I was
having a discussion with Joe Khoury, a producer at Eidos, about the rigors of
his job and the subject of evaluating games came up. He basically told us that
everyone wants a 90+ on Metacritic, but the grading was entirely too subjective
and a single grade to fit every single game is absolutely inadequate. Add to
that the fact that a high score at Metacritic will not necessarily translate
into high sales, maybe it’s time the gaming industry set a new barometer for
games. In these coming blogs I’ll try and put forth the building blocks of ‘Gaming Metrics’, a hopefully better standard for evaluating games.
The first of
these ‘Gaming Metrics’ I want to talk about is the openness/linear aspect of the
game. It’s something dear to my heart, as a big MMORPG fan, and is also
something that can make or break a social game.
So how
would I go about building a reference sheet for such a metric?
Well my
first instinct is to go over in real life and find something similarly used.
And we have just the thing: the index of economic freedom from the heritage foundation
(http://www.heritage.org/index/).
So how does that index work? The index revolves around four main categories of
freedom:
- Rule of Law (property rights, freedom from
corruption);
- Limited Government (fiscal freedom,
government spending);
- Regulatory Efficiency (business freedom, labor
freedom, monetary freedom); and
- Open Markets (trade freedom, investment freedom,
financial freedom).
Source: http://www.heritage.org/index/
Can we do
something similar for Games? Let’s try it!
First we
need to understand what makes a MMORPG great. It’s actually pretty simple: what makes a game
great is choice. Yup, that’s it. The more choices you have, the better the
choices you can make and the more impact your choices have the better the game will
be. Choices make the players involved in the game: no one wants to feel like a sock on a clothesline being pushed further over the pool.
So here are
the nominees for induction into the Gaming Metric: Economic Freedom (Or GMEF
for short)
1. The character; Levels or Skills?
a. How many classes? Diversity of roles
(holy trinity or not, how many different build can someone have?)
b. How many races? Race perks, disadvantages
2. The crafting: afterthought or
important?
a. How many professions?
b. Is difficulty linked to levels?
c. Crafting items quality versus solo
play/group play/raid play loot
3. The world
a. PVP or PVE?
i.
Open
world PVP? (instanced or not)
ii.
Open
world PVE? (instanced or not)
b. How many PVP factions?
4. The quests/story
a. Kill/gather X or story driven?
i.
How
hard?
b. How much do they lead you to the
next part?
5. The hardware
a. How big does your rig have to be?
b. How many concurrent players can a
server have?
c. Lag?
6. The money
a. Microtransactions or subscription
based?
b. Frown on ‘real to game’
transactions?
7. The content
a. How much of it
b. How fast do you get updates?
c. DLC? Expansions? Future plans?
d. User generated content?
8. The rules
a. Botting or no? Stance on botting?
b. Stance on cheating?
c. EULA
9. Social platform
a. Guild tools depth?
b. Handicapping the social aspects?
i.
Group
search tools
ii.
Guild
search tools
iii.
Raid
search tools
iv.
Auction
house
This is
just a rough idea. If you have anything you want to add please let me know. I’ll
work to add depth in the
coming months. It’s a cool project!
No comments:
Post a Comment