.”
5. When you have a companion and they block a door and they won’t move.
[Pathfinding is hard]. Most of the time we can put in code to make them back off if you walk into them but that can be difficult too, especially if the area is very narrow and you’re blocking their path too. Thus “the amount of work it would take to do this would not be worth the gain we get from it.”
6. The AI’s rules are not the same as my rules. I hate cheating AIs.
So this usually comes in two flavors - strategy games and racing games. In strategy games, it’s mostly because the complexity of the strategy games makes them difficult to write actual AI (especially in games where we try to model specific personalities in the AI), so we stick with scripted builds and cheat out of necessity of time. Seriously, [making good AI is hard]. In racing games, this mostly manifests as “rubber band” AI, which does two things - it keeps the race interesting even if you’re far ahead, and it allows you to catch up even if you are not very good. Better implementations will have limits on both extremes, but “the amount of work it would take to do this would not be worth the gain we get from it.”
8. You’re the most badass, elite soldier known to all humanity but you touch a body of water with your shoe and it’s instant death.
This is because we likely don’t have the resources for fully-featured swimming, but we still need to have water effects because of the environment art. So, once more, the answer is “the amount of work it would take to do this would not be worth the gain we get from it.”
9. Share this to your Facebook!
Only happens in mobile and social games and for good reason - the tiny percentage of people who click through this action has a sizable effect in new acquisitions for the game. We need as many people as we can get to try the game in order to find people willing to drop a few bucks on it.
10. Forced tutorials for the first hour.
Players stopped reading manuals and they generally react a lot better (i.e. quit much less frequently) to learning to play the game by playing the game. While skipping the tutorial for a new playthrough might help, less than 50% of players even finish a game the first time through, let alone start a second playthrough. In other words… “the amount of work it would take to do this would not be worth the gain we get from it.”
Overall, much of the time we don’t acknowledge or address “legit complaints” because they aren’t really all that legitimate. It might annoy or bother you that it’s in the game (just like it annoys and bothers us too - we play our own games as well), but we have to prioritize what we spend our resources on. Most of the time we choose to focus on getting the primary gameplay elements in and fixing bugs, rather than addressing the nice-to-have wishlist quality-of-life improvements that most of these tend to be. None of them are the sort of dealbreakers that we try to prioritize instead.
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