Feature Creep Hell

(Except Nintendo whose new Revolution controller is a guaranteed system seller - for the PlayStation 3.)


Oh, snap! Totally taking the ease of use out of the argument from a guy who's never played it, while ever journalist who did said it was more accure than a keyboard and mouse.


Why complain about games being more difficult to get into if he's going to blast that without having any informaton on it at all and the one company that is trying to bring in new gamers, and ease of use?

Really enjoyed the article and I think all points hold valid. Its painfully obvious that if you don't "Game" a decent amount most games these days are hard to get into. I have a buddy (By the way I'm just your average college age dude) who played NES and SNES but then he just kind of stopped. I continued playing and now sometimes we'll hang out but if the game is something like Halo 2 it becomes increasingly difficult for him to get into it because there is a certain level of shock just jumping in.

Now I'd like to say I differentiate him from say a guy or gal who plays a lot of videogames but just hasn't played Halo or Halo 2. Its obvious to me that if I jump into say, a game of Day of Defeat Source where I neither played original DOD I still will catch on faster due to my more game time. Granted there is a clear difference from just feature creep and total lack of experience, but I think that games these days can be daunting for even someone who has a lot of older school games. Hell, it can be downright humiliating jumping into a game that I have never played before.

jeez -- ya think that website has feature creep? just give me one or two pages at the most to scroll through-- rather than click through four pages like a pretty little print magazine. oooo how innovative! :\

Stop making up new definitions for words that already have been defined. This is not feature creep.

RTFM

In terms of the little things, Half-Life 2 did a good job of explaining some of these within the game. Take for example, that early on, when given only a crow bar, crates that were in the way were easily smashed apart. Another example would be that the association of the lambda sign and supplies was made fairly early.

I guess the point is that even though the game was made for veterans with a high expectation, the game was also tailored to the beginner crowd, probably what made this game along with the original so accessible, and thus popular.

Let's see how many "features" we can think of that have creeped into more and more games:

Keep in mind these are "creep" features that have showed up in games that either don't need them or would be better off without them.

*leaning left and right (perfect example: the FEAR implementation of this is nearly useless for some reason. lean is only good if you can lean far enough to enable shooting past the point you could hit standing behind cover. In FEAR your view tilts to the side a bit but your gun doesn't actually move more than an inch to the side, preventing you from actually aiming/shooting around your cover. Rainbow Six did Lean well almost eight years ago. wtf, over.)
*reloading of weapons, especially manually
*rate of fire on weapons
*view zooming, especially on non-scoped weapons
*a Walk button or Always Run as an option when the game has no stealth element and running footsteps aren't loud
*colored lighting
*3D positional audio
*rotating/animated brushes and objects
*little fauna running around, especially when you can't kill them
*skeletal systems in character models
*"pathfinding AI" - why call it that when it can't find it's way anywhere?
*"realistic" fog/smoke that isn't very realistic
*"realistic" trees and grass that still aren't very realistic
*ragdoll model physics
*animated lips (and we're still extremely far from looking natural, i might add)
*shadowing
*bump mapping (especially when it looks like plastic)
*bloom

Great article. Keep em coming Remo you filthy bastard...

i dont know about you guys but i could sure go a Carlsberg right now. it's probably the best beer in the world.

lol...this is the type of discussion I remember Warren Spector giving lectures in interviews about. Game design and all that...now is "Feature Creep" the new face name they're giving bad games nowadays?

John Tynes has been a game designer and writer for fifteen years, and is a columnist for the Stranger, X360 UK, and the Escapist. His most recent book is Wiser Children, a collection of his film criticism.

Game designer and doesn't bother mentioning which games he's worked on yet tells us about his book of Film criticism??? Guffaw.

WTF another "Dumbing down gaming" article. Accessible to non gamers means suck. Fucking stuck on suck.

If there was no feature creep, what would Lionhead games be then??

That's kind of how I felt recently.

* Note for american readers: when I say "football", read "soccer".

