As I was playing two very different indie games over the course of this week, I was reminded of just how important expectations are in determining whether or not people enjoy a particular game.
Exhibit One, the PC indie title, Capsized. Gorgeous graphics, but I didn’t particularly care for the gameplay. However, I have to wonder how much of my dislike for the game from the game itself and how much of it came from me expecting to get a Metroid style action/exploration game and instead getting a run & gun shooter with a complex control scheme.
Exhibit Two, the PC indie title, Dwarfs!? I’ve put in a couple hours into this game and so far, I’m really enjoying it. However, going online, I discovered that many people hated it because it’s not a complex simulation like Dwarf Fortress. Instead, it’s a fast-paced, score-focused arcade game that’s kind of like an out of control top-down Lemmings. Oh and it’s got a well done tower defense game as one of its bonus modes.
When people’s expectations don’t match the reality of a product, disappointment almost inevitably sets in regardless of the quality therein. You could have the best orange in the world – it still makes for a crummy apple.
With both Capsized and Dwarfs!?, much of the confusion came because of the setting. Capsized is a 2D platformer with a setting similar to Metroid so I expected similar gameplay as well. Dwarfs!? and Dwarf Fortress both feature dwarf colonies digging out tunnels as their basic premise so some players expected they would play similarly as well.
However, there are other ways that player expectations can become misguided. Consider Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter. Dragon Quarter is one of the most brilliant RPGs of all time, a true piece of gaming art. However, it did horribly at retail. Why? Because the fans were expecting another Breath of Fire III, a fun, colorful, and fairly stereotypical fantasy RPG, and instead got a very dark sci-fi/fantasy blend with several experimental gameplay systems.
Shadow of the Colossus is considered one of the finest games ever created. And yet, I bet you if you had taken the exact same game and all you did was change the name to The Legend of Zelda: Shadow of the Colossus and replaced the two leads with Link and Zelda that the game’s reception would have been drastically worse due to failed expectations.
Or take pricing. Players have different expectations for $60 games than they do for $15 games than they do for $1 games. This can be either advantageous (great value!) or disadvantageous (overpriced!) to the developer. To use a personal example, I purchased Bioshock 2 for $5 in a recent Steam sale and so far, I’ve been loving it. Would I have had the same reaction if I had paid $60 for it? Maybe not.
Or consider Mirror’s Edge. It’s a great and unique game, but had underwhelming sales. Had the game been designed & marketed first and foremost as a unique take on the racing genre, I daresay it would have sold drastically better than it did. As it is, people played it expecting a FPS/platformer, finished the short story mode, were unimpressed and set the game aside, not realizing that the story mode was basically just an extended tutorial for the really fun stuff – becoming totally awesome while doing time trials & speed runs.
With expectations being so critical to a game’s success, both critically and commercially, what are some things that can be done to help gamers to have the proper expectations for our games?
1. Price your game appropriately. My simple rule for game pricing is “What is the highest price we can charge for this game while still making the game an incredible deal?”
2. If your game has superficial similarities to a popular game but the gameplay is very different, you need to make these differences very obvious in any and all marketing you do for the game.
3. If your game is a sequel to a highly respected franchise but features major differences from previous titles, consider releasing it as a spin-off instead of a main game entry. This advice is less applicable if the series is widely considered past its prime and in need of a reboot.
4. Long held expectations can take time to change so start your marketing early. If I’ve been hearing details about your game for months, then I’m probably going to have a good idea of what to expect when I finally get to play it. If the first I hear of it is when it shows up on Steam’s New Arrival list, I have much less to base my expectations on and so there’s a much higher chance of inaccurate expectations forming.
5. Take care when describing your game that you don’t inadvertently overemphasize less important aspects. For example, with Capsized, one of the features listed in their Steam description was “massive non-linear environments” which combined with the sci-fi setting, naturally made me think of Metroid.
6. Name your games with care. I feel this is something we did successfully with our first RPG, Breath of Death VII: The Beginning. Just from reading the title, the average fan of RPGs should be able to correctly guess that our game is 1) an RPG. 2) a parody, and 3) undead-themed.
7. Make sure that the player knows how hard your game is. Some people love hard games and others prefer easy games so you want to make sure your game gets matched up with its correct audience. Super Meat Boy did a great job of this. Its Steam description contains phrases like “tough as nails”, “old school difficulty of classic NES titles,” and “difficulty from hard to soul crushing.” Its difficulty is a selling point, not a surprise. Conversely, the excellent PS2 horror game, Siren, failed to emphasize its extremely high level of difficulty (seriously, it’s one of the hardest story-based games of all time) in its marketing and so much of the backlash towards game was a result of people finding it frustrating.
Too many great games have underperformed because of misguided expectations. By keeping gamer expectations in mind when we design and market our games, we can help our games to be appreciated for what they actually are and avoid being disliked for what they are not.
@Chris – I agree with all of this, especially the part about breezing through text and roster-padding characters. I hate it when you have three party members who have actual weapons, and then a fourth who fights with a hand-bag.
I think you take games way too seriously Wes. The reason the characters can do all that is because its a game and they are the head honcho’s. The reason cloud can leap 200 ft in advent children is that movie was nothing but pure, unadulterated, blissful fan service. I can agree about making characters into blank slates who all eventually turn into the same class/character with a different skin, that was rather annoying in a lot of games, and way too many developers use that to take a shortcut on character creation.
