Is a game that pleases the majority still a good game?

I agree very much, in my mind the points at which you draw the line between simulating the experience and making it an enjoyable experience is the essence of "... is it good?", ... enjoyment over depth leads to a more casual experience, depth over enjoyment a more simulated one ... and it depends where you intend to aim, ... and yes aim to please. But then what's important is that you please with the finished product, not a feature set or fluffy vision of what your game could be; as these always detract from the reception of the finished product. An MMO market that has seen many struggling attempts through out the years shows that aiming to please, and pleasing to market are distinctly different things ... "We'll have this this and this!..." because the audience plays the majority rule card does not make a good game, good developers with keen decision making skills make good games.

Which is why in my mind, in a heavily audience-centric prone to struggling releases and player backlash market it's important to: distance a game from an almost unfulfillable desire to please everyone ... "Hey community! We're here to make a good game, we hope you can all appreciate that and like what we come up with!", versus the insinuated, "Hey guys! We've got our finger of the pulse of the community and aim to deliver the MMORPG experience you've been waiting for." ... as soon as you start treating those you communicate with as a generalised individual entity, or an audience, or demographic etc that can be pleased by appealing to the majority of them (which can be a comparatively small number of people depending on how many ways a decision splits the whole), you're setup to not please everyone else. It's highly likely that you don't have a core majority who will be pleased by every decision you make. As soon as you mix benign disappointment with the catalyst of expectation you have nearly every major MMO shortfall in history.

Which is why in my mind ... forget pleasing the majority and forgo pleasing the audience first. Therefore put enjoyment aside to begin with. Grab the ultimate simulation of your world. Think of all the wonderous things that could be part of it. Work out which of those things can be supported by codeable systems. Cut back until you have those systems that are necessary to give your world the level of definition you need to achieve your game. Prune or redesign those systems to generate the experience and level of enjoyment versus simulation that you want your players to deal with, until you have a development roadmap that scales to your time and budget. Then release the original vision of your game, and how you intend to achieve it with said game mechanics. Apply copious amounts of Tipp-Ex as necessary.

Allow developers to design what they know is good first, then please people later. Rather than please people, and then try and live up to their expectations.

I think the issue most people have is that they feel SotA will be their special interest game. Where as SotA at this stage, looks more like an amalgamation of the various types of game that have defined the Ultima series in the past plus a few new ideas born of more modern influences. And this means some decisions irk heavy Roleplayers, some decisions irk the Old school gamers, some decisions irk the Ultima Online fans, some decisions irk the PK crowd, some decisions irk he casual crowd etc etc

And when it comes to talking to each other about the game, they don't talk about what SotA is or intends to be, but argue about what they want from it. Which is one part of what worries me about the whole concept of please majorities as Ome comically pointed out above.


(Edit: added extra long winded yammering just for swaggart

 

Hahaaha

 

I think the announcement on how SOTA will be handling NPC conversations should put to rest any fears that it will be dumbed down for the unwashed masses. I can't think of anything less designed to appeal to the imagined majority of slack-jawed yokels than forcing people to type in responses to NPCs. (In the form of complete sentences and likely with correct spelling no less.) With that being put in the game any worry that it will be made to appeal to the LCD is pretty silly. That ship has already left the port... and has been set on fire and sucked down a whirlpool and blasted to atoms by aliens. SOTA will be a game for the lowest common denominator like it will be a game for shadow creatures from the 8th dimension, whose existence I find just about as plausible as any single LCD.

 

Short Answer: Not necessarily.

Long Answer: Not worth typing, no one would read it anyway.

 

Sorry if I did not read the whole thread as it basically turned out splitting hair.

If enough people evaluate, like and play a game then it is by definition a good game. That some are critical and dislike the product as it does not meet "their" standards is irrelevant. On the other hand, if a majority evaluate, dislike and do not play the game that it is by definition a failed game especially if it cannot support itself, regardless of those critics that think that "their" standards have been met.

Bottom line, a person's opinion on what makes a good game is personal and very subjective, regardless of the criteria used as they are personal. A plurality of person's opinions on what makes a good game is the standard used.

 

A new game of Adventure & Virtue, but good ideas and aspects will be culled if considered to be to difficult. They might have to set up vendors selling empathy, moral & good manner.

 

To the OP - I completely agree

 

Reading is good! A tidbit of sociology: When we watch media, we feel the messages emotionally. When we read media, we consider them logically. The latter is a good thing when it comes to being a useful and productive community, even if it takes a moment longer. Its a shame how many people's opinions are filtered out by walls of text (tl:dr syndrome). Its hard to go through 4 pages and read the whole thing, I know. Its easier when you start posting and reading from the onset of the thread (I didn't do that, so I sucked it up and read for a few minutes). The bottom line is, if you don't do, it is hard to post a constructive reply.

It saddens me to see such a well thought OP followed up by such a short (yet concise) accusation relating to fel/tram (not to hate on the 2nd post).

Anyway, this is about integrity. I'm not a game developer, but I can relate this to music in a fairly accessible way. OP is concerned about the difference between Justin Bieber and an honest musician. Bieber doesn't create his music. He is a figure head, a pawn in an industry that preys on our ears (and teenagers/children), abusing and reusing the same harmonies of the classical era to maximize a profit. An honest musician (or game dev) creates music as a piece of art, not as a source of profit. Should SotA be in a major/minor key because it is the most accessible, or should it draw from modes, atonality (eww), and the like for the sake of expression? While it is true that simple is often grand, the point still stands that most people would agree that they want their devs to view SotA as a piece of art, a virtual world to enrich the lives of players, rather than a tool to be used in the pursuit of unending wealth.

