No it's not. Games are designed for specific player profiles and if you know what has been done before, then you can do better.
lol dude fun is entirely subjective, while you as a canadian might enjoy curling and hunting bears, this doesnt't mean another person will have fun with either or both activities.
Let's say we make the best fighting game ever. Whoever appreciate fighting games would give it 10/10. That said, you might not have much interest for fighting games and would rate most fighting game as 4/10 in terms of satisfaction, but that game you would actually rate it 7/10.
just out of curriosity: you are implying here that this is possible so i would like you to name the best fighting game/shooter/racing game, whatever genre you choose, just name one please.
''Fun'' is a very vague, often misunderstood and extremely complicated term. The methods that we use to create satisfying experiences are universal.
Let's say we make the best fighting game ever. Whoever appreciate fighting games would give it 10/10. That said, you might not have much interest for fighting games and would rate most fighting game as 4/10 in terms of satisfaction, but that game you would actually rate it 7/10.
So, what is my point here? Fun is universal and has to do with the quality of the experience itself. Your interest is subjective, but that doesn't change the quality of the experience. But as human beings, we also have the capability to change ourselves and open up to new fields of interests to fully embrace new types of experiences.
Are you really trying to argue the idea that fun isn't subjective? Really?
If fun wasn't subjective, then there would be some kind of objective method of measuring how much fun exists within a particular game, or any activity really. How many grams of fun exist within the latest Call of Duty game? I'm not talking about hard drugs either!
Your point about reviews doesn't make much sense either because it is generally known that reviews are a representation of a person's own thoughts on a subject. Since it is entirely opinionated, there exists a need for multiple different reviews. IGN is a perfect example of this, they have a lot of different reviewers that like a lot of different things. If you asked their FPS-addict reviewer to try playing the latest JRPG, he would give it a low score because he's not interested in it. Similarly if their JRPG addict went to review the latest Call of Duty game, another low score would be given. I even recall reading up on how IGN had to do some updated reviews for certain niche games because the original viewer was clearly uninterested in the genre.
...If you think something is not fun, it's either because you experienced something better or had the brilliance to think about something better. That's it. If you have no interest in an experience, you are just indifferent to it at that time. All this, including the article above, also means that it's totally possible to be objective when reviewing games.
So again. Your interests are subjective. Fun is universal and can be measured, because it has to do with the quality of an experience.
there is still personal preference in it if you accept it or not. I love playing some shooters, i dislike others. Your best shooter is Quake 3, while i never really had fun with it and preferred the deathmatches or team deathmatches in Call of Duty 1 or 2 can't remember which it was. But i do remember that i never enjoyed Quake 3 that much, so objectively speaking Quake3 must suck? I liked UT more as well.
I also had way more fun with Need for Speed Porsche than with the Need for Speed you said is the best racing game, even other games such as burnout have been more fun to me.
Some people might prefer tekken over streetfighter, for various reasons.
All you do is projecting your personal taste onto others, but this doesn't make any of it objective.
When did I say that I even like either Street Fighter or Quake 3? Never said that. Never will. Those might be the finest games in their own genre, but that doesn't mean that they actually fit with my fields of interest. In fact, GAROU: Mark of Wolves better fits with my tastes and when it comes to FPS game, I tend to favor Unreal Tournament for the movements (dodge, walldodge, etc.). But I can still remain objective and recognize how SF:3rd strike and Quake 3 are greater overall games in comparison.
what is it about those games you listed that objectively make them better than other games? its kind of hard to judge video games objectively because there's pretty much nothing objective to judge.. art, story, feel of the controls, experience.. thats all subjective.
Feck me, that's the scariest thing I've seen in a long time!
We've had these since 10 years by now, facerig messes up but the rest stays in its supposed place Only thing is we can just re-render and deliver the proper result...
I really have to disagree with you that art can be judged objectively. Sure, at the lower levels that may be true, especially in game art where you be relatively miserly with polygons and know how to set up UVs to maximize your textures, understand how to bake normals correctly, and be able to navigate through programs with interfaces that are almost more complicated than fighter pilot jets... but there are many, many art critics who would compare a sculpt from Haz and a sculpt from Picasso and give the prize to Picasso, purely for art criticism reasons, and there are many, many more ordinary people who would give the prize to Haz over Picasso just because they don't get cubism, and they're impressed by Haz's raw representational talent and ability to depict an ideal female form. There is a lot of taste that can go into judging art, and there are even people who would rather look at a drawing by their second-grader than look at anything from either Haz or Picasso.
