One small correction

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Friday, July 12, 2013, 00:34 (4196 days ago) @ Cody Miller

A decent designer looks at the evidence, uses their mind, and can see the truth without people having to explicitly TELL them what's wrong.

This is why Portal 2 dropped challenges and advanced chambers. "We looked at Steam, PSN and XBL, and only like 11% of the people playing the game ever tried them, and fewer than 1% finished them all. So we didn't put them into Portal 2"

Well, guess what? Those things were awesome.

It's possible to make something so awesome that no one can appreciate it. There is a point of diminishing returns along the axis where excellence and accessibility meet. A lot of the things you like are at or beyond it.

I'm sure a minority of people use forge, yet if it were taken out that'd be a huge problem. Most people probably never used films in Campaign, but they are gone now and tons of people miss it.

That's very true, and does underscore why Bungie has many times-- not always-- gone above and beyond for something they think is cool, even if they know not everyone appreciates it.

Likewise if you have to create 'incentives' for casual players to keep playing, then you're going to make your game worse for the people who actually do like to replay, an decrease the overall quality if your game.

Not necessarily. The above examples, for instance. Forge and films create incentives for certain kinds of players to replay a game, but do nothing to make the game worse for everyone else, except insofar as any zero sum game analysis of the situation suggests that money and man-hours spent on one feature could have been spent on something else.

Halo 4 is the biggest seller of the Halo series appealing to the most people, but is it the best? I think we all know the answer to that.

Umm, what?

No, it isn't.

http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=halo

Perhaps it reached some particular milestone faster than all others, but it hasn't been out long enough to even surpass Halo 2. So far it has only outsold ODST, the original, and Halo Wars.

Don't look at the 'evidence' look at your gut and make a game that is simply fun for its own sake. Bungie used to do this well: you know your game is good when it gets delayed because all your employees are playing netgames instead of working (then blame it on the boxes).

A lot of what we have heard about internal playtesting of Destiny suggests that exactly this is going on. Give me day one digital downloads on all platforms and screw the boxes :)