Samstag, 3. März 2012

Small mistakes big effects

This is about skyrim and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and how 2 very small mistakes had huge impact on my gamimg experience.

So im into Skyrim 50 hours and Amalur 30.
Obviously i had a good time with both of theese games, but at some point 20 hours into amalur everything started reminding me of how much better everything(except the combat) is done in skyrim, and how i felt way more imersed into skyrim then amalur.
But i didnt stop playing amalur cause it had one critical feature skyrim is missing.

PUT EVERYTHING INTO JUNK.
I remembered how terrible the itemhandling in skyrim was, how i wasted atleast 3 hours of my gamingtime scrolling through my inventory, selling stuff.
And amalurs is equaly terrible, but in amalur i could put all the items im gonna sell anyway into junk, and then sell all the junk with one button.
But whats wrong with amalur? well there are lots of minor flaws like all the gameplayelemts that feel like they are just there because every big rpg has to have them, like lockpicking etc.
But the one huge flaw it has, wich would have been easiest to fix, is the camera angle.
All the environments are realy huge and make full use of the vertical spectrum so that everything should feel realy huge and epic.

IF YOU WERN´T LOOKING AT THE FLOOR ALL THE TIME.
Realy i didnt realise that the fat pillars in the starting area actualy were huge trees until 3 hours into the game.
and all the environments are this huge, but you will never know if you dont stand still for a moment and rotate the camera manualy.
And there are no camera settings were you could atleast increase the camera distance, because its literarely hanging 3 feet behind your character (and always facing to the floor).

And i think i know the reason why both theese mistakes never were adressed.
QA focus is mainly on functionality, not if a game is fun. Cause gues what, professional testers are not realy able to have fun with a game when they have to play it every day, and all the same parts again and again.
For the fun part they usually do focus group tests, but those people are no professionals. They maby recognize that something feels off, but they wont know its the camera. Or they wont get enough time to play, to recognize theese mistakes, cause they only start getting more and more anoying when you are realy deep into the game.

So for the developers this stuff doesnt realy matter, cause everyone who recognizes this mistakes already bought the game, right?
Maby, but theese are just anoying things that are so easy to fix, and that would significantly improve the image of the game and the developer in the long-term memory of the consumer.

As a closing statement i´d just like to say i will always remeber skyrim for the inventory-system from hell.

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