Art
How can you say that art is subjective? You are posting on polycount, one of the best place for artists to show their work and get better at their craft. Who can say that what they are doing now isn't on a whole other level compared to what they were doing 2-10 years ago? Don't you think that the art from CoD: AW looks better than CoD4? Aren't we not pushing graphics further every year? Every month? No matter how artists pretend that art is subjective, it's in fact super technical. Image composition, shapes, colors, proportions, rhythm, etc.
Are you sure that art is still subjective?
Art is almost entirely subjective. Sure, you can look at the technical aspects of something and see some objective ideas, with art this would be things such as proper triangle usage, UVing properly, good form, etc. But art is more than some technical specifications.
What if you are making stylized art? Games like Disgaea are basically still using technical budgets from the PS1 era yet the art is still inspirational to some. Some people would find the technical budget of a game like Disgaea to be disgusting in 2014, and those people would laugh at the art. But there are plenty of people that would think the opposite. I'm sure somebody like valuemeal would much rather look at and play a game like Disgaea over a game like Call of Duty, and that right there shows that art can be subjective. If art was entirely objective, then it would be easy to measure and compare. Does Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare look better than Fortnite?
Story
If story is subjective, then why did you laugh when you saw my dog? Why do we still want a remake of Final Fantasy 7? Why do we hire writers to write stories fro book, films or games? Why aren't we giving that job just to a random guy in the studio? Why did it bother you that I wrote ''for'' wrong? How could you explain that we had the chance to have wonderful people like Robin Williams to make us laugh when so many others just couldn't pull it off?
Why are writers hired? Well, why are programmers hired? Why are artists hired? Why don't we get Jerry the janitor to make a fictional world that people want to be a part of, create art to help sell this world, then write the code to turn it into a game. Doing so would probably allow the budget to get cut in half or more!
Feel of the controls
If controls were really subjective, why most FPS players claim that Quake 3 Arena (now Quake Live) had the smoothest mouse movements of all time for years (and still does)? How is it that some designers and programmers specialize in game controls? How is it that just recently on the development of the next Unreal Tournament, a lot of community members felt that there was something wrong with the game controls, that something was creating a delay that shouldn't have been there and it make the game feel pretty bad. And note that gamers have been complaining for years about the mouse movements in most UE3 games. Guess what? Epic Games found out that there was actually a conflict in the code that was causing the delay in the engine.
Are you sure that it's really subjective?
Controls are definitely subjective, personally I despise the "realistic" movement in games like GTA4 because it turns something as important as moving within the world into a chore (not sure if GTA5 has the same mechanics in place since I haven't played more than maybe half an hour back at launch, not my type of game.) Many people would disagree with me, of course.
If controls weren't subjective, then there wouldn't be a million different ways to code different types of movement systems. In fact, why even bother with the whole "realistic vs fun" argument?
Apples, oranges, what does it matter? In the end, they are both fruit. One is hard to peel, the other has a core that's hard to swallow, but both can be delicious at the right time. Who do you think you are, to tell me to not compare apples and oranges? Clearly it is both possible and practical to do so!
I'm sorry if I came off as standoffish or vindictive. Waiting on UE4 to recompile on my dual-core machine after changing a core class is more eye-glazing than watching ice melt.
Yes i do still think art can be subjective.
In your case, obviously the upper version is better.
Now compare that very well done and realistic Dobermann to a very well done and realistic Chihuahua. There is no objective way to compare the two.
Now bring style into play, compare this dobermann to a very well done but stylized dobermann and you've got another comparison that will be entirely subjective.
Haz VS Picasso?
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare VS Fortnite?
Why exactly are you trying to compare apples with oranges?
Compare Quake 3 VS Unreal Tournament... fine.
Titanfall VS CoD:AW... fine
Street Fighter 3rd Strike VS GAROU Mark of Wolves... fine
But please don't try to compare Diablo 3 with Forza 3, because that makes no sense whatsoever. If you are going to compare art, then compare a sci-fi vehicle artist with another sci-fi vehicle artist. Don't try to compare a sci-fi vehicle artist with a character artists who makes cute cartoon characters. Same reason why boxers fight boxers.
That is exactly the point I'm making, you can't compare apples and oranges. At what point do you draw the line and say two things are too different to compare?
If you ask the hardcore fans of either Quake or Unreal Tournament what they think about the opposite game, they'll tell you that the games share next to nothing in common other than the fact that they are both arena shooters. To them, comparing the games to each other would be the same thing as comparing a stylized model to a photorealistic one, which makes no sense.
