Interesting observation? ("Korean" RPGs)
Interesting observation? ("Korean" RPGs)
It seems to me like a large portion of the many "free to play" RPGs in some cases have surprisingly decent art - but, either the programming, the interface or the gameplay kinda sucks. I made this observation more or less exclusively from Granado Espada (Sword of the new world), which have rather enjoyable music and good if stereotyped graphics. But something about the interface/gameplay turned me off enough to not want to play the game. Have you had similiar experiences?
I find it interesting that the traditionally "hard" part of making games seems to be in abundance in these games, but the other game parts are a bit lacking. So are artists not really a scarce resource, but simply hard to convince to join a project? From what I've seen from these kind of games, there is more need for good interface and gameplay designers than artists. Thoughts?
I do realize that the reason for this might be that they either didn't care or didn't think about it. I suppose that what I'm getting at is "What makes a good game?". Is it the art? The programming? Gameplay? The user interface? And which part has the least people able (or interested) in doing it well?
I have two thoughts on this.
One, it seems to me like Korean style RPGs (particularly MMO's) are "grind-heavy" by nature. The thought sounds horrible to me personally, but they're pretty popular over there, so it could just be a matter of taste. Maybe people like grind-heavy gameplay.
But let's assume, for a moment, that people *don't*, and these games really are poorly designed. I guess the difference between art and design is that good and bad art are both pretty easy to identify (there is, of course, an entire school of thought that there's no such thing as bad art, but I suspect most of those people are bad artists). Good and bad design I think are a bit more nebulous.
If I were to draw a picture of someone, you might look at it and say, well, the anatomy is off, or the shading is wrong, or something. But sometimes if you play a poorly designed game, it just doesn't feel right. You can guess at the flaws, you can follow all the design rules, but in the end, you just have to fiddle with it until you end up with something that feels good. That's a long, iterative process that I think ultimately requries a lot of feedback from your players. Take Wesnoth or WoW, for instance. These are both highly polished games. The key is that they've been around for years, and that whole time, the development teams have been gathering feedback from players and updating the game and interface to make them more fun to play.
You don't end up with good design by accident, and most of the time you don't have good design right out of the box. It takes a lot of time and effort.
Indeed - that's the reason I placed interface design side-by-side with art & sound, programming, and gameplay :). Interface design is hard. It's not something you can "slap on when we are done with the rest" or where you can simply say "we'll leave it to the programmers" (ugh). Interface design is hard work, requires skill and experience, and needs to be present in the entire game process. I do think you can "ship" with a decent interface, but it requires effort. Ideally, I believe that just as a project may have an artistic "lead", so it should have a (qualified) interface lead. And just like the code should be tested, so should the interface - both internally and by "test audiences".
Point taken about grind-heavy gameplay.
And I consider WoW's interface decent, at best ;).