Quite simply, should a game prioritise ease of play over all other mechanical considerations?
A common complaint in regards to, for example, Lost Planet 2 and Monster Hunter Tri is that the mechanics are janked because they don't emphasise playability over other concerns such as characters animations or demanding practice/mastery. This perspective also seems to presuppose that there is a certain "standard" for a game genre; for instance, LP and MHT could be judged against Gears of War and God of War respectively, often argued to have the smoothest-playing and thus best mechanics for their genres.
I'm not sure that this is something I'd agree with personally. Whilst playing Borderlands, for instance, its control scheme and gunplay mirrors Call of Duty almost perfectly. Modern Warfare is a very playable and polished series, so I can understand why the developers would crib gameplay aspects from it but sometimes it felt as if I were simply playing a re-skinned version of Cod4 in the guise of a SF coop game. Don't get me wrong, I think Borderlands is a very good game, and it is certainly not a CoD clone, but on a mechanical level I didn't find it particularly distinctive or memorable. If you simply borrow the mechanics of another game without offering significant tweaks or additions, the result will be homogeneity, no matter how games might differ on the surface.
Another example could be survival horror games. In the early days of Silent Hill and Resident Evil, those games were effective as horror because of your vulnerability due to stiff controls and an often obstructive camera. It didn't promote playability but it certainly offered a distinctive experience and created a whole new genre of games. Once Resident Evil allowed the player to move and shoot much more naturally in the fourth entry, it became a sublime third-person action game but as a result it had a rather different mood and feel. I found nothing about it particularly scary, nor did it bear much semblance to its forebears. Although Resident Evil 4 is still a great game, I think it was in retrospect the beginning of the end for Resident Evil. Perhaps I was the only person to find Resident Evil 5 had little to offer the action or horror genres, retreading the same ground as the previous game except with poor coop implementation and terrible inventory .
Tl;dr In my opinion playability shouldn't be the only yardstick by which we judge how a game feels and plays, because that kind of thinking promotes standardisation and reduces the range of experiences games might offer.
Game Mechanics: Is Playability All That Matters?
The mechanics of a game are never a problem to me, as long as the game has something unique or well done in another portion of its design, i will play it.
Prioritising flight over fight is a valid choice for horror games I think. However, turret-style movement has no possible justification and needed to be removed.
@masterpaperlink: Yeah, that's where I'm coming from in regards to how I approach games.
Either way, I totally agree with both you and @masterpaperlink, if a game got some solid stuff to stand on other than its controls, it's good enough for me. Prime example, again, being Silent Hill. :)
It's like people who first and foremost only judge a game wether the graphics are mindblowing or not. It just doesn't make sense.
For me personally Game Mechanics or gameplay is everything. Not to say every FPS should feel like Halo or COD, but it must feel quick and responsive. I say this because for me, story in a game is never the draw. It benefits the game very much, absolutely, but if gameplay isn't there to sustain long enough for me to experience the story, the game has failed in my opinion.
A game has to have something really REALLY special going on for me to deal with poor controls.
I believe playability is priority #1 but I do find too many people are too quick to label "different" as "poor".
I've played a lot of games where the controls seemed shitty at first but got much better as I got more comfortable with them.
But at the same time, there is something to be said for controls that are so well done that they just instantly feel natural.
@ProfessorEss: True, I don't think anyone would want to argue poor controls are a good thing in-themselves. "Difficult" or "requiring some time and patience to master" would be more what I'm talking about. In some games I think it makes sense to have controls that you can't master straight away, thus giving the player a sense of accomplishment and progression. So by playability I don't simply mean polished controls but also those that are instantly easy to pick-up and play; they're related but I'm not sure they're the same thing. For instance, I think Demon's Souls has a great control scheme, even if it deliberately makes certain actions difficult or taxing.
What you said about people being quick to label what is different hits the nail on the head.
Not everything should have exactly the same mechanics but there is a reason that games you listed (COD, God of War, Gears of War) are considered the 'standard'; it's because they have extremely responsive controls. I'm sure I speak for a vast majority of gamers in saying that when I press a button I want that action to be done straight away, and if it doesn't happen then it's really frustrating and I think it's poor design.
If you want the controls to take time to master developers shouldn't just make them slow and unresponsive, they should add depth to them by adding new mechanics that work together and allows players a choice of which mechanics to use in certain situations. That way the skill comes into it by selecting the right mechanics at the right time.
I agree with what you're saying though, especially at the end. Developers shouldn't just copy games that are the standard and call it a day, but this choice has to have a reason otherwise it's frustration with no point. Ideally, it should have a pay-off that makes the time investment worth it, whether it's being able to use more powerful weaponry more skillfully, etc.
Perhaps the average gamer wants playability over all else, and that's fine. But I think they must also realise that those standards don't apply to every game, and those standards imply a certain degree of sameness/homogenisation.
" If you want the controls to take time to master developers shouldn't just make them slow and unresponsive, they should add depth to them by adding new mechanics that work together and allows players a choice of which mechanics to use in certain situations. That way the skill comes into it by selecting the right mechanics at the right time. "This.
This reminds me of playing Starcraft 1. The AI on units is sometimes awful (units taking the longest possible route to somewhere, units getting stuck on eachother, etc). I've said many times that so often, skill in a game like that is more about being good at subverting the brokenness of it. As in, you know the game so well, you know where, when, and how the game will break, and you are good avoiding it or using it to your advantage.