The fact that there are differing opinions about the similarities that two games share is proof enough that art is subjective. I don't even know why I'm continuing to post though, this is common sense.
Tidal Blast
let's assume a 15 year old teenager enjoys playing multiplayer competitive shooters.. and a 30 year old guy enjoys story driven stuff like the last of us.. how do you decide which one is playing the better game?
it's so much a matter of age, taste and experience all mixed together that you can't really say one game is better than the other.. you can of course compare technical stuff or point out bugs.. if you were to judge all games it could only be from your point of view and I'm sure you liked different games when you were younger.
But please don't try to compare Diablo 3 with Forza 3, because that makes no sense whatsoever. If you are going to compare art, then compare a sci-fi vehicle artist with another sci-fi vehicle artist. Don't try to compare a sci-fi vehicle artist with a character artists who makes cute cartoon characters. Same reason why boxers fight boxers.
That might be a good thing to compare on a technical level or how skilled one is, but it doesn't change the fact that one person might not like watching scifi vehicles, because he's fan of mario kart. But that doesn't make either of them bad art.
let's assume a 15 year old teenager enjoys playing multiplayer competitive shooters.. and a 30 year old guy enjoys story driven stuff like the last of us.. how do you decide which one is playing the better game?
And to make things even more complicated, I can confirm (quite subjectively !) that as a 30-something, I personally enjoy competitive online shooters and fighters a whole lot more than any "story-driven" game like The Last of Us which I just ended up watching a Let's Play of. Part of it is a matter of taste (very few fictional pieces manage to hook me and I much prefer reading biographies, essays, or clever short novels), but a big part of it comes from the fact that sometimes you just have to outgrow maturity, so to speak
I end up avoiding most AAA releases simply because I feel like these games tend to take themselves way too seriously, and their aspirations of being "just like a movie" don't do anything for me.
There was a time where AAA term did not exist, not so long ago. A game was fun or was not, regardless of the budget.
Yes the experience is subjective to the person who plays the game. But Just like food, just cause you are making caviar doesn't mean everyone will love it. Just like going at a pricy restaurant once in a while. It is supposed to taste better than macdonalds, but that isn't always the case unfortunately.
I guess AAA now means that ''aaa'' lot of money gets pushed in making a game. It also comes with expectations, if someone pays 70$ for 4 hours of gameplay, they expect to get a good creative experience out of it and especially NOT bugged to the point it grabs them out of the experience.
look at most SNES games( I still play btw) they didn't have any major bugs at all, at least less than what you would find in today's products.
Look at riot, valve or blizzard games, people are playing the shit out of them because it is better than all the other stuff. they are polished experience that don't leave a bad taste in people's mouths.
To get the thread back in rail and something about the so called "betas" .
As much as I could understand from user posts companies don't even fix the bugs found on their betas and using betas as mere "demos" because fixing bugs costs extra time and money.
Game companies should NOT have the right to take down youtube videos that explain how their game sucks.
Such moves always seem to backfire, and I do think it's shady as fuck, however in this case to say that they shouldn't have the right is a step too far in my opinion. It is their content after all, and I'm not sure if these monetized videos simply showing glitches qualify as "fair use".
Maybe if the videos were "this game is glitchy, be warned/do not buy", then yeah I guess that qualifies, but the ones I saw were more along the lines of "this game has glitches, here's how to use them to cheat!".
Lets take it a step further on the theory of subjectivity. Your eyes are built to detect a very small portion of wavelengths of the thing we call light. The wavelengths we know as red, green, and blue.
I imagine a mantis shrimp would find all the art humanity has ever produced quite boring to look at since it has receptors for 16 different frequencies of light!
TL;DR: "Check yourself before you wreck yourself."
I just wanted to poke my head and say that while the discussion is decent at times, some folks need a reminder to try and be constructive with your feedback. Polycount is known for its honesty, but its also known for being constructive. Put the 2 litre bottle of Haterade down and really think about the problem(s) you have and what solutions there might be.
It's fine to be upset, but some folks just spew hatred without any actual solutions and its made me cringe a few times. WE're all peers here, so lets offer our observations, criticisms, and our solutions.
If that really bothers you, then I hope that you also had the balls to leave that kind of company.
And what about financial issues, such as supporting a family, paying rent/mortgage/energy bills etc? You can't blame anyone for putting these responsibilities first, even if they do have major issues with how their company is run, or how the release of their product is managed.
