Well, that may be true. :sad:

But maybe the target audience for a MUD is more sophisticated…?

More sophisticated - and more niche. I think it's always worth remembering that we can afford to target audiences that wouldn't be financially viable for a large commercial games company.

I think you might be taking elanthis a little too literally. You are effectively arguing that Die Hard is good because its execution of its vision is good, and other movies are bad because their execution of the vision is bad. We might as well be talking about water being wet, the Pope being Catholic, and so on and so forth. :smile:

I think you're taking vision still to mean more "plot synopsis" than what elanthis is driving at. I haven't played Black & White, so I can't give a good a vision for that game, although I can already tell you that you're trying to capture every detail and that is not the point. Just look at the difference of "vision statements" that the two of us gave for Amelie Poulain; mine says basically nothing about the plot and yet IMO does a much better job at capturing the intention and emotions of the film. This is what elanthis is saying: the execution (plot, gameplay, etc.) of a game is separate from its vision, and the execution will most likely (if not absolutely invariably) change over the course of the project. The vision is the core, and the execution is "merely" the medium in which that vision is expressed.


The MUD audience is certainly more niche but I hesitate more than a little bit to say that it's that much more sophisticated.

Than Farm Town? :tongue:

No, I'm suggesting that the reason for the poor execution is that they are too hung up on the "vision".

Oh, well, no. :tongue: I didn't realize you were only comparing to Farm Town. :wink: I thought we were talking about MUDs in general as a game genre vs. wider-audience games.


Well, it could also be incompetence. Or it could be that you simply don't like it.

For instance, you criticize id Software for being "too hung up on staying true to the vision", whereas others would say that id Software truly understood the vision and executed it very well – perhaps precisely because they deviated so little from their mission statement! Not everybody has to like everything, and your dislike of some project doesn't necessarily mean they had a bad vision, implemented it poorly, or stuck to it too literally.

You seem to like games with a vision that can be expressed along the lines of "multi-angle world manipulation". You seem to hold Black & White in high regard, and yet I've spoken to other people who hated the game. Similarly, while many people liked Amelie, many others didn't. Multi-faceted story-telling, gameplay, etc., are good for those who like it and not good for those who don't. You can perfectly execute a complex vision and still have people hate your product, just as you can perfectly execute a more straightforward vision and have people hate that too – and all the while, others will love all of this.

In other words, I don't think that one should confuse (a) having a good vision and executing it correctly, and (b) personal taste.

I'd suggest the reason for poor execution is, they're not very good at what they're doing. Don't let DaVinci's notebooks fool you. Documentation tends to be a crutch for over-achievers. :wink:

Seriously, I think elanthis has a good point, but it seems to be hard to convey. I think a good vision statement is composed of words that evoke concepts. For instance, my vision for my current game was "Be the opposite of RoT.". Or course, that means nothing to a Circle dev, but to my crew, who felt as I did ROM went too far from Merc in making things easy, RoT was an anathema.

On the other hand, while "Make it fun!" might work for some projects, it begs the question "Fun for whom?". I feel the vision shouldn't be too broad, no matter how many contrary examples you can come up with. :cool:

Actually, a more accurate summary would be: I am suggesting that the reason for the poor end result was the makers' perception that the vision for their project had to be something that can be condensed down to one sentence or less. My own preference tends to be for projects where the vision is sophisticated and substantial enough that it cannotbe compressed down that far.

As I said, the reason why I hated Quake is not because I don't like fast-paced FPS games; it's because being a fast-paced FPS is all the game involves. (By contrast, I loved the original Half-Life, and also System Shock, both of which are FPS games and often fast-moving. You actually cansum up Quake in less than a sentence; that's the problem. Id delivered on that vision, and the end result, as far as I'm concerned, is almost unplayable.

As for Black & White, I regard that game as a glorious failiure. It's actually quite a good example for this thread in some ways, as some of its problems stem from spending way too much time implementing "cool" features and not enough time focusing on the core game-play. The single-player game is brilliant while it lasts, but simply far too short. They should have spent more time on that, and less time on interfacing with Outlook and Internet weather servers. It's also very poorly documented - far too many of the game's mechanics are hidden too deeply for people to be able to work out what they need to do.

Arguably, it also suffers from sticking too closely to its original "vision" - some of the contortions that Lionhead had to go through to ensure a completely icon-free interface are rather excessive, given the end goal.

Maybe it suffers from them not having a "vision". Maybe they just had a detailed concept. Maybe……

But we don't know for sure, do we?

To question Peter Molyneux's vision is blasphemy.

I'd put Spore in the same category, and possibly Fable as well. Although I wouldn't call them 'failures' they all tried to bite off more than they could chew, and fell short of their potential. Fable and Spore both dropped a lot of cool features to reach their release dates, and IIRC the same was true for Black & White.

I wouldn't put these problems down to "vision" though. Rather, it's an example of how budget and timescale pressures can have an impact on the vision and concept of a game. As hobby mud developers, we have far more freedom in this respect.

Shasarak, you seem to very strongly resist one-sentence summaries of games you like; I guess you view them as simplistic and therefore degrading to the complexity you like. It seems that you are attaching value judgment to this process. I think that this is incorrect. Everybody understands that a vision can hide great complexity: having a clear, well-stated vision does not imply that the result is simple. As I said earlier, I think you are reducing the vision task to something far too simple, to something that can or should be accomplished in a relatively small amount of time. I think that you are also not attaching enough importance to choosing words very carefully when it comes to capturing at least some of the spirit of complex ideas.

