Game Customization: Why not sim engines? - RaychelSnr's Blog

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RaychelSnr's Blog

Game Customization: Why not sim engines? Stuck

Posted on January 27, 2010 at 12:00 PM.

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Thanks to OSer jaosming for the idea for this blog. I wrote a couple weeks ago about difficulty levels, and how I wanted them to be more customizable.

Today it is simulation engines. I want to just ask a very fundamental question about sim engines: Why were they not developed with user customization in mind? And how can we get there from here?

My grand idea centers around making sim engines a customizable option much like difficulty levels. There are a lot of OSers who absolutely hate sim engines and the results they produce, but that griping would go down significantly if you could tweak the global simulation values of the games you play. I know sports gaming developers are pulling their hair out at this thought, because it would require nothing less than a complete rewrite of simulation engines to make this possible.

But sometimes, progress is not easy.

I'm going to use Madden as an example here to illustrate what I'm proposing. Why can't we adjust sliders for total plays in a game, how much teams run and pass, how often people get injured, and other varying factors that go into simulating a football game? Furthermore, why are gamers so accepting of having predestined limits being put on their gaming experience?

My point today is a simple, yet very complex proposition. I want simulation engines to be opened up and made customizable so users can have the ability to fix the inevitable inaccuracies developers create with simulation results. Several titles have experimented with this, but none have dived headfirst into complete customization. I'd like to see that happen. What do you think?

Comments

# 1 nolan273 @ Jan 27

Nice write up and good idea. In Madden, it would be a good start just to put slider in to adjust play calling tendencies (run % vs. pass %) for every team. It would be a small step toward what you're proposing, but a step nonetheless.

# 2 Valdarez @ Jan 27

There's definitely a Simulation engine in Madden. I agree that we need the ability to customize it separately from the gameplay. Hoping that's added to M11. It would definitely make a lot of us NFL Simulation purist happy.

# 3 SHAKYR @ Jan 28

Wow! Nice write up you hit the nail on the head. I have been telling EA this for years. Customization and options will give fans what they want. I gave the EA Canada Producers a 35 plus page wishlist for Fight Night Round 5 and the tendencies sliders stood out the most to many fans. I even created a survey for the EA Fight Night producers to let them see what fans want, tendencies sliders and customization was voted in by a landslide. I hope gaming companies realize this is the way to go.

# 4 rspencer86 @ Jan 28

Options allow developers to get themselves off the hook. Why put so much pressure on yourself to get everything "right" (which is impossible given the wide range of expectations from different gamers) when you can just give gamers the ability to tweak things as they see fit?

Look at how excited so many people are about the ability to manually injure players in MLB 10 The Show. People like this addition because it gives them control. We like that. We want to be able to control and shape our own gameplay experiences. If I want to pretend that the dead-ball era is back in baseball, I can adjust gameplay sliders to make it so. Why shouldn't I be able to tweak the simulation sliders to match that?

If nothing else, developers should implement this in order to take some heat off themselves. Instead of people getting angry about the running back YPC and sack stats in, post-patch Madden, if we had the ability to tweak simulation sliders we could just handle that ourselves. That means less work and less worry for the devs. How could they not want that?

# 5 RaychelSnr @ Jan 28

You guys are all hitting on what I think SHOULD be the theme for developers the rest of this generation: putting more and more power into the users to customize their experience to their liking. Look for some more from me in the coming weeks on this, I think it's something every developer should take to heart since it'd fix so much of what is wrong with sports gaming on the surface.

# 6 denverbro89 @ Feb 2

I like this idea. But really they should just use player rating to dictate the stats, Chris Johnson(99OVR) ratings should dictate how many yards he gains, his YPC his touchdowns and how tough the defenses he goes against his 2000 yard performance should be the max he gains in a year where he plays bad teams or his O line is great and his worst performance being about 5-700 yards. This solves two problems: 1.The ratings in the game would take more affect 2. Average players don't produce gaudy numbers.