Even if you find another job, there's a good chance you may end up having to move, which sucks enough if you're on your own, let alone if you have kids or a partner who is also employed.
Try to have a little perspective, we're talking about game developers here, not BlackWater.
Replies
lol dude fun is entirely subjective, while you as a canadian might enjoy curling and hunting bears, this doesnt't mean another person will have fun with either or both activities.
Yes and don't forget the meat dudes and spicy sausages
This one was quite colourful. I found it a damned good distraction from the usual 'super tough guy with machine gun' shooters.
just out of curriosity: you are implying here that this is possible so i would like you to name the best fighting game/shooter/racing game, whatever genre you choose, just name one please.
oh yes it is!
Panto season on polycount
Now I really feel like an alien. So this is how "normal" people think and act ?
Then I take back everything I say. We deserve this.
If fun wasn't subjective, then there would be some kind of objective method of measuring how much fun exists within a particular game, or any activity really. How many grams of fun exist within the latest Call of Duty game? I'm not talking about hard drugs either!
Your point about reviews doesn't make much sense either because it is generally known that reviews are a representation of a person's own thoughts on a subject. Since it is entirely opinionated, there exists a need for multiple different reviews. IGN is a perfect example of this, they have a lot of different reviewers that like a lot of different things. If you asked their FPS-addict reviewer to try playing the latest JRPG, he would give it a low score because he's not interested in it. Similarly if their JRPG addict went to review the latest Call of Duty game, another low score would be given. I even recall reading up on how IGN had to do some updated reviews for certain niche games because the original viewer was clearly uninterested in the genre.
Who's speaking in metaphor? I thought this was about lunch time at company events?
This sounds a lot more like UX rather than Fun?
there is still personal preference in it if you accept it or not. I love playing some shooters, i dislike others. Your best shooter is Quake 3, while i never really had fun with it and preferred the deathmatches or team deathmatches in Call of Duty 1 or 2 can't remember which it was. But i do remember that i never enjoyed Quake 3 that much, so objectively speaking Quake3 must suck? I liked UT more as well.
I also had way more fun with Need for Speed Porsche than with the Need for Speed you said is the best racing game, even other games such as burnout have been more fun to me.
Some people might prefer tekken over streetfighter, for various reasons.
All you do is projecting your personal taste onto others, but this doesn't make any of it objective.
what is it about those games you listed that objectively make them better than other games? its kind of hard to judge video games objectively because there's pretty much nothing objective to judge.. art, story, feel of the controls, experience.. thats all subjective.
We've had these since 10 years by now, facerig messes up but the rest stays in its supposed place
What if you are making stylized art? Games like Disgaea are basically still using technical budgets from the PS1 era yet the art is still inspirational to some. Some people would find the technical budget of a game like Disgaea to be disgusting in 2014, and those people would laugh at the art. But there are plenty of people that would think the opposite. I'm sure somebody like valuemeal would much rather look at and play a game like Disgaea over a game like Call of Duty, and that right there shows that art can be subjective. If art was entirely objective, then it would be easy to measure and compare. Does Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare look better than Fortnite?
Why are writers hired? Well, why are programmers hired? Why are artists hired? Why don't we get Jerry the janitor to make a fictional world that people want to be a part of, create art to help sell this world, then write the code to turn it into a game. Doing so would probably allow the budget to get cut in half or more!
Controls are definitely subjective, personally I despise the "realistic" movement in games like GTA4 because it turns something as important as moving within the world into a chore (not sure if GTA5 has the same mechanics in place since I haven't played more than maybe half an hour back at launch, not my type of game.) Many people would disagree with me, of course.
If controls weren't subjective, then there wouldn't be a million different ways to code different types of movement systems. In fact, why even bother with the whole "realistic vs fun" argument?
In your case, obviously the upper version is better.
Now compare that very well done and realistic Dobermann to a very well done and realistic Chihuahua. There is no objective way to compare the two.
Now bring style into play, compare this dobermann to a very well done but stylized dobermann and you've got another comparison that will be entirely subjective.
If you ask the hardcore fans of either Quake or Unreal Tournament what they think about the opposite game, they'll tell you that the games share next to nothing in common other than the fact that they are both arena shooters. To them, comparing the games to each other would be the same thing as comparing a stylized model to a photorealistic one, which makes no sense.
