CBJ wrote: ↑Thu, 16. May 13, 12:05
greypanther wrote:Is it really asking too much for the option; for choice?
Actually yes, it may be. I've explained this before, but I'll do it again with this particular context in mind.
Every time there is a discussion about a particular feature, you have three camps. There's the "I want this" camp, the "I want that" camp, and then you have the people who think they have a magic solution that will make everyone happy, the "make it optional" camp. The trouble is that it's not the magic solution those people think it is.
Creating a game that is fun and enjoyable is about making game design decisions, not dithering about it and ending up leaving the player to decide. While some players have strong opinions about a feature, most will just go with the default setting, and if you have dithered and not designed your game firmly around a core set of solid design decisions, then everyone's experience will be almost certainly be the poorer for it. Of course there are exceptions, particular features such as graphics settings, where giving people options doesn't detract from the game's core design, but for something fundamental like the cockpit it is almost always better to make a decision and accept that it won't please everyone than to dither and give people two different options, neither of which can be fully followed through because you have to take into account the possibility that people may choose the other option.
And that brings me to the second point, which is that making something optional costs more than making a design choice
even in the case where one of the options is simply not having that feature. Why? Well, because not only do you have to develop the feature (or in the worst case two different versions of the feature) but you also have to set up the option (additional menus, translations, etc.), and then you have to test the whole game with both options. The more things you make optional, the more different combinations you have to test; up to twice as many combinations, in fact, for each thing you make optional.
It gets even worse if the option is as fundamental as something like the cockpit. Even if the cockpit were just eye-candy, you'd have to make sure that all aspects of the game worked and performed correctly with both a full-screen view of space and a partial view. But of course in this case the cockpit isn't just eye-candy, it's an integral part of the game, with the parts of the UI built into it. Making that optional would require the game to function with two separate interface paradigms, significantly increasing the cost for design, development and testing.
Why should you care about making things optional being an expensive way of doing things? Well, cost and time are pretty much the same thing in development tems, both of which are finite, so those resources would, by definition, be prevented from being used on other game features. Worse still, for any given player, at least some of those resources would be wasted, because they would be spent on an option that they wouldn't be using; in fact in practice for most players, all the effort put into the non-default option would be wasted. In essence you are shooting yourself in the foot somewhat by suggesting that a feature you want should be made optional; you are asking for the available resources to be spent on a feature you
don't want, only for you to then switch it off, instead of on features you
do want!
And this of course brings us back to the first point, which is that it is almost always better to make design decisions than to try to please everyone by making everything optional.