The 7.5 commandments all video games should obey [I Heart Games]

There’s quite a lot that goes into the creation of a modern game, but if you want to make something that’s enjoyable and not just shovelware calculated purely to turn a profit, there are seven basic rules that your game should follow. Some games have been able to ignore some of these commandments and still be fun, but it doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have squeezed quite a bit more fun out of them had they been followed.

This list is via Cracked and I’m just summarizing here, so click that link for a little more in-depth explanation.

7. Thou shalt allow us to play with our real life friends.
Violators: GTA IV, MotorStorm, Shadowrun

GTA games, while a blast, have blatantly ignored this commandment for years, despite much fan rumbling. The GTA games are incredibly fun, but imagine how much more fun they would be if you could play with your real life friends. Online multiplayer can be fun, but playing against groups of anonymous assholes gets sort of grating after a while. Sure GTA IV made a godzillion dollars in its first week out, but the shelf life and replayability on single player only games only goes so far. Guitar Hero III, Rock Band, Wii Sports, Super Smash Bros. Brawl– what do these zillion dollar games have in common? You can play them in the same room as your real life friends for hours on end.

6. Thou shalt not pad the length of your games
Violators: Mass Effect, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

If you’re advertising that you have say 2000 hours of gameplay, and you know in reality it’s only about 30 hours of gameplay because you’re forcing the players to ride a fucking horse for 20 minutes between objectives, then you deserve to be punched in the balls. Many open-world games in this current generation suffer from this, with gorgeous landscapes and characters with only a relative smattering of content in between. It’s like going to a restaurant and being told that you’re being served this gigantic burger only to find out that it has a plate-sized bun with a tiny, tiny sad piece of meat inside. Boy, that may be a big bun, but it’s not the kind of gorge-yourself-til-you-puke fun you were expecting. Portal was a short game, only about four hours, but it was four condensed hours of fun. Sure they could have made you run down hallways a mile long and added in pointless fetch quests to make it “80+ hours of gameplay”, but they didn’t.

5. Thou shalt not force repetition on the player
Violators: Resident Evil 4, Heavenly Sword, Dead Rising

Okay so I played the hell out of Dead Rising. I even got the super ultra zombie slayer achievement from killing oh I don’t remember a hundred million zombies in a night. Sure it was fun, but Ill probably never play that game again. After countless hours of incredibly repetitive zombie killing, it’s like being on a bad drug or getting stuck playing Minesweeper until dawn– it’s mindless repetition and it only lasts for so long. Don’t make the entire game play exactly the same and don’t force players to repeat the same shit over and over again through poorly designed save checkpoints. As a matter of fact, fuck save checkpoints all together. It’s the 21st century, let someone save whenever the hell they want to. If you build your game’s difficulty around repetition, you suck and I hope your family gets eaten by the undead.

This also relates to my pet peeve about cutscenes, so call this commandment 5.5 A) don’t force players to watch the same fucking cutscene over and over and over again and B) while you’re at it, dont’ force players to watch any cutscenes at all. If I wanted to sit down and watch a movie, I would have popped in a movie, but I want to play a video game. Your cutscene is beautiful and gorgeous and I’m sure it pulls the plot together nicely, but if I want to watch it, I’ll watch it and if I just want to get to more killing, I really don’t want to watch it. Give me the option to watch it later and I’m sure I will. I’m looking at you, Final Fantasy.

4. Thou shalt make killing fun.
Violators: Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, any game where you fight with a sword.

The aforementioned Dead Rising made killing fun. Repetitive as hell, but the reason you can sit down for hours to kill the same wave of zombies over and over again is because it’s fun– because practically everything in the game can be used as a weapon, so there’s a certain amount of sandbox creativity that goes into finding out what does what where. Katana? Lawnmower? terra cotta plant holder? I’ll try them all!

You may have found yourself welling up with rage that Half-Life is on this list and it’s only for one small reason– for the most part, Half-Life is the definition of making killing fun. The gravity gun… oh dear sweet buttery Jesus, the gravity gun is a joy to behold. But it’s an example of starting you off with a shitty weapon as you learn the ropes. The crowbar can be fun, but dammit I want to shoot shit. You can give players better and better weapons, just don’t build things around this… not that Half-Life did entirely, but other games have I just can’t think of them.

Oh, and STOP ALREADY with the games like Oblivion and Resident Evil and WoW where you’re given quests to kill lots of tiny rodent mobs. Everyone fucking hates that. Everyone. Every person on the face of this Earth.

3. Thou shalt admit when enough is enough
Violators: Let’s just say every single WWII game made in the last 5 years.

World War II games, escort missions and the grizzled old space marine. Worn the hell out. Escort missions suck because you’re either defending someone who’s completely helpless and when they get a single scratch on them, you have to start over or you’re defending some stupid AI who just gets in the damn way.

World War II games. I get it. WWII was nasty and long and Hitler was bad n stuff. How many perspectives can you take this from? Apparently about a hundred. What about the WWI games? So trench warfare can be boring, make it exciting. Hell, I bought that stupid History Channel Civil War game just because I was tired of WWII games. Sure the Civil War games was an absolute atrocity of a game, but at least they sort of tried dammit.

2. Thou shalt make sure your games actually work.
Violators: Bully for the 360, The Orange Box for the PS3 and so many others.

Welcome to the era of only mostly-finished games. Just because you can make a great-looking game that’s broken or is incomplete, knowing that you can just patch it later doesn’t mean you should. Stop making beta testers out of early buyers. And if you’re going to charge full price for a finished game only with the knowledge that you’re going to charge players later for the privilege of downloading the rest, you can die in a fire.

1. Better graphics do not equal better games
Violators: Sony, Microsoft, just about every developer has been guilty of this at one time or another.

You really started to see this happen a lot when the PS1 and the GameCube came out and ushered in the true 3D era– countless games were created or re-created just because they were in an 3D environment with little thought to making the game fun other than the fact that you could turn in a complete circle. Sure, games on the PS3 and the 360 look wonderful and all, but add some substance to it. Hire people who understand game design and mechanics. Hire some halfway decent writers.

You know what consoles sell better than any in the entire world? The Nintendo DS and the Nintendo Wii. Why? Not because the games look fantastic, because frankly they look sort of old. But because they’re fun. Because when you take out the advanced bump mapping and bloom lighting and motion capture, you’re left with being forced to make something that’s actually fun and is replayable and enjoyable. Too often, game developers severely skimp on the actual gameplay aspects when they could be focusing more on making something that people would want to play. And it’s been going on for way too long.