The ingame footage scam

In game footage is not the same as game play footage. Say you watch a video online and it says "made entirely of ingame footage", it can be accurate and still run into the follies of cut scenes. Bad offenders here are Battlefield 3 recently, but also much of the Max Payne 3 and Grand Theft Auto 5 footage. I want to see how it is to play the game, not how it will look like if I had a professional camera man filming me while I was playing the game.

To have a good counter example, the new Hitman game absolution, besides having some usually intense and just fantastic pre-rendered cut scene trailers, also includes a couple of game play trailers. There you can see a developer presumably, play through the entire first level of the game (or so it appears). You see the cut scene that leads you into it, then how the developer sneaks and murders his way through the level. No commentary. No popups or stops. Just game play. I for one applaud this.

The scam is that the game can look as good as you want it to look, but you will not see what those videos make you believe you see. They either show you exactly what you will see, i.e. the cut scenes, or things that happen out of a perspective that you as a player will never experience. Very disappointing in either way.

Sow me what we will see, for real, in the game. How it will feel like to drive, shoot and run through the city, battlefield and dark places. That will tell me so much more if I want to play the game than anything else.

Story tools

I touched on story before. One of the major parts of it was to give players the ability to write the story. Look at it like reporters. Or bloggers.

You want story in your game. Not everyone will want story in your game, but you will want it there, for the simple purpose to tie it together, to give it coherence and alongside your design documents, an easier to digest feel. Also some players will enjoy reading about it. After all people still read books.

But games are not books.

Fracturing communities

I have mentioned stacking boxes before. One big pitfall in this though is the fracturing of communities, which I haven't touched really. Still not sure why I didn't but here it goes.

Addon packs, DLC, and anything else of that ilk, which make it only possible for a fraction of your playerbase to enjoy a certain content with one another (not talking single player content) will fracture your playerbase. No brainer, right?

Let's look at a general multiplayer game, such as Battlefield 3. The first pack is Back to Karkand, which coincidentally was given for free to everyone who preordered the main game. Those buying it later, not getting the pack had to shell out additional cash. Some will not. Just like that, you already have two different groups, the one only having the core package and those having the core and the expansion. Fracture started.

Now ok, Battlefield, there it's not so dramatic. For various reasons, but it's a lot more visible on the developers side when we go for MMO's.

Where the story becomes the game

A particular genre of "games" has thankfully died a long time ago, that of the interactive movie. Imagine a game where you mostly just watch things and occasionally do a couple of things to get more of the story, though that doing part is maybe one percent of the overall experience.

"Wait", the clever reader says, "that sounds like games today, but with less doing things" and you are right of course. Essentially we have come down to sports games (including just driving around), sandbox games (mmo and non mmo) and then comes what is essentially the furtherance of a simple scroller game. Especially that last one adheres to the principle of going from point A to C by passing point B. No way around it. Although you have elements of sandboxes in many MMO's but really, if you look closely at it, things like WOW and SWTOR are heavy based on the quests you have to do in a pretty predefined order (to experience the story).

So, now that is the big selling point, the story.