My apologies to all those that won't take the time to read this post (and this thread) due to length. I would have made it shorter, but I didn't have the time.

 

Some real points in here

I think kickstarts could be good, but the main point is that the concepts are VERY WELL defined beforehand.

What a large body of contributors can contribute is a larger pool of potential assets.

More items to choose from.

totally agree though, that too many decision makers is always a bad thing.

It helps when player content is compartmentalized, so it don't interfere with game 'proper' areas.

 

I still think the answer to this thread is a simple yes.

 

A game can never please everyone, and if they try, it is always so restricted and safe that it quickly becomes as boring as everything else.

 

Just because a game is popular 'liked by the majority', doesn't mean it is good. There are also many good games out there that never became successful.

(Success / Failure) and (Good / Bad) are two very different judgements.

Because the two are actually completely unrelated, it is just as possible to create a good game that is also popular.

To Fail is easier than to Succeed, a Bad game is easier to make than a Good game. Most publishers focus on 'Success', not on 'Good', because at the end of the day, all they care about is making money; and since 'Good' doesn't directly lead to 'Success' it's not a priority.

Therefore, yes, creating both a Good, and Successful game is the most difficult of all the combinations. And this is what Portalarium has committed themselves to.

I wish them luck, but I also know that it's much more important to me that the game is good, and will always favor that as a priority over success. Any day.

 

This all depends on how you define 'good'. If by 'good' you mean a game which has the broadest appeal and largest fan base, then certainly a game which pleases the majority is actually the epitome of a good game. If by 'good' you mean something that you personally enjoy, or a game that we personally enjoy, then the question is quite biased and more or less pointless to begin with.


Trying to answer as objectively as possible;

I think it depends on who is the 'majority' you are trying to please. An average person, to put it mildly, is ill informed and not very bright. If the 'majority' you are trying to cater to is the average person, then yes, you are correct that a game with such design goals has little chances of being a "good" game to people who land outside of that demographic. And if our society's overall goal is self improvement, it objectively cannot be considered a good game, even if it accomplishes the intent of being entertaining and appealing to the vast majority of people who try it (like, lets say, Bejeweled).

It is a repeating result, however, any product which strives to appeal to the majority of any demographic, will be less than ideal to anyone lying on the extremes of that demographic (think the bell curve).

But lets be a little more specific, in our case, SotA, if the demographic they are trying to cater to the majority of is, let's say, RPG fans, catering to the majority is not necessarily a bad thing. You will certainly alienate the hardcore and the casual gamers, but an RPG with too much emphasis on either of those two will not fair too well either. So it may even be beneficial to cater to the majority, by finding middle ground, when it comes to crafting an RPG with an RPG demographic in mind. Sure you may lose a couple of hardcore backers, and not have the broadest appeal of something like WoW, but that middle ground will still yield fans from both sides as well as the millions who enjoy games like Baldur's Gate and Skyrim.



I think overall any game which accomplishes its purpose of being fun and entertaining to its target audience, is in effect, and by most definitions, a good game.

 

I still, also agree.

 

The very definition of good is subjective, especially when it comes to entertainment. You can begin talking of technical innovation and the "correct" way of presenting scenes and the like, but saying that a game can be good based on objective standards? Who has made those standards? You? Give me a link to something that explains to me the rules that makes a good entertainment product.

(This is a question to the OP, btw, not the poster above me)

 

A distinction that needs to be made is that catering to the lowest common denominator often means trying to make a game that we assume will have mass appeal. That isn't necessarily the same as a game the majority of people like.

For example, someone got the brilliant idea that Fallout couldn't appeal to the masses as is (despite winning RPG of the Year awards) and they tried to make a game that appealed to the masses with Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. It was an action console game that simplified everything about Fallout. It has an average user rating of 3.1 on Metacritic.

http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-2/fallout-brotherhood-of-steel
The Last of Us however is loved by the masses, and is a great game. It is loved by the majority because of its greatness. Mass appeal does not necessarily equate to detritus shovel to us because someone tried to cater to the lowest common denominator.

And if crowd funding has taught us anything recently, is that some of these genres and concepts that people assumed no one was interested in anymore, people are actually still quite interested in.

 

@enderandrew
I agree completely

except this last part:

Hardly. The opinion was not that no one was interested in them, it was that not enough people were. The final amount raised isn't relevant, it is the quantity of backers that is important. SotA has barely 25000, a very abysmal quantity for any game or genre. Other KS RPGs are more or less in the same boat. A game that cost at least 4 million to make, in a publisher's eyes, should sell several hundred thousand copies to make it worth their resources (it is not simply the monetary investment that is at stake, but it may also be a poor use of employee talent).

We have yet to see how many people flock to these KS projects besides the ones who already backed them. If the hardest of the hardcore fans already invested heavily, how many more are out there?

It is still not clear if the KS video game strategy pays off in the long run. So far, we have one failing endeavor (Double Fine's Broken Age) and one that was a disappointment to most (Shadowrun). We will see how other developers will do, and if these games make any money post release (since the majority of the fans already bought it, many receiving several copies to gift to friends).

So far, we are paying the developer's salaries to make us a game we want, which is awesome for us. Will the game make profit after release? Hopefully, but no one knows for sure.

 

I know there are other KS video games that have been released already.

Cloudberry Kingdom
FTL
Resonance
Giana Sisters
Pinball Arcade
Organ Trail
Cthulu Saves the World
Shadowrun Returns
Leisure Suit Larry
Legends of Dawn
SolForge