I am learning to play Pro Evolution Soccer 5 (Winning Eleven 9 I suppose). I've always been a fan of football and videogames, but the last football game I enjoyed was Goal for the NES, so I assumed I'd finally learn a new title. I've played previous Winning Eleven versions before and got totally schooled.

I picked up this game and started to run throught the tutorials to learn how to play it - which button passes, which button shoots, stuff like that.

What the hell.

The game does have shooting and passing buttons, but man, that are so many features/combinations possible I'm feeling like it might be easier to learn a new arcade fighting game. Seriously. There's SO MUCH STUFF YOU CAN DO - all kinds of ball touches, tricks, dribbles, and all kind of strategies that can be toggled on real time through the combination of some buttons, that it really feels a lot of a drag just to learn the game to be able to have fun with it. I like depth, I'm a QW player, but this is too much.

It looks like the football games have achieve such a saturated position that the only way they can add something is adding new crazy dribbling tricks and other stuff that requires you to use 100 joystick buttons at the same time. It's insane.

I'm kind of enjoying the game, but man... this is a football game, not a MMORPG. I want to have fun, not to waste hundreds of hours learning how to play it.

Yet another "game design" article suffering from the idea that the broad category of what we refer to as video games has anything collectively in common besides microchips and interactivity. So outside of make the interaction feel good, which he does touch on, you can't apply ideas across the board and expect everything to be better as a result.

I also often wonder what the motivation of a lot of these ideas are. They generally are presented in an "improving the art" context, but a lot of the arguments end up talking about how to pull more people in or sell more games... "Damn marketing! Here's how to market more effectively..."

On the one hand, I 100% agree, I think too much attention is paid to new features that don't really add anything to gameplay, and other parts of gameplay or stoytelling (especially) can suffer.

On the other hand, I disagree, simply because I think that over time games need to add more to the experience than just more levels or whatever.

On the other other hand, I'd pay full price for Diablo 3 even if it was just 5 more mapsets/monsters and items, maybe a new class or two. No new features, no new bullet points. I'm know that Diablo 3 will really be a 3D game with a completely new engine and possibly frustrating camera controls and 10 dozen new whizbang things to do that have little to do with what makes D2 a great game. farming for runecloth *cough* Sure, it's Blizzard, so I know they'll do it right, but there are other old classic games that I love that I'd play if it was just more of the same.

DNF = Ultimate Feature Creep

Don't agree. Games are an evolved medium. I don't expect someone who has never read a book to dig into the Baroque cycle, and I don't expect someone who has never played a game to dig into competitive FPS multiplayer

There are (and have been, and will be) plenty of gateway games. Doesn't matter if it's Bejweled or Katamari. People aren't stupid. If they enjoy what they play, or what you show them, genuinely enjoy it, they'll explore and learn more on their own.

I think it's pretty much the same as anything else. There's more games that assume more for the hardcore players and there's starting to be more games now for the new players. I saw 7 year old girl stuck on a Nintendo DS at Best Buy, I thought that was pretty cool since I haven't seen girls in general interested in video games for a pretty long time.

The ICO team's approach to this problem is pretty neat. They practice something called "subtractive design", where they don't implement features that they can't do an excellent job on. The result is that while it doesn't have all the wizz-bang features of regular games, the existing features are fantastically-refined.

The team's slideshow on their process: http://www.thelastcandle.net/gallery/icodesign

Feature creep is not usually an issue with sequels, it's usually a problem that keeps first titles from shipping. It's a symptom of an inexperienced team. Sequels that manage to come out with regularity are usually pretty organized (like Tony Hawk and Madden). They pick their 3 new features and then they make the sequel revolve around them.

