| Khuutra said: I'm not sure that you're talking about "faults", here. There will be aspects of some games that don't appeal to certain value sets, but that doesn't make those aspects into faults. Trying to please everyone doesn't make sense. So do you mean "faults", or do you mean aspects that don't appeal to some audiences? |
I read both faults and aspects as the same thing. There is one side who loves a great story and does not mind dealing with linearity to finish the book on their television screen. Conversely, there are more Western-oriented gamers who want more emergent gameplay where there is a story, but it is a backdrop to the gameworld, which is a sandbox where you can play the story at your own pace and play around aimlessly at times.
Emergent gameplay is a fairly esoteric term that became readily apparent with Ultima Online. Emergent gameplay is where the developers create a game universe with very little restrictions on how players choose to play the game. In the early stages of Ultima Online, every single best weapon and armor was craftable and purchaseable, you lost all iterms and money for dying, guilds could control towns and levy entrance and other taxes on non-guildies to use the town, and players were allowed to grief other players with no penalties of moderation.
Once Tom Chilton AKA Kalgan in the World of Warcraft (WoW) came along, he and a team created a few expansion packs for Ultima Online, which took away some of this emergent gameplay with a focus on dungeon crawling with a group of players. If a player wanted the best gems to put in their weapons and armor, then they needed 10 other players to go into a dungeon with them to get them. The focus went from the players to the developers. The developers became the drivers of the content.
Now Tom Chilton AKA Kalgan is a big wig lead game designer for the World of Warcraft and I believe his area is PvP, but that may have changed since I quit WoW last July.
If you are interested and want a fascinating story on the demise of Ultima Online, then google "Tom Chilton Ultima Online" and few other key words such as demise, downfall or fail. You will get forums filled with multi-paragraph explanations on how they perceived him as killing the experience they loved.
