The Hidden Price of Changing a Game

It's hard to get people to accept change. So how can we make changes in a game without costing you your fan base and adding real value?

*Thanks for participating in this week's discussion!*

♪ Outro Music: "Flow State by Tiffany Roman
Artist: David Hueso I Writer: James Portnow I Showrunner & Narrator: Matthew Krol

#ExtraCredits #Gaming #GameDesign

[extracredits]

Thanks so much for watching and supporting the show!

[denniskrq]

I think one of the peak example for the cost of change is the US sticking with Imperial unit system

[danrau]

As Technology Connections once said, the only thing better than perfect is standardized.

[Sientir]

Friggin' Windows 11 context menus, changing everything into icons (instead of text—and I can promise icons are not as clear as the designers seem to think they are), and constantly changing UIs in productivity programs (Google's online Office Suite and Microsoft Office are two excellent examples) are a few examples of changes that frustrate me.

One of the things I've come to appreciate as I get older is there's a huge difference between learning something for the first time and updating your knowledge of a thing. With the latter, you have to keep straight which version you're working with, which means you have to sort through more information in your head. This will ease over time, but for things you might only use occasionally, it's brutal. And not being able to use a new version of something with the ease and mastery you could use the previous version because the designers changed the UI yet again is deeply frustrating.

[RobotShield]

Hot keys in RTS are a good example of this, you don’t have to have the best hot keys, you just have to have trained on them and know them well

[scaper]

I imagine they saw the ActiBlizz and slapped their hands together while shouting “HOT DAMN, we couldn’t have timed this better!”

[Lorryslorryss]

I think a thing this is missing is that when you're changing things, you're learning things. And a game that's build by a process of releasing, learning from the community and making small changes is going to be better than one that tries to get everything right in one big go.

[blaster]

Good luck to Bethesda employees when they finally decide to change the engine. It's going to be a MONUMENTAL leap they have to land to keep gamers satisfied.

[ForestFWhite]

As a great engineer I worked with once said, "if you do not have time to do it right, you do not have time to do it wrong."

[jedith]

I wish this could be explained for all software, not just gaming. Smartphone updates, apps, Microsoft, etc. Sometimes it gets changed seemingly just for change, not for any specific reason

[mastrheartsxiii]

Did you know blizzard was going to announce OW2 cancellation of PVE, or was this just masterful timing

[flazryuful]

I needed the laugh from the train hat depicted in the Bethesda segment. Still blows my mind that that was the workaround that was come up with and implemented.

[KittyLitterYT]

"When everything's worse, our work is complete!" - Every tech company



also team rocket, they also said that

[EyalBrown]

Hearthstone Battlegrounds recently started changing how certain heroes appear in different levels of play - that is, they implemented nerfs that only affect the higher end of competitive play. Most of these are to strategies that are beloved by beginners, but are quite bad in low-level play, but that have very high, nerf-level winrates for better players. Granted, these are the simplest possible "number nerfs", not complete redesign; but it does show that this action is POSSIBLE.

[TheDisplacerBeast]

I watch youtube on an ipad most the time, and stupid touch control changes have made my experience way worse. Its been months and its still infuriating.

[mesektet]

I do not dislike change, however even if a layout is changed, all previous options must be open somewhere. Oh my aim assist isn’t on the right controller pop-up, cool, I can adapt, but where is it now?

[failedleopard]

The Creation Engine as you mentioned is a similar thing that occurred to CDPR with Cyberpunk. They had big ambition, but their Red Engine just couldn't keep up anymore with how big the project was. Every new hire had to learn their internal engine, which took money and time and turned more and more outdated. Which caused the aftermath of the mess to push CDPR to abandon the engine and go to Unreal Engine 5 in the future, cost less to keep up because most know it and is continuously updated by Epic Games. Internal engines can be very good for a time, but darn are they a cost in the long term.

[mrrd]

Haha the timing with this and OW2 is astounding. But also probably unsurprising given it looks to be a problem across the industry anyway.

[BlakeTheDrake]

Here's a problem that isn't mentioned... sometimes, developers make a change and treat it as an objective improvement, genuinely believing that it makes the game better. But the players, or at least a certain segment of them, simply *disagree* - seeing it as a downgrade, or at best a 'sidegrade' that's purely a matter of taste, and doesn't suit *theirs.* That's an INCREDIBLY effective way to alienate that particular segment, permanently, unless it's very carefully handled - telling everyone "Look, we made out game BETTER!" also sends the message of "If you think the game is worse now, you're not part of our target audience, and this game isn't for you." It can even put you off a developer altogether, and not just a single game, if you wind up feeling like their idea of 'fun' is fundamentally different from yours.

This has happened a few times to me. I like turn-based games, particularly turn-based RPG's and turn-based strategy - and when a game or series that has until now been turn-based gets 'upgraded' to a more 'fast-paced, action-packed, real-time' system, it just... *feels bad, * basically. Like I'm being erased - after all, the developers are saying "Real-time is inherently superior to turn-based! Nobody likes that kind of slow-ass slog, it's just a thing that we used to do due to technical limitations!" - they're leaving those like myself who actively prefer turn-based systems completely out of their calculations. And that's why I don't even bother to look at Square-Enix games anymore...

[Stratelier]

A standout example of this (and in the open-source community, of all things) is when the GIMP development added a hard split between "Save" and "Export". In previous versions you could open a standard image file, make a few tweaks and then "Save" back to that same file and/or image format. But with 2.8.0 the "Save" command became limited to GIMP's internal file format only (.xcf), with all standard file formats moved entirely to the "Export" command instead. The ensuing controversy over this one change between versions was INTENSE.

To be fair, the key benefit was that when working on a complicated image project _already_ saved in GIMP's native file format, the link between the open file and the saved copy on disk wouldn't get broken whenever you wanted to export to a standard image format. (That is, previously if you "Saved" a project as file A.xcf then "Saved" a copy to file B.png, all future "Save" commands in that session would target file B.png, not file A.xcf, and accidents happened)