small44 on 13 November 2014
I was having a discussion with Joe Khoury, a producer at Eidos, about the rigors of his job and the subject of evaluating games came up. He basically told us that everyone wants a 90+ on Metacritic, but the grading was entirely too subjective and a single grade to fit every single game is absolutely inadequate. Add to that the fact that a high score at Metacritic will not necessarily translate into high sales, maybe it’s time the gaming industry set a new barometer for games. In these coming blogs I’ll try and put forth the building blocks of ‘Gaming Metrics’, a hopefully better standard for evaluating games.
The first of these ‘Gaming Metrics’ I want to talk about is the openness/linear aspect of the game. It’s something dear to my heart, as a big MMORPG fan, and is also something that can make or break a social game.
So how would I go about building a reference sheet for such a metric?
Well my first instinct is to go over in real life and find something similarly used. And we have just the thing: the index of economic freedom from the heritage foundation (http://www.heritage.org/index/). So how does that index work? The index revolves around four main categories of freedom:
- Rule of Law (property rights, freedom from corruption);
- Limited Government (fiscal freedom, government spending);
- Regulatory Efficiency (business freedom, labor freedom, monetary freedom); and
- Open Markets (trade freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom).
Source: http://www.heritage.org/index/
Can we do something similar for Games? Let’s try it!
First we need to understand what makes a MMORPG great. It’s actually pretty simple: what makes a game great is choice. Yup, that’s it. The more choices you have, the better the choices you can make and the more impact your choices have the better the game will be. Choices make the players involved in the game: no one wants to feel like a sock on a clothesline being pushed further over the pool.
So here are the nominees for induction into the Gaming Metric: Economic Freedom (Or GMEF for short)
1. The character; Levels or Skills?
a. How many classes? Diversity of roles (holy trinity or not, how many different build can someone have?)
b. How many races? Race perks, disadvantages
2. The crafting: afterthought or important?
a. How many professions?
b. Is difficulty linked to levels?
c. Crafting items quality versus solo play/group play/raid play loot
3. The world
a. PVP or PVE?
i. Open world PVP? (instanced or not)
ii. Open world PVE? (instanced or not)
b. How many PVP factions?
4. The quests/story
a. Kill/gather X or story driven?
i. How hard?
b. How much do they lead you to the next part?
5. The hardware
a. How big does your rig have to be?
b. How many concurrent players can a server have?
c. Lag?
6. The money
a. Microtransactions or subscription based?
b. Frown on ‘real to game’ transactions?
7. The content
a. How much of it
b. How fast do you get updates?
c. DLC? Expansions? Future plans?
d. User generated content?
8. The rules
a. Botting or no? Stance on botting?
b. Stance on cheating?
c. EULA
9. Social platform
a. Guild tools depth?
b. Handicapping the social aspects?
i. Group search tools
ii. Guild search tools
iii. Raid search tools
iv. Auction house
This is just a rough idea. If you have anything you want to add please let me know. I’ll work to add depth in the coming months. It’s a cool project!
PS4 - over 100 millions let's say 120m
Xbox One - 70m
Wii U - 25m
Vita - 15m if it will not get Final Fantasy Kingdoms Heart and Monster Hunter 20m otherwise
3DS - 80m
