Thursday, March 24, 2011

Making games not too difficult is important

So for game makers, there one point that I’ve written about before but it seems many game developers, and sometimes even myself, miss out on. We like to make our games difficult and challenging because we think that way players will keep on coming back to them in order to beat them.

However, this is not usually the case. If a game is really challenging, a lot of the players will just give up. People like instant gratification more than ever now and if something is too hard, they will more likely give up rather than try again. Take for instance a game I sponsored in the past — Lightwing. It is an excellent plane shooter game and graphically on par with the Raiden X series, but it had one major flaw — people consider it way too hard. I tried to get the developer to implement mouse controls but he wouldn’t do it because he designed it to be that way. The game ended up doing OK but I think it was denied a chance at going super-viral because many people just got frustrated at the difficulty. As one player put it “I simply do not like games that are all about dying”. Now, the game is possible to beat but it is highly challenging. I believe if mouse controls had been implemented or the game made easier, people would have rated the game a lot higher.

Another testament to the popularity of easy games are sites like arcadeprehacks, which basically take all the challenge out of a game and let players win instantly. Now, you might think that no one would want to play such a game, but in reality, those sites are madly popular. Once again, people prefer instant gratification rather than having to work for something. So next time when designing a game, do not make it too challenging or hard or have difficulty levels were people can choose to make the game easy if they want.

Flash Games

No comments:

Post a Comment