The gaming industry is a big huge world. It has two very important elements, the suppliers and the consumers. The suppliers that are Game developers, study their audience and make a product that is based on some data estimating what would work and what wouldn’t. These calculations and estimations are very important as they highly impact the future of the product, the game.
There is a very special relationship between that of the Developers and Gamers. Developers always are committed to giving their best to please their audience trying to keep them awestruck and curious, keeping them wanting for more. This is the reason, seldom it happens that players don’t like a game, or they think what they have purchased is a complete disaster.
The game Concept is God in this business as it defines the paradigm of every single aspect used for creating it. It’s the whole base where empire gets built for players to experience it. The creators have to go an extra mile so that they can give full justice to the concept of the game. To inflict the required emotion among the gamers is what really matters as emotions are how the designers communicate with the players. It gives kind of an internal satisfaction for designers when this tremendous hard work put into it is appreciated.
Last weekend I finished playing the game “Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice”. For a game, I think it is simply fantastic. It can’t really be explained in words, you need to play it to experience how game addresses and deals with the medical condition of psychosis. The game gives players a tour of dark horror and real-life experience of this mental condition.
For gameplay, Hellblade had two important elements in it for progression, combat and Puzzle solving. The game relies on old-school combat tactics of a block, parry, light and heavy attack with sword and a classic puzzle solving scenarios of detecting patterns in the environment for progression. So before playing the game, I couldn’t help but hear many gamers were truly happy with the combat, however not many were pleased with the puzzle solving style. Typical feedback was that puzzles were very shallow and did not blend well with the game style. I am yet to research why gamers might think so, but on my first gameplay, I couldn’t judge the game that way.
What my primary thinking is that not many people know about this mental state. Most players had intentions of just pure combat like every other game with a sword and shield basically offers.
I was literally awestruck with the depth of research developers at Ninja Theory have put into to bring this dark experience closest to reality. In a vlog on their website, they have had several mentions that the pattern recognition we see in-game is one of the daily problems the patients of psychosis suffer from. The protagonist of the game, Senua too suffers from this problem and that’s the reason these puzzles totally make sense. Most gamers are not aware of this fact that if something is there in a game, developers surely must have put a lot of thought for it. The pattern solving puzzles put in the game now makes complete sense of the WHY it is really there in the game. Most reviews heavily criticized this puzzle solving game mechanic saying the puzzle is not a good fit and does not really blend with other combat mechanics present in the game.
While I do support the developers for their amazing work, I somewhat feel we can’t really control what exactly player wants from the game. This pursuit of perfection needs different angles of proper thinking of what majority players may desire out of the product we are selling them. Some players may simply love the amazing hardcore combat and may expect more out of it, while on the other hand, many would like the patterns finding puzzles in the environment.
My views on this are currently neutral for players as well as the developers. Due to the lack of knowledge that people suffering through psychosis have this kind of problems may be the reason many gamers got their own different perspectives about the game. I won’t blame the players here to expect something like this from the game, but players also need to at least try to understand the intentions of the developers of what they exactly want to convey. This is like while playing Assassin’s Creed game, we really dig deep to find out the history of Templars. I bet most of us even tried to read and understand the information what game hasn’t offered about Templars!
On the other hand, while developing a game its important and part of the job we do all the research work and dive deep into the subject so as to know almost everything and make sure no part is left unturned in it. But at the same time, we also need to find the easiest and most interesting way to convey our hard research work to the gamers. We as developers need to understand that what developers have spent so much time in “studying” may be a completely new subject for players as they perhaps may be touching the subject for the very first time. The learning curve, therefore, plays a very important part here in the game design aspect. The deeper players understand the core concept, the more developers are successful in justifying the concept of the game. It does happen sometimes that we have a great concept, a solid research behind it, but the mediocre presentation to an audience which makes it difficult or very alien for them to cope with.
Well, these points discussed are not universal and may not fit aptly for all kind of concepts, but you’ll get the jest of what I want to convey.
What happened with Hellblade is perhaps a pure misunderstanding between the developers and gamers. The convention was apt but the learning curve and information of “why are we doing what we are doing in the game” could definitely have been better.
Developers also managed to trick players and grab attention with a great concept of “Permanent Death” in the game. Many gamers admit having fallen for it. Yeah, it is a part of the excitement and helps you keep you on the edge of your seats while playing. Now was it really implemented or just a hoax will remain a secret for now.
I would definitely recommend trying out this very different experience of stepping into the shoes of victims of Psychosis. The sounds and audio techniques used are hands down one of the best till date.
Thanks for reading my speculations on the Game! I’d like to hear your thoughts on it.