A good example of the opposite would be something like Street Fighter. The controls are very responsive but they take years to really master. Personally, I think "mastering controls" should not be about learning to accept their "unresponsiveness" and work around it, but learning the ins and outs and complexity of them. Having slow, unresponsive, janky, or frustrating controls and then claiming you need to "take the time to master them" is lazy on the part of the developer. It's like in say, a bad hockey video game where if you turn up the difficulty, the AI doesn't get any better or more difficult, but their goalie stops more shots and your goalie lets in more, completely at random. It's lazy and stupid.
As for copying controls or mechanics that work and feel natural and are the "standard" for a particular genre (Gears, GoW, CoD, etc), allows the developer to focus on the things that do make their game unique, such as story, atmosphere, etc.
I mean, the reason a game like the Saboteur doesn't fare well is because it's a game that relies heavily on environment traversal and when you compare that to a game like Assassin's Creed 2, which arguably has the most fluid and natural traversal mechanics of any game so far, the Saboteur in comparison just feels bad.
As for copying controls or mechanics that work and feel natural and are the "standard" for a particular genre (Gears, GoW, CoD, etc), allows the developer to focus on the things that do make their game unique, such as story, atmosphere, etc. I mean, the reason a game like the Saboteur doesn't fare well is because it's a game that relies heavily on environment traversal and when you compare that to a game like Assassin's Creed 2, which arguably has the most fluid and natural traversal mechanics of any game so far, the Saboteur in comparison just feels bad. "Re: Saboteur, this is true, although I'll have to take this on faith as I haven't played the game. But really all the Saboteur has going for it is it being parkour in a different setting with guns, explosions, and titties, so doing things hamfistedly highlights that it's a poor knock-off. What made Assassin's Creed great is that its parkour gameplay ties in with its themes and its story, as well as being a fairly unique gameplay concept that you associate with the series. Even if Saboteur's mechanics were up to AC's standard, it would still probably be a soulless and derivative game.
As for the notion that it frees a developer to focus on things that make a game unique, I'm not sure you can or should separate the mechanics from the story and the atmosphere. Although the idea sounds good in principle, in practice a developer who goes as far as copying mechanics will probably not be focusing on creating a distinctive and coherent game world but will rather aim for the same market as bought those standard games (thus a bunch of games with mostly superficial differences).
Once Resident Evil allowed the player to move and shoot much more naturally in the fourth entry, it became a sublime third-person action game but as a result it had a rather different mood and feel. I found nothing about it particularly scary, nor did it bear much semblance to its forebears. Although Resident Evil 4 is still a great game, I think it was in retrospect the beginning of the end for Resident Evil. Perhaps I was the only person to find Resident Evil 5 had little to offer the action or horror genres, retreading the same ground as the previous game except with poor coop implementation and terrible inventory .Dead Space use the same perspective as RE4 and RE5 and I found it to pretty nerve wracking at times. RE4 might not have been terrifying, but it had it's moments. RE5 was just awful, due to the action coop. But in all of those games, the mechanics are essentially the same. It's just a matter of implementation. When RE4 came out with the new over-the-shoulder perspective, it was generally praised as it made the game better in terms of it's playability. Fast forward to Dead Space and RE5, the mechanics are the same, but the quality of the experience has everything to do with the game, and not the mechanics.
How much scarier would it be if you were as vulnerable as many of the characters in Silent Hill?
I've recently started playing Penumbra, and I can say that it is chilling. But in terms of mechanics, it's fairly standard for a PC first person game.
Mechanics can ruin a game, like Alone in the Dark (or so I've heard), and atmosphere can render great mechanics moot (RE5).
" in practice a developer who goes as far as copying mechanics will probably not be focusing on creating a distinctive and coherent game world but will rather aim for the same market as bought those standard games (thus a bunch of games with mostly superficial differences). "You could argue (as many have) that Braid is very derivative of the Mario series of platformers. And you wouldn't really be wrong. But what it adds and does differently is completely unique and in fact, the copying of Mario-style elements is a positive thing because of the juxtaposition of what is so familiar with what is so different.
There's nothing wrong with stealing a game mechanic if it's a good idea. Look how many racing games now have the "rewind" feature, a feature that makes the notoriously hard to penetrate racing genre more playable and less frustrating for more people.
I don't think the early Resident Evil and Silent Hills game were good because of their shitty controls, but in spite of them. There were lots of other games of that era that had nearly identical controls and they weren't as good. There's a reason why games aren't made that way anymore either.
My point is a developer does not need to try to re-invent the wheel every time they make a game, but can use what has worked for other games in the past, and improve upon them. If you're spending all your development time and resources to make a unique control scheme or reinvent mechanics, you don't have that time or resources to create a unique game world. If people spend a lot of time playing, say, CoD, when they go to play another FPS, their instinct is going to be to pull the right trigger to shoot, the left trigger to aim down the sights, etc. If you change that for no reason other than to be unique, you're just going to frustrate people.
My point is a developer does not need to try to re-invent the wheel every time they make a game, but can use what has worked for other games in the past, and improve upon them. If you're spending all your development time and resources to make a unique control scheme or reinvent mechanics, you don't have that time or resources to create a unique game world. If people spend a lot of time playing, say, CoD, when they go to play another FPS, their instinct is going to be to pull the right trigger to shoot, the left trigger to aim down the sights, etc. If you change that for no reason other than to be unique, you're just going to frustrate people. "This is a really good point too. It's the same reason why the PS3, 360, and to a Wii Classic Controller are share a similar button layout. Using what is tried and true is safe and it's what people expect. We also expect the mechanics formula to be tweaked according to the game play, but without making wholesale changes to what works.
It depends on what kind of game it is. In a shooter, such as Gears of War, needs good controls to be great. Other genre's such as survival horror can still be great without the sharpest of the sharp control schemes. See Dead Space.
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