For example, it's actually very interesting to me that you view B&W as a "glorious failure", in part because they spent too much time on features. Isn't this exactly what people have been saying about vision? Perhaps they had a vision, and perhaps they didn't – I don't think that "icon-free interface" qualifies as a "vision" by any stretch – but by your own statement they spent more time on random stuff than on achieving their goal, assuming they had a clear one in the first place. When you cite things like icon-free interfaces as "vision", it really gives me the impression that you are stopping far too short when it comes to establishing vision: you're taking things too literally. As I said, I haven't played the game so I can't help when it comes to describing its vision, but if it really was something so literal and extensional as "have no icons" it's unsurprising it didn't do very well!

To be honest, I'm not sure how much disagreement there really is. I think that you clearly don't like putting vision statements for simple and complex games on the same shelf, but otherwise we all seem to be in agreement that having a clear mission statement and following it is important.

Well, I followed the development of Black & White, read all the stuff on the Lionhead discussion boards, read or listened to every interview I could find, attended Peter Molyneux's lecture at BAFTA, etc. I don't claim to have an insider's persppective, but I probably have a clearer picture than most outsiders about the way the game developed, which ideas were considered and then abandoned, and why, etc. For example, Lionhead claimed more than once that the single-player game would contain no less than eight rival gods; we ended up with just three. Had the single-player game ended up on the scale that was originally envisioned, it would probably have been the finest game ever. Maybe it suffered from an excess of vision.
:smile:


On the subject of "vision", I think it's also worth saying that some of Elanthis' examples really are quite ridiculous. I mean, "Fire and explosions"? SRSLY? That could mean anything.

"The game should contain vehicles."

"Why?"

"So as to move you closer to the source of fire and explosions."

"Oh, okay."

"The game should contain wombats."

"Why?"

"They're grazing in the fields close by the explosions."

"Ah, right, good thinking. Contributes to the vision."

"And the game should contain cheese."

"Why?"

"To keep the player character's strength up in between the explosions."

"Oh, okay, good idea."

When a vision gets as vague as that it becomes absolutely pointless. If you can't use the vision to assess whether any given feature or decision to contributes to it or not, why even have it?

I think it's fair to say that you wouldn't like the games, but I think it's rather inappropriate of you to say that nobody would like the games. Did you miss where he said "It cleaned up at PAX '10"?

By the way, you are consistently treating vision as plot summary. Visions are not supposed to give a very detailed roadmap of the entire execution.

Well, if you'd played Black & White and followed its development process, you'd understand what I mean. :smile: The decision to avoid icons massively influenced not just the interface but the whole game-play; it was one of the foundation stones of the whole project. Every single thing you could do had to be achieved by directly manipulating objects within the game-world. The implications of that were very far-reaching.


What I've been objecting to all along is simply Elanthis' insistence that a vision must, of necessity, be less than one sentence long. I think that's far too restrictive.

Well, if that was their "vision", did they succeed at creating an icon-free game? That they chose to implement that with a game controlling little critters and making moral choices is incidental, if the idea was to create an icon-free game.


Perhaps you're interpreting it too literally; I think the idea is that it should be clear, simple and straightforward. Surely we can all agree on that? The "vision" of Elanthis's statement is "keep it simple", not "write one sentence", as it were.

I'm not questioning whether or not Igneous is a good or enjoyable game, I'm questioning the assertion that deciding up front that it would consist of "fire and explosions" in any waycontributed to its beinga good game. The statement that a game's vision is "fire and explosions" is so vague that it's pointless to state it. That doesn't necessarily mean the game will be bad, merely that the three-word version of its "vision" serves no useful purpose. Maybe the longer version did.

Creating an icon-free game was not "the vision", it was one part of the vision. The creature was another part of the vision; the moral choices aspect was another part; and so on. That's what I keep saying: none of those things are incidental - the vision for a game like Black & White cannotbe compressed down to just one aspect or one sentence; the vision was too complex for that. And the game benefited from that. I don't know why you're having so much trouble understanding what I mean!

EDIT: And yes, that part of the vision (an icon-free experience) was very well realised.

And yet just before you said that it was a glorious failure, and suffered from distracting features that added little or nothing, and its gameplay was far too confusing because there was too much stuff to know about and it couldn't be divined from the interface.


I believe that I understand exactly what you mean; I merely think that you are incorrect. :wink:
I think that you are putting complexity on a pedestal and refusing to find the essence of a project in brief expression, because you find it demeaning or simplistic.


The question was not if they made an icon-free game. It was if they succeeded at making a good icon-free game. I can make lots of icon-free games; basically all of them will be crap.

I believe it was a glorious failure in that the hype and promise surrounding Black & White perhaps raised expectations too high and it failed to meet them. That's not to say it wasn't a bad game (it wasn't great either), I actually quite enjoyed the single player campaign. It had loads of potential, but alas time and money constraints never help.

Happened with Fable too, it was hyped up but things had to be dropped because Microsoft wanted the game released. Of course Lionhead eventually got around to releasing the game as was intended but the damage was done.

If anyone's been following Fable 3's development, you can see Peter Molyneux up to old tricks again building up massive amounts of hype for the game. Alot has been promised and if it fails to measure up, it too will be a glorious failure (in my eyes at least).