Lileks expresses disappointment with a game he purchased and played:
You are no doubt eager to know how my wonderful amusement park is going. Planet Coaster 2! So dearly desired, such a surprise when announced. Better pathways and – wait hold on you can’t be serious we dreamed of this – water parks!
I got a refund.
It is a clunky mess that seems profoundly less engaging than the first version. No custom signs or music. This is not a review because who cares; I have a larger point. The problem reminded me of everything I read about Cities Skyline 2, which I also was keen to play. I do not want to play complex simulations and balance industry and traffic and other such tedious things. I just want to build something. Cities Skyline 2 was released to a friendly audience entranced by spectacular teaser videos, certain they wouldn’t sell us something that wasn’t as good as the game everyone loved. But the first release was junk. The lamentations were enough to make me sigh with relief: I don’t have to spend hours laying out streets and zoning things and dealing with powerlines. I just . . . don’t.
I have probably harped on this for years, gentle reader, as I do so many things, but I beg your indulgence yet again.
Sometimes, game designers get excited about designing their own systems and whatnot to the point that they really don’t ask themselves if users want to play that way.
For example, when I was playing Asheron’s Call (almost twenty years ago–what?), when they started talking about Asheron’s Call 2, they talked about how they would build the game so that items in the game would have to be crafted by the players. That is, they expected players to spend hours forging the swords and whatnot that players would use in the game. I don’t know why they thought players would log in after a day at work to a second job of baking or blacksmithing online, but that’s what they thought.
I mean, games like Fortnite and Minecraft definitely have the building/crafting elements of the games down and would seem to be exceptions that prove the rule, but not exactly: In Fortnite, so I understand it, you can build structures to improve your position and whatnot, but you’re not spending most of the game gunsmithing. And Minecraft started out as a crafting game, and you’re building a world. Maybe I’m talking off base here as I’ve not played them and have not watched any YouTube videos on them nor Twitch streams, but the point of the game is not to contribute to the game’s macroeconomy. It is to build and/or to adventure, and any crafting is in the service of that.
At any rate, I remember some of the games Aaron Reed describes in 50 Years of Text Games where it seemed like the games were designed with that in mind: building an interesting system and capturing those complex rules for a game that would not be very interesting to play, but it would be very interesting to design and develop. I don’t even remember which games struck me that way, and if I did mention the names, they would largely be unrecognized.
I am probably just going off on something about which I have little actual knowledge–this is a blog, after all, and the only game I play regularly is a 20-year-old version of Civ–but it does seem, even outside the gaming industry, that designers and developers get a little wrapped up in their worlds and cohorts and write for that audience and not the casual gamer.
