Quote:
|
Originally Posted by bhlloy
Ultimately more people want to have an enjoyable game rather than get canned in a realistic manner.
|
I agree entirely.
This is something I talked to customers about many years ago when I was involved at WS. Where we basically came out on it is that some people were interested in it, but they were not interested in any of the realistic type of features that could bring it about. In other words, better in theory than practice.
Examples of things at least tangential in my view:
- Getting fired/fan pressure not just for poor results but for trading/not playing popular players. There's a sense of wanting to treat the game as dry strategy, but then have outcomes that don't correspond with such a thing.
- Had a conversation a while ago here about not being able see ratings of players on other teams in a college bball game. Basically came out with the response of 'yeah that's realistic, but it's not fun'.
- Conference movement well before the recent craziness happened. Stuff like 'but traditional football rivals should be followed' came up in basketball context, and it was like 'well, the game can't possibly know any of that, and has to support completely fake schools etc.' In other words it can never know or care who 'Penn State' is or who they'd be likely to join a conference with, it has to follow the in-game info on the sport in question. .
- Wanting GMs to not be predictable/exploitable, but also not wanting them to do dumb things like the Pau Gasol trade. Basically 'make it realistic, but not realistic in a way that is dumb' - which is of course, not realistic at all if the dumb things never happen. Pick your favorite example; Russell Wilson's contract, whatever.
- Wanting realistic outcomes without realistic constraints (such as uncertainty/variability in player ratings). I remember one conversation with someone who was a PureSim player who wanted the AI to be competitive, but without using information on historical performance of, say, Ted Williams for example, while the person playing did want to use that information.
I'm more of a strategy game person now, but what all this comes down to for me is that
most people who say they want challenging/realistic games don't really want that. A lot of them even think they want it, when they really don't. What they want is a game that is challenging enough to make them feel like they are working for a win, without actually having to do a whole lot of truly working for it. I.e. the feeling of a great accomplishment without most of the effort that actually goes in to such a thing.