Valve took ~5 years to make HL2, but that probably wasn't feature creep. I think Valve, like Blizzard, goes for many more iterations over greater periods of time than most companies. Personally I think there are diminishing returns in iteration. At some point you'd be better off creating new content than just polishing the same content, enabling you to make a game every 2 years instead of every 5.

so true... playing a great game like Half Life 2 I often think about how difficult
it would be for a beginner to get into the game with all the esoteric skills and
knowledge that's required. But that doesn't have much to do with feature creep
imo. it's simple things like mouse/keyboad control that have been part of
FPS games from the beginning that are the biggest challenge to learn.
Once you learn to move around and manipulate the environment, the laws
governing the game should be pretty intuitive assuming the developer
did a decent job designing the game.

I think this is another thing that online distribution can help prevent.

more like sequel creep. most of the games that get full of gimmicky stuff are ones rushing to get another version out every year or two years.

but I disagree totally with the idea games need to be simpler for people who won't learn them. you know what that equals? games without gameplay... virtual chats.

From reading the comments, it seems that there are many definitions of feature creep. Ease of use for new gamers, extra options that serve little to no purpose, simple = better hence complex = worse, etc.

I honestly don't think things have changed really. Think about the games you have played 10 years ago. Some people have different gateways into gaming. What one thinks is ridiculously hard to figure out is nothing to another.

The new gamer doesn't know that these features are new or cliches. It's the everyday gamer that complains about everything what should or shouldn't be in a game. We either want something totally new and revolutionary or something exactly like a game we've played before. While the newbie gamer is enjoying his experience we're noticing all the faults that could easily be ignored.

I'm being very general here, so please don't take offense.

Yes, I especially like graphics feature creep, look what happened to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

having a girlfriend who really isn't into video games i've struggled against this feature creep for the entire year we've been dating. i tried to get her into the silent hill series of games, figuring the emphasis on atmosphere and plot would entice her book loving side.

but then i had to explain the "surivival horror mindset" of glistening objects, picking up everything you possibly can, ammo conservation, etc etc.

and i realized that so many games are built around this assumed skillsets that he talks about.

then i introduced her to katamari damacy and the beauty of the game truely came into focus. after that we played some super smash bros. melee, i got her started on indigo prophecy, and i'm hoping to get her to start a metroid prime save some time.

that's when i realized that the single factor that joins all these games together is that they have moderately simple controls and they all work within a genre that is either new or revitalized (indigo prophecy and the dying adventure genre).

it's when you look at the really trite and bloated genres: action, RPG, etc (but, well, let's see what Dragon Warrior 8 does, since that series has always been known for it's resistence to that latest and greatest) that you see this feature creep thing.

taking this into consideration along with the inability to draw in new markets (if you can't play the game why buy it?) it really makes me wonder why companies keep pumping out the same derivative crap year after year. shouldn't you want to expand your markets?

Oh nos! They'll figure out the secret of our success! (Just make it accessible.)

I think the games he's talking about are from genres that stress realism (not in terms of content but in terms of immersion). Reality is complicated. Naturally, a game that tries very hard to simulate reality through graphics and physics and AI is going to become more complicated.

Teams need to start with a solid, but achievable, base of features and then start adding once they are done those. Some devs try that, but they add features before others are done.

what a fun, sexy time for you all

I personally don't see it that way. At least in many cases form follows function in games nowadays. All the extras aren't needed to grasp the gameplay.

The whole Feature Creep phenomina is, in fact, why Nintendo has remained successful all these years and been able to re-image their classic characters countless times.

Nintendo takes great pains to make sure that their first party games are as intuitive as possible. They aren't against adding new features at all, but they have to feel like natural extensions of the franchise.

You can see this philosophy taken to its extreme with the new revolution controller.

Really I think this is one of the reasons that the Revolution may do so well.


Make the games simple and fun, look at sonic the headgehog for the genesis.

I like the article a lot, but I personally think the font size is way too small. I can blow it up with a browser command, but it screws up formatting. I hope they enlarge the font eventually.

I like the article's layout. Escapist Magazine has a snazzy little website!

If feature creep was a person I would shoot it inna face >:(

srsly...games these days have so many buttons that i have to remember that it becomes frustrating to play.