but you will need to make sure players actually prefer them to more traditional meth-
ods. And as you gather their feedback, long-term iteration is all but unavoidable. One
example of this happened on my gameThe Suffering. The game was a shooter and we
wanted to make it as console-friendly as possible, and thereby tookDevil May Cryas a
source of inspiration. At the same time, we wanted players to have the freedom to move
through the environment and position and orient their camera like in first-person
shooters or, specifically,Syphon Filterand our ownDrakan: The Ancients’ Gates.Sowe
developed a hybrid targeting system that provided players with intuitive movement
through the world with a single thumb stick, but then allowed for simple targeting of
enemies. We spent a long time developing this system and iterating on it, and felt we
had done a pretty good job. Then we started hearing grumblings from fellow developers
we showed the game to that the controls seemed odd. When we finally put the game in
front of players their feedback almost universally mentioned the controls as what they
liked least about the game. We tried tweaking it a bit more, showed it to some more
players, and found that the controls still seemed odd. At this point we were fairly far
into development and realized that the innovative control scheme we had attempted
simply was not working out. Since it was the control system we were having a problem
with, we decided it made the most sense to imitate some existing control schemes. We
wanted something powerful that we knew players would be familiar with, so we copied
the two-analog-stick scheme that most of the other current console shooters, including
Max PayneandHalo, were using. At this point we were imitating instead of innovating,
but when we put the game in front of players again with our new control scheme they
almost all praised the quality of our controls and then were able to focus their com-
plaints on other aspects of the game.
Particularly in action games, when your controls are perfect, the wall separating
players from the game-world will disappear and they will start to feel like they truly are
the game-world character. This is the ultimate sign of an immersive game, and achiev-
ing this effect is impossible without strong controls. In a game where that level of
immersion is possible, the controls must be completely invisible to players. This can be
frustrating to a designer. Why work so hard on something that, if implemented per-
fectly, will be completely invisible? The designer must realize that it is the
transparency of controls that allows players to enjoy the rest of what the game has to
offer.
Output and Game-World Feedback ...................
While the player’s ability to intuitively control the game-world may be key to a success-
ful game, outputting vital information about that game-world to players is just as
important. Computer games contain numerous complex systems, commonly perform-
ing more calculations than a human would ever be able to track. Indeed, that is the area
where computer games excel. Condensing that massive amount of data into its most
instructive form and communicating that information to players is key to a
well-designed output system.
Consider a strategy game in which players have a number of units scattered all
over a large map. The map is so large that only a small portion of it can fit on the screen
at once. If a group of the players’ units happen to be off-screen and are attacked but play-
ers are not made aware of it by the game, players will become irritated. Consider an
136 Chapter 7: The Elements of Gameplay