I was planning on writing about this soon using plenty of examples.
Pretty evenly split between "the developers got clear feedback and did/didn't act on it" and "the developers were lead astray by bad feedback."
Not always easy to differentiate but some processes and venues encourage bad feedback.
As far as I can tell listening to "pro gamers" is almost always bad though. Letting them help figure out if a game breaks down at the highest levels of play makes sense but having them greatly influence the core design rarely seems to work as they are by definition extreme outliers.
WoW Classic is an interesting example to use. Over time WoW became (more of) a Baby Game because the team kept giving players what they thought they wanted - integrating simplification mods into the game itself, cross-server matchmaking, etc etc.
I love to quote myself!
Unfortunately I think the answer is "it just depends." Sometimes developers stubbornly refuse to give players what they want and sometimes they listen too much.
WoW Classic "gave the players what they want" but was only needed because Wow listened too much to players!
The pace that Highguard has updated is pretty impressive even *before* considering that most people were laid off, they knew the game was toast, and there was no reason beyond pride to put in any more work. Just did it for the love of the game.
That's why I wrote this.
Most of the Highguard analysis I've seen is people just repeating other analysis - it's turtles all the way down. (Lazy idiot turtles)
"Toxic positivity" is an appealing concept but there's not much evidence that the Highguard team suffered from it.
Youtuber: "The controls are awkward, but I forgive it because what the game does is incredibly ambitious" talking over footage of a block-pushing puzzle.
The people doing this discourse want to play Twitter, Reddit and Twitch chat.
Same dynamic as those who claimed to be long time comic book fans but thought Marvel invented She Hulk for the TV show.
He's wrong it's Defiance
I have that exact gun (first image) in Marathon.
There are many interesting things that could be said about Marathon but the collective gamer community is making angry screaming ape sounds so it kind of feels like "why bother?"
On the other hand, counter-balancing screaming apes may be a good thing...
I'm continually surprised by how good many "old" non-blockbuster movies look. Of course some look awful (especially if they have bad transfers) but many middle-of-the-road movies have great lighting, sets, etc.
(Compare to that God of War still that was released earlier today)
"It's multiplayer and different players play as different versions of Atreus or something" smacks of "we worked on a game for years without a core concept."
Which is something that happens ALL THE TIME now.
Marathon is another game that presents you with a EULA screen and you have to press and hold the "accept" button to accept, even though to accept you first have to move the cursor over to the button *and* there's nothing else to do on that screen.
Why!
"Its honestly so easy for games to make money. Just sell what people want."
For some reason I have this image saved in my blogs folder.
Probably saved it because of how savvy it is.
I remember someone reviewing an MMO or some big open-world fantasy game where something similar happened, trophies revealed they never left the starter area.
I like RE games but 40 hours would be torture.
I'm sure there are plenty of great consultants!
Every consulting team or person is different so your mileage may vary.
But some consultants can't give much concrete info on how they make games better and exploit lack of confidence and a desire for outside "expert opinion" and that makes me nervous.
So the consulting didn't deliver much and you could tell the team was annoyed that they didn't have much say in a large part of the game. (That was hiring a single individual to do hands-on work, not a consulting team to make a report, so it's a bit different, but whatever)
6) In the Double Fine Broken Age documentary you can watch an example of game design consulting gone wrong. For part 2 of the game they basically iced out the team and had a puzzle consultant guy work on the puzzles - the puzzles in 2 were worse than in part 1.
5) Anecdotally I've heard of people hiring game design consultants and they get back a report like "add multiplayer" or "make it more like PUBG." Make it more like X, where X is whatever is big - you don't need to pay for that, you can get that from anyone!
4) I'm kinda wary of consultants in general. (Even though I arguably occasionally serve as one...)
Low investment in your project, get paid regardless of results, often don't have great track records (or any track record), often prey on lack of institutional confidence.
There was a popular tweet (skeet?) going around like "you should hire consultants to avoid pitfalls." But sometimes consultants guide you towards those pitfalls! "Hire consultants because they understand the community." Do they? Does NAME_REDACTED have its finger on the pulse of gamers?
3) I'm wary of orgs who say "we've made lots of games better" but can't say which games they made better or how. Yes I know NDAs and other agreements exist but "we've been around for 10 years and consulted on hundreds of games but can't mention a single positive contribution." What?
That's part of why I wrote about "Ostensible Improvements." The suggestions we got were ostensible improvements - kinda obvious suggestions that would make the game better on paper but turn a 7.5 into still a 7.5 because the underlying issues weren't being addressed.
1) I think mock reviews are good but I'm wary of ex-journalists providing guidance beyond that because that's not their wheelhouse.
2) My personal experience was that a mock review was useful but the "here's how to make your game better" part of the service was a net negative.
There's something incredible about these guys who spend 16 hours a day on Reddit talking about how all game developers are morons, but they're also trying to learn game development themselves and are currently working on the most basic dogshit thing imaginable.
Many such cases!
Social media selects for people who a) have a lot of time on their hands b) have nothing much else going on c) care deeply and are highly motivated (often by culture war issues) and d) like to express themselves in 50 words or less. Recipe for disaster.
I agree with the small caveat that calling this "discussion" is generous.
Twitter / Reddit etc is the biggest losers imaginable just saying "LOL CONCORD 2" over and over again.
There are guys on the Highguard sub who post 50 times a day about how they're glad the game failed. Bottom 1%ers.
