Thus, as soon as I heard that Valve was starting an Early Access program, I knew we wanted to take part with Offworld Trading Company. The logistics of managing this group – with NDAs, physical copy protection, and bi-weekly patches – were a nightmare but much of what went right with the game can be traced to feedback from this group, which kept us on the right track. In contrast, we recruited a private external testing group from the community to play Civilization 4 over 18 months before we shipped. I saw this first-hand with Civilization 3 and 4 the former had no external feedback before shipping and thus had numerous gameplay and balance issues that would have been easy to fix if we had simply known about them. No one knows a game both better and worse than the development team, which understands why every decision was made but is also blind to how the game appears to new players.Īt Mohawk, we believe that games need outside feedback as soon as possible. Basic assumptions about how the game should be played might be wrong, and a community more dedicated to winning can easily find holes in the balance. Often, this discovery is not made until shortly before shipping when the game is finally played outside of the development team. The most common problem in the games industry is waste – wasted time, wasted effort, and wasted money on design ideas that aren’t actually fun in practice.
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