Max Nichols

This is now the third of the Trails games I've beaten (or am about to beat, rather) and I looooove them, but

but

All three have had brutally plodding, momentum-destroying final dungeons. They are experts at making me exhausted and convincing me that I want the game to just end already

#nopg

It’s kinda surprising how often this happens. I see it all the time, hahah

Of course, by the time you’re finalizing dialog it’s often too late to change the pacing, but still. Just rub it in will ya, hahah

A screenshot from Trails of Cold Steel 2. The upper left has text that says “Infernal Castle - 3rd Stratum End”. There is a cat talking. The dialog box says “Finally… Whew. That took way too long.” The color is terrible because it’s a photo of a tv screen.

Pro tip:

If your characters are commenting on the bad pacing, consider that it may be bad for the player, too xD

I think the main difference is that successfully returning is rarely in question, and they often have “warp home” consumable items. So to ACTUALLY hit this they need to make the return journey meaningfully difficult, which I have definitely not seen in an RPG

I feel like any dungeon crawler where you need to try to return from expeditions with supplies, which you can drop if you die, probably hits this? It’s not my most played subgenre so I don’t have examples off-hand though

The Slender Toilet isn’t real, the Slender Toilet can’t hurt me

I do think I did you a disservice quoting your thread then doing mine here.

I was imagining all the cases I’ve seen of leadership listening to — frankly influencers, not even players per se, and doing a bad job of filtering & interpretation.

But of course most advice is assuming functional orgs

That is a good point! I will watch your video

I do suspect that we're talking at kinda cross-purposes here a little bit, maybe thinking about different kinds of decisions at different scopes or points in time. When we get down to brass tacks and specific examples we seem to agree.

I don't think it's just that. I am saying that I want more creative leaders who make strong decisions without any input _at all_ from users.

I want to play, and work on, games that are catering to an individual vision holder's tastes and artistic goals above and beyond whatever users are saying.

Right!

What I'm trying to say is that, if we're making a work of art, it doesn't always matter if some users are complaining. In fact, I doubt it's possible to make something really compelling that doesn't turn off some users.

Making "users stop complaining" is often not an important goal

That I definitely agree with!

Even that usual framing—that users can explain their feelings, not solutions—can mislead teams into treating all negative feelings as important, actionable problems.

I would never suggest that users should be ignored outright!

But I don’t think it’s correct to say that they should always be heeded (I don’t think you said that), or even even that their inarticulate feelings are always useful to act upon

I think our industry has a terrible dearth of authorial intent in projects above indie scope, and many leaders that are willing to listen to influencers or streamers or loud reddit threads over their own devs. That’s why I push back

Honestly, I’m even a little skeptical about that common wisdom. One player’s “wrong” can easily be another player’s “right”, and we can’t please everyone, right?

Maybe it’s ok if our game just isn’t to their taste.

I think scale can be a huge factor, yeah.

The old chestnut “listen to their problems, not their solutions” is a good starting point. But frankly not every player represents every other player, or your own artistic vision.

Sometimes it’s ok for someone to have a problem that we never plan to solve

bsky.app/profile/mark...

Very true! Utterly dissimilar examples.

It takes a lot of discipline and very clear vision to be exposed to all that and still hold your course against ALL the feedback you perceive.

For 100% of the feedback you hear to be "this thing is frustrating" and say "no, I am the designer, the artist, I know that this thing is important."

And... listening to vocal minorities is effortless. Unavoidable, even. And you have this insidious thing that happens where ALL the feedback you're getting is from this narrow cross-section. It is your entire window into the player experience. You're blind to problems that this subset doesn't see.

Like

I think as game devs we often exist in this vacuum where we don't get to really see information, especially in short feedback loops, about how our work is landing. We're desperate for evidence of how our work is landing and how it's being taken and experienced.

Aonuma: With fan sites and Miiverse, its almost as though we’re sitting in the same room [as the fans], because there’s no go-between; it’s direct. But with regard to how fan voices or fan opinion affects my daily work and my creative process, I certainly have the fans in mind when I’m creating something, and I want to create something that will make them happy, but it’s my creative responsibility to also give them something they didn’t know they wanted. An element of surprise always has to be there, because I’m a creative person; it’s my job. … I like to leave a little bit of distance between myself and my fans, because it’s that distance that allows me the space that I need.

I think it can be important to listen to feedback from communities or players in very controlled ways, but taking their opinions as truth and their problems as your problems is a huge danger that must be carefully managed.

I identify much more with what Aonuma says here:

I guess my experience in games has been one of slavish devotion to the words of every streamer or redditor or esports player with a platform.

Where exactly are these teams that are NOT listening to their players to the degree that it's causing them problems? I want to work there instead, hahah

I've worked as a designer on a MOBA team where I had to take direction from a "Balance QA team", comprised mostly of esports players we hired from MOBA communities, even if I disagreed with them. I, the character designer, basically just became the implementer of these folks' feedback.

But I've seen large GAAS teams that practically listen to their games' reddit as a creative director. I've never seen a game that ignores their reddit.

I've seen CEOs that follow twitter influencers for the game, and take their feedback as gospel.

The reality of course is that this is nuanced and can't be summarized as "we should listen to players" or "we shouldn't", since at SOME level you have to just do basic, like, playability testing and balancing, which inevitably requires at least observing players.

I don't fully disagree with Robin-Yann here, but I think I've seen FAR more problems caused by listening to players, than solved.

Listening overmuch biases towards vocal minorities and shortteam bandaids, and diffuses the vision/focus.

I've seen more games ruined by this than vice versa.

Not to put Luis on the spot here, but this seems like a pretty clearcut illustration of a source of FOMO that only affects games:
bsky.app/profile/beet...

I will abstain from trying to define what's normal here, hahah

My impression is that fewer people feel that way about other mediums, but who knows what kind of distortions I'm looking at it all with

I know for myself a lot of this feeling stems from being a game designer, who:
1) Wants to stay abreast of trends and boundaries being pushed.
2) Am surrounded by interesting discussion of many games. A zeitgeist.

But I see players who are not devs or professionals with the same feelings