The fact that there are differing opinions about the similarities that two games share is proof enough that art is subjective. I don't even know why I'm continuing to post though, this is common sense.
since money kind of runs the world, you can judge the quality of things by the amount of money people are willing to pay for them.
this is No. 5, 1948
its the second most expensive painting ever sold.
NASA says you can:
http://improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i3/air-1-3-apples.html
Also, so does the Journal of British Medical Science
Picasso's version of Zbrush was much older.
let's assume a 15 year old teenager enjoys playing multiplayer competitive shooters.. and a 30 year old guy enjoys story driven stuff like the last of us.. how do you decide which one is playing the better game?
it's so much a matter of age, taste and experience all mixed together that you can't really say one game is better than the other.. you can of course compare technical stuff or point out bugs.. if you were to judge all games it could only be from your point of view and I'm sure you liked different games when you were younger.
That might be a good thing to compare on a technical level or how skilled one is, but it doesn't change the fact that one person might not like watching scifi vehicles, because he's fan of mario kart. But that doesn't make either of them bad art.
And to make things even more complicated, I can confirm (quite subjectively !) that as a 30-something, I personally enjoy competitive online shooters and fighters a whole lot more than any "story-driven" game like The Last of Us which I just ended up watching a Let's Play of. Part of it is a matter of taste (very few fictional pieces manage to hook me and I much prefer reading biographies, essays, or clever short novels), but a big part of it comes from the fact that sometimes you just have to outgrow maturity, so to speak
I end up avoiding most AAA releases simply because I feel like these games tend to take themselves way too seriously, and their aspirations of being "just like a movie" don't do anything for me.
marble? : )
There was a time where AAA term did not exist, not so long ago. A game was fun or was not, regardless of the budget.
Yes the experience is subjective to the person who plays the game. But Just like food, just cause you are making caviar doesn't mean everyone will love it. Just like going at a pricy restaurant once in a while. It is supposed to taste better than macdonalds, but that isn't always the case unfortunately.
I guess AAA now means that ''aaa'' lot of money gets pushed in making a game. It also comes with expectations, if someone pays 70$ for 4 hours of gameplay, they expect to get a good creative experience out of it and especially NOT bugged to the point it grabs them out of the experience.
look at most SNES games( I still play btw) they didn't have any major bugs at all, at least less than what you would find in today's products.
Look at riot, valve or blizzard games, people are playing the shit out of them because it is better than all the other stuff. they are polished experience that don't leave a bad taste in people's mouths.
As much as I could understand from user posts companies don't even fix the bugs found on their betas and using betas as mere "demos" because fixing bugs costs extra time and money.
http://kotaku.com/activision-targets-call-of-duty-glitch-videos-for-take-1661763431
Such moves always seem to backfire, and I do think it's shady as fuck, however in this case to say that they shouldn't have the right is a step too far in my opinion. It is their content after all, and I'm not sure if these monetized videos simply showing glitches qualify as "fair use".
Maybe if the videos were "this game is glitchy, be warned/do not buy", then yeah I guess that qualifies, but the ones I saw were more along the lines of "this game has glitches, here's how to use them to cheat!".
this thread has it all: apples, oranges, Disney dogs, art, Russell Crowe and Jackson Pollock!
I imagine a mantis shrimp would find all the art humanity has ever produced quite boring to look at since it has receptors for 16 different frequencies of light!
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp
So, is art subjective? Considering it requires an observer to impart value upon it... I'm going to have to say yes.
There we go, thread derailed!
TL;DR: "Check yourself before you wreck yourself."
I just wanted to poke my head and say that while the discussion is decent at times, some folks need a reminder to try and be constructive with your feedback. Polycount is known for its honesty, but its also known for being constructive. Put the 2 litre bottle of Haterade down and really think about the problem(s) you have and what solutions there might be.
It's fine to be upset, but some folks just spew hatred without any actual solutions and its made me cringe a few times. WE're all peers here, so lets offer our observations, criticisms, and our solutions.
http://kotaku.com/ubisoft-apologizes-for-assassins-creed-unity-with-free-1663768202
*Stands a safe distance back after adding fuel to the fire*
And what about financial issues, such as supporting a family, paying rent/mortgage/energy bills etc? You can't blame anyone for putting these responsibilities first, even if they do have major issues with how their company is run, or how the release of their product is managed.
Even if you find another job, there's a good chance you may end up having to move, which sucks enough if you're on your own, let alone if you have kids or a partner who is also employed.
Try to have a little perspective, we're talking about game developers here, not BlackWater.