Everything Is Known for Its Worst Qualities
You know that smelly guy at work? Maybe it’s B.O. or bad breath, but everyone knows who it is. The interesting thing is, that’s how you classify that one person. They could be the smartest or hardest working guy in the office, but you still think of him as the smelly one. It’s the exact same way when it comes to games.
Like Neverwinter Nights 2. I couldn’t stand the game because of its horrible camera controls. The story was great and I enjoyed everything except for controlling the camera, which happened to be inherently tied to controlling your character. If you can’t control your character, it’s hard to play the game. They’ve since patched the game and apparently fixed the camera controls, so I’ll have to give it a go, but I still characterized NWN2 as a game with poor camera controls, and didn’t further describe it to most people who asked about it.
Mark of Chaos is another great example of this. My buddy at work keeps talking about how cool the intro video is, and how the game is actually quite good when you get into it, but he often focuses on the abhorrent load times in the game. He has a beast of a machine, but it takes a couple minutes to load up a map. This one bad quality overshadows all its good qualities, and I haven’t purchased the game because of it.
This only emphasizes the importance of first impressions, which I wrote about a while ago, as well as maintaining a consistent level of polish throughout your game (a permeating theme in many of my posts). I’m sure you could come up with a few recent examples of your own.
Agreed.
Guild Wars is “pretty”. But playing as play a warrior, I felt like I had been on a rollercoaster with the camera swinging to face what you are fighting.
Pretty true, and there definitely seems to be a rise of games with poor control and camera angles these days. Dreamfall was game that I throughly enjoyed, but throughout the entire game, navigation was so horrendous due to the absurd camera control.
I didn’t think NWN 2 was that bad though. Sure I went on fits for the first day or so I played it, but it was still playable and I gradually got used to it. In fact, the good points of that game probably outshone the bad. The same applies to Dreamfall too.
I did get frustrated with the NWN 2 load times however, especially since zoning is so frequent in the game.
Your websites snow is cool, but when it floats to the right, it blinks the Lower scroll bar, they also seem to be making your page get longer as you sit here and read the site.
To stay on topic. =)
The site, and its commentary are good, but the snowflakes need work.
Merry x-mass, or whatever!
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After a full day being subjected to jingles and ho ho ho’ing in town, I come home to find snow on my computer.
You, sir, deserve pain, lots and lots of pain.
It is the player controls which stop me from playing Morrowind. I simply hate games with Mouse Look — especially when you can’t change it. And Morrowind is big for Mouse Look. Oddly enough when Julian LeFay was the designer we didn’t have Mouse Look, but when that incredible cretin Todd Howard got his hooks into the game along came Mouse Look. So I know what you mean — a game can be a great game, but if the controls suck, I won’t play it.
Though the camera control in NWN2 is far from the best, I don’t find that to be a game-breaking issue. The slideshow level FPS out of the box, however, made the game virtually unplayable until you had tweaked settings, disabled functions, etc. – this on a brand-new Dell with SLI-enabled NVidia cards.
On the subject of Gears of War … unless I’ve missed something, your buddies ‘beast of a machine’ would have no impact on the load times, as GoW is an X-box 360 only game and therefore he likely has the same setup as everyone else in the world. ;p
Oops, that’s Mark of Chaos, not Gears of War.