Let’s start with an analogy. Let’s say you’ve just written a short story for class in college. You hand it in to your professor, and get a B. There are plenty of editor’s marks on it: spelling, grammar, some minor organizational stuff. Then there are the overall comments, like “doesn’t flow well” or “theme isn’t well developed enough.”
Now, you are given the chance to revise the paper for a higher grade. You could just revise the former: it’s easy enough to correct grammar mistakes when the professor tells you what they are. If you just change all those in Word and reprint it out, you might get a B+.
The other stuff is harder. It’d effectively take a rewrite to fix. You know the overall structure now that it’s been written out, but you’re basically starting over. You know you can fix those problems, and if you did, you’d get an A, but it’s going to be a lot of work.
I prefer the latter, in every kind of design I do. And I especially recommend it in games.
There have been plenty of games I’ve been involved with designing or testing that have been in that stage. There are parts of the game that we enjoy, and are working OK, but there’s clearly still something wrong. But either we could start patching the game all over the place to try to force the results we want, or we could start over. (We have a leaky boat. We could patch the holes in the boat, though those patches would always show, or we could build a new boat.)
There are many reasons designers are unwilling to teardown. When you’ve invested so much time in a project, it’s tough to just step back and say “this isn’t working, we need to start over.” There will often be complains from playtesters too who have enjoyed so much about the game. I mean, you basically have to tell them that you’re taking away their fun! Such is one of the hardships of game design. What you should strive for is to make a new game that is even better, such that they never pine for the days of that old, broken proto-game.
Doing a teardown is easier when working on a game in your spare time with no deadlines or pressures. In the fast paced world of game design, such luxuries aren’t always possible. I’ve seen plenty of games by the same designers (OK, usually Knizia) that clearly stem from the same idea, but have been released multiple times. There’s some core mechanism in there that’s roughly the same, but a change in scoring that makes it a different game.
Then there is the question of multiple editions. D&D underwent a pretty major teardown. Had D&D never been released in any form before, it’d be much easier to accept for fans that there was this game called D&D, and it has powers and very abstract hit points.
Of course, that’s not the case. The game has been around for over 30 years, and we all have plenty of fond memories of playing with it in a variety of rulesets. It’s also had the problem that the rules tend to be used by people for a lot of different styles of play. In order to support the style of play D&D is best at, the designers really had no choice but to step back and teardown. That meant alienating a lot of players who were using it in other ways. It also meant going to all those fans who have so many fond memories of play and saying “yeah, it’s a good game, but we want to step back and make it better.”
I may not approve of every single design choice that the Wizards team has made, but I wholeheartedly approve that they were able to teardown D&D and rebuild it. There were many core issues of the game that they had tried for many years to patch, but ultimately, the only way to fix a core issue is to change the core.
It just remains to be seen if the final rules will convince enough people that the rebuild is even better than what they were playing before.
Great minds and all that. I just said pretty much the same thing in a comment over on ChattyDM’s blog, but with a slightly different slant.
The way I see it, 98% of 3.5e worked well with only 2% needing fixing. That’s not a reason to do a re-write and risk introducing new bugs. If D&d were an application and me the business analyst (my day job), I’d advise against it.
We’re going to need a new edition to fix the new, as yet unknown, problems very, very soon down the line. There’s going to be killer combos that the designers haven’t spotted, spells that are too powerful and classes that are over- or over-powered in actual play. 3rd Edition has been through all that already.
4th Edition though, is a whole new beastie.
Whereas I’d put the % that needed fixing much, much higher. Plus I’d also argue that fixing 2% doesn’t require releasing a new edition.
As far as future killer combos… yes, there’s going to be bugs for sure, but enough to necessitate a new edition? We’ll see. However, the simpler a ruleset is, the less chance you get hidden bugs like that. Also, 4e is a much more exception based model, which means you can just adjust the exceptions instead of tweaking the core system.
Do you mean the latter, not the former? As it is you say you prefer the B+ approach, then go on to seemingly laud the teardown approach… I’m confused.
That is, of course, what I meant.
Agreed. I’m of the opinion that a good portion of 3rd Edition needed reworking. The real kicker in redesigning this kind of game is that there’s such a vast variety of experiences with it — I may not have liked certain mechanical aspects of my game sessions, yet there are probably many many others who have no complaints at all.
Anyway, I’m also glad to see Wizards ballsy enough to do such a heavy redesign, and what they’ve showed us so far looks promising. Whether it can stand as solidly a few years down the road remains to be seen, but I guess my game group and I will just find out for ourselves.
For me it really just displays that there are people at Wizards who care about things other than simply making money. They realize that improving the core game of D&D will make them more in the long run because they’re trying to make it a better game and not just hack out content that doesn’t solve any of the problems.
Tearing you own work down shows self-awareness and commitment to quality rather than a commitment to ‘finishing.’ I would have never, ever torn down a high school English paper because the objective was to complete it rather than work anything notable. By the same token, there is an entire completed novel sitting on my hard drive that I’ve shit-canned. It was rife with plot holes and hackneyed developments (largely because I started it in High School… remind anyone else of when the read Ergaon?). Anyway, I realized that the great story wasn’t the one I wrote, but events that formed the background of that original novel. Its a painful process, but you’re better off (in all creative fields) going with your gut if it just isn’t satisfying you.
I hope I’m not bringing up old issues, but
Speaking of “commitment to finishing over quality.”
Does the video game industry’s manual fixation on opening day numbers and pre-release hype fuel the majority of their rushed and shoddy titles?
I’m glad that WotC operate in a realm where gradual sales are acceptable.
But while many video game companies would argue they live in a different word, I wonder if that is a world of their own making.
@ Abe
I agree that the video game industry as a whole has a tendency to release shoddy games, especially during the early part of a new console’s lifespan, just to ‘finish’ them and get them out on the market.
But there are notable exceptions. The Metal Gear Solid series, for instance, takes a long time to release a new game. The last two playstation consoles have not had a metal gear solid game available at the time of their release. But when the games came out, boy were they great!
Another great example is Blizzard, with the Warcraft and Starcraft series (can’t comment on WoW cause I don’t play that). There is a long time between games in the series, but every game is a very well designed game – usually a classic.
So there are still “real” video game designers/design companies out there that are willing to wait seemingly forever to release a new game, only to have it turn out to be totally worth the wait. But there are also a lot of ‘get it to the stores now’ designers/companies that are more interested in making an acceptable game that reaps huge profits instead of making an honest-to-God good game.
This is an old post, but I thought I’d add my view of the source of the problem in Sultan’s post; the latter games are running on cashflow issues that force them to get it out:
The simple discrepancy between constant wages and big returns at the end of development means that non-established companies need to focus on small, frequent returns. But fashion and buzz mean that you get much more money from a big release. Now if graphics is a pre-requisite for buzz more than gameplay, then the best way to do that is to make a crappy but awesome looking game. If demos sell stuff not magazine/website pics and trailers, then time length gets cut, or you develop for a phone where graphics can be bad.
Interest payments and fading savings push you to crash something, and it’s generally wherever it will hurt the least in terms of starting sales. With the hope that when that cash comes back in thanks to the big release and stabalises you, you can fix whatever you couldn’t before. And hope the gamers forgive you.
There are alternative models, like cheaper pre-orders when the game is still in development, but these have not yet got off the ground much, and tend to keep the same problems with interest payments as debt funded development, except that you are in debt to hardcore early-adopter customers instead of banks or publishers. Naturally this tends to produce a different kind of game!
In a certain respect many games already work like this, in that if you buy a game you will spend the first month helping to finish it’s testing, but this is without the extra influence that the other model would give to the guinee pigs!