🚀 go-pugleaf

On Wed, 31 Dec 2014 11:32:55 -0500, "Chuck"
<chuck....@comcast.net> wrote:

>I was just sitting here wondering, how do people decide if a game is good or 
>not?  Is it because you finished it?  You played it multiple times?  You 
>have X number of hours invested in it?  I have my reasons, just curious 
>about others.
>
>Chuck


I've played thousands of games over the past thirty or forty years and
I don't think I can give a straight answer to the question "what makes
a game good". It takes a number of factors, not all of which need to
be met for a game to be "good". If a game manages to satisfy me in a
majority of the categories below, I'll probably rank it favorably.

On the technical front, there are the production values. How are the
graphics, the sound, the music? Are they appealing to the eye and ear?
It is customary for "serious" gamers to pooh-pooh the importance of
these things (after all, we all are in it for the gameplay) but
presentation counts for a lot. Character animation is important too.
And it's more than just the clarity of the textures and the bitrate of
the audio; do the visuals and sound match the tone of the game? 

Next, there are the story, setting, and characters. Do the developers
use all the above to create an immersive world in which to play, or do
they take shortcuts that break the fiction? Some gamers don't care too
much about this sort of thing but it can make or break a game.

Gameplay is the most subjective; is the game in a genre I enjoy, and
does it innovate in any ways? If it does attempt something new, do
these changes add or subtract from the overall effect? Are the
maps/levels well designed, is there a decent learning curve, does the
game offer enough material to keep me interested to the end or does it
blow its load in the first few chapters? 

And then there are the "extras"; is there obtrusive DRM? Is the game a
buggy crashfest? Is it a pay-to-win game or does the game push its DLC
too obviously? Does the game come with any nifty extras or feelies?

Personally, I tend to value high-fidelity graphics and an immersive
gameworld as some of the more important features, although that isn't
to say I dismiss the importance of the rest. I've played butt-ugly
games to the end if the story was intriguing (say, Portal 1986), or
struggled with seemingly endless bugs if the gameplay was just that
good (the original Gothic was like that for me).  I'd consider both
excellent games. 

Generally, if I finish a game it is because it is good; I don't
consider it good just because I finished it. I played through
Terrawars: NY Invasion to the end just because it was so terrible.
Some games I quite enjoy and consider good games even if I don't get
very far in them; for instance, the IL-2 Sturmovik flight-sims are
excellent titles even though I don't think I've played more than an
hour. I often replay "good games" (for instance, System Shock 2 has
seen more than its fair share of reinstalls) but at the same time I
may revist terrible games just to remind myself how bad they are (I've
played Alien Colonial Marines four times and been disappointed each
time).

So there's my answer, wishy-washy as it it may be. I like games that
are well-designed, in one way or another. If the developer was lazy,
and used slapdash graphics or rehashed gameplay or a created a
non-coherent world, then I'll probably look less favorably on the
title. 

Now, if you were to ask "what sort of games do you enjoy" I could
probably give a more satisfying answer, because then I could specify
certain genres or styles of gameplay. But just because a game doesn't
suit my taste doesn't mean I can't recognize it as being good.