{"id":16,"date":"2004-12-20T17:32:05","date_gmt":"2004-12-20T21:32:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=16"},"modified":"2006-08-20T13:21:12","modified_gmt":"2006-08-20T17:21:12","slug":"what-makes-a-game-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2004\/12\/20\/what-makes-a-game-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"What makes a game bad?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Check out this piece<\/a> and the associated comments on Scott Miller’s Game Matters<\/a> blog.<\/p>\n

Tough question, since every bad game is bad in its own way. Since I know strategy games better than any other genre, here’s a quick and dirty guide to making a bad strategy game.<\/p>\n

1. Bad interface – this is the real killer. A good UI can pass by almost unnoticed – look at the elegance of Rise of Nations, for instance. A lot of strategy games confuse complex with complicated and make an interface that tends to the latter. <\/p>\n

2. Backwards priorities – Think about this year’s Superpower 2. Deep and complicated domestic model with a lot of detail on social and economic policy. Now look at the foreign policy\/military model – terrible. People play world politics sims – mostly – because they are interested in wars and diplomacy and all that stuff. By putting more energy into how many options were open to a player who liked variable tax rates, Golemlabs completely missed the boat. The result was one of the most disappointing games of the year.<\/p>\n

3.Quick copies – no game can become a success without seeing a spate of copycats in its wake. Soon after Civilization became a hit, 4x games were all over the place. One of the most ignominious was Activision’s Rise and Rule of Ancient Empires. It had research, city building, warfare – all the stuff that Civ had. But it had only two sides, terrible graphics and no real sense of discovery and expansion. It short, it was Civ-Lite. Look at all those Tycoon games. How many are actually any good? Two? Three? Even Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 and Railroad Tycoon 3 were middling games – and they have real legacies behind them. National Lampoon’s University Tycoon? Rarely have I needed to play a game less to know how much it stinks.<\/p>\n

Feel free to contribute more suggestions. This list is hardly exhaustive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Check out this piece and the associated comments on Scott Miller’s Game Matters blog. Tough question, since every bad game is bad in its own way. Since I know strategy games better than any other genre, here’s a quick and dirty guide to making a bad strategy game. 1. Bad interface – this is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-g","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}