As for NIS/A games, the reason people like them is because, while they aren’t old school rpg’s, they are a whole lot more so than current rpg’s. The best rpg’s on any console are old rpg’s, be it ps2, ps1, saturn, dreamcast, super nintendo, nintendo. Back then you were drawn into the game by the sound and the story. With current gen graphics, I don’t feel as connected to the rpg’s of today as I did to the rpg’s of yesteryear. I skip text after determining if its worth reading in the first 5 words….I try to skip all the ridiculously long animations if the option is available….I try to develop all the characters, but a lot of rpg’s have characters who are just plain frustrating to play, and seem to only be there to pad the roster, as they are weaker than all the other characters, and nothing short of making him higher lv than the rest of your characters can help him.
I am old though, though not really old, just 31, but I have been playing consoles since atari. I learned to have fun with old school games watching two white lines bounce around a white ball on a black background. A lot of games get pretty big boosts from graphics, but rpg’s arent one of them.
If I remember correctly, we even made a “graves as apartment” joke on one of the tombstone.
Good stuff, sir. I would like to go on record that I beat Dragon Quarter (a magnificent game) without any restarts, much to the disbelief of my friends. I so swear this on my factory sealed copy of Dragon Warrior II.
Another good reference in point is Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled on the Nintendo DS. I really liked the game, despite its disturbing shortage of sound effects. On the packaging it said something like, “Inspired by Chrono Trigger,” which according to Nominal Use in US Copyright Law, is just fine.
Final Fantasy XIII was a failure to me because it was everything I hate about RPG’s summoned into a sixty-dollar blu-ray disc. I hate story for the sake of story, I hate linear dungeons, I hate Tetsuya Nomura and his messed-up fixation with designing shirts to be made of belts and asymmetrical pant-leggings and whatnot.
I grew up with the story of Lorraine Williams, an RPG-hating she-monster, nicking TSR out of the hands of Gary Gygax and subsequently mauling a once-fine game. I compare this to Yoichi Wada at Square-Enix now. He hates RPGs. I love most of what comes out of Marvelous/Matrix in the way of remakes of classic stuff, but Final Fantasy Dissidia Duodecim XII…come on. They seem to like making RPG simulators lately.
A point I would like to jab out in anger is the gradual growth of abstraction between exploration and combat in an RPG. I blame Final Fantasy VII and its Limit Breaks as setting precedent that anyone with the “right stuff” and summon meteorites from their bum, regardless of the fact that there is already a canonical method of producing such wonders relative to the world setting (materia).
I recently played through Riviera: The Promised Land, and realized that I hate Sting and I hate NIS. Here is why: In many RPG’s your party members can produce extremely potent combat maneuvers capable of delivering massive damage without a shred of martial training. All you need is a quirky outfit that makes you look apart from the native NPC’s and all the sudden you can shoot energy bats out of a pitchfork as long as you scream, “Baatu Kanon” first. Actually, with Nippon Ichi it would probably be something in German or French, like, “Die Flauder Maus le Grande Royal Fantaisie!”
In Final Fantasy VII Advent Children, Cloud Strife leaped hundreds of feet up into the air (albeit with the assistance of his briefly shown allies) to fight Steppenwolf. If Cloud Strife can jump even fifty feet in the air (as Zack Fair could in Crisis Core) then why in the hell did I have to run up all those goddamn stairs in the Shinra Tower? Furthermore, if Shenanigoat’s evil plan was to summon one meteor to wreck the planet, yet in his final form he destroys the solar system, what does that even mean?
“He destroyed the solar system.”
“Destroyed the solar system, you say?”
“It got better.”
My favorite RPG ever is Dragon Warrior II, and I do not see how it could be greatly improved by superfluous dialog and a theme song by Japanese Pop Diva #65789.
Also, I have a question about Breath of Death VII. If everyone in the world is undead, why are there graves? Am I correct in my deduction that the large cemetery stages were meant to be like apartment buildings?
To a certain extent the incorrect expectations about Dwarfs!? are a result of their marketing. The Steam page for Dwarfs!? specifically makes a comparison to Dwarf Fortress.
I would argue the problem with DQ is not that it’s so different, but that it’s differences were executed poorly. Forcing people to restart many times, having to redo the same FMVs and story scenes over and over? Saving the game can, if you do it right, penalize you from getting the best score and thus forcing you to redo the game AGAIN even if you’ve beaten it?
The game was brilliant. The game was unique. The game was flawed.
Yeah, I didn’t have a hate/love relationship with dragon quarter, I liked it from the get go because to me the breath of fire games were getting very stale. Dragon quarter was a breath of fresh air for the series.
I have had a lot of problems with games not living up to their hype or descriptions. I have officially, as of this year, learned that most games just aren’t worth buying right out the game. A majority don’t deliver their promises, and are over priced at the $60 mark. Now, unless I just plain really want a game, like next months Duke Nukem and Record of Agharest War, I will just wait. I know the difference between niche and mainstream titles, and I can, with 99 percent accuracy, judge if a game will still be around new when it hits the 20 to 30 dollar mark. I think a lot of consumers are starting to become like me, and that is why you see a lot more special editions and stuff, as that is the only reason I am buying Duke Nukem new…….can’t say no to a wicked looking statue of the Duke.
Anyway, really enjoying these blog posts. You bring very real issues up and give an interesting view on them.
I really like these articles you write, these are some of the few that actually treat videogames with a racional approach, which is very much needed.
Expectations are very important in videogames, a lot of people were disappointed with Final Fantasy XIII because they were expecting a typical Final Fantasy game (but then again the same can be said for most Final Fantasy games that changed the formula).
Great insight on videogames Robert, I’m really looking forward for Cthulhu Saves the World for PC.
You hit the nail on the head with the Dragon Quarter example. The first time I played it I really hated it. I went back to it six months later and fell in love with it and often cite it in my top 3 best RPGs from that generation.