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Comment by michaelteter | Hacker News Reader

Historical inaccuracies aside, when making a game it is essential to frequently stop and ask, “does this make the game more fun?”

A lot of realism mechanics make gameplay dreadful, boring, tedious, or frustrating. A simulation is one thing, but a game is another.

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I had a discussion with my son son about recent (2015-2019) Need For Speed games I worked on. He asked why we didn't include keeping track of fuel and actually stopping to use the gas station like in real life (in game you just drive through and it repairs your car). And why don't repairs require you to leave the car for a few days and cost tons of money?

I told him it would be annoying rather than fun and negatively impact the pacing. It wouldn't work well in our specific games.

Actually, during development there are always so many interesting ideas which don't pan out because they wouldn't actually be fun. Some even get built then scrapped because it didn't work as well as one would think. That's the kind of thing you'll often see internet forums bring up framed like "why didn't the devs think of this?!"

One of the first games I remember seeing (I was maybe 7 years old) was Test Drive, I still remember it features gas stations as checkpoints: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/b03NIAoH2g4/hq720.jpg?

my first thought! fond memories, I remember it as being really hard

I’ve recently really gotten into playing Starfield by Bethesda and you can turn the difficulty up and down, they obviously put a lot of systems in that they decided most people would find annoying and not fun, so they kept it in but gated it in granular options menus that give you an exp bonus.

Like becoming dehydrated and malnourished if you don’t eat every half hour, which is pretty easy to manage, not being able to carry as much, turning damage up, and increasing afflictions so when you get hurt you have to go see a medic and can’t just cure them, although you can stabilize them.

While those ones are okay, and I’ve turned them on (like the weight being lower has a skill that you can add to mitigate, and items that make you stronger), there’s environmental afflictions on certain planets, but they didn’t put sufficient mitigations in the game to combat them. So a high air pressure planet or high solar radiation planet, even if you get a protective suit it gives you maybe two minutes of mitigation, not nearly enough time to do anything productive while walking on the planet, so if you crank the difficulty up those planets just become totally off limits, since there’s no way to “plan effectively and feel clever”, instead you just get burns and then come down with pneumonia and it’s not fun.

I think you could make it engaging, maybe by leaning harder into the robots automation and allowing them to do more tasks, or having diving style space suits for higher pressure environments.

Hey! Just wanted to say it's really cool to run across someone that worked on those games. NFS is one of my favorite franchises, and Payback was my favorite in the series. Good work!

Thank you, that's very nice to hear. :)

Every time I hear someone likes a game I contributed to I feel quite happy. After all, giving joy and escapism to people who need it is why I always wanted to make games.

It really depends on the audience though. I personally way prefer more realistic simulation like games, for example BeamNG. NFS has a broad appeal and is fun to play but it doesn’t feel anything like driving a real car. No offence though, I grew up with NFS underground 2 and it largely inspired my love of modified cars!

Edit: as a kid my friends and I dreamed of the day car games would have realistic and dynamic crash physics and well BeamNG gets pretty close.

Right, which is why I wrote "It wouldn't work well in our specific games."

There's an obvious appeal to sim racing for those who want realism and My Summer Car for those who... Well, it's an interesting project which I respect, at least.

The thing to think about is always how well something fits in the specific game you are making. If it completely warps the focus and disrupts the intended moment to moment gameplay loop, then it probably isn't a good inclusion. But it might still be a great idea for another game. In some cases, and this happens often in early development, it can even mean that other game is what you should be making instead. But that rarely happens when working on a big established franchise.

Interesting, thanks for sharing

Reminds me of an old joke from The Onion

https://theonion.com/ultra-realistic-modern-warfare-game-fea...

I can't find it now, but someone made an ultra-realistic D-Day simulator where you basically portray one of the guys who never made it to the beach in Saving Private Ryan.

Battlefield 1 opens with a series of short battles that you can't win. Every time you die the camera moves to another nearby soldier who is also being overrun, and you fight for a while then die again. You see the graves of each person you played who died. It's one of the most powerful openings of a war game I ever played and really drives home the reality that whilst what follows is fun, the real WW1 is one you probably would not have survived.

Thanks for sharing I skipped this title and missed that scene.

Precisely; the reason for omitting many realistic elements is because they would be boring. If I wanted to play through all the steps of plowing a field, planting the grain, irrigating the field, dealing with weeds, harvesting the grain, and hauling it to a market to sell I would play Farming Simulator. If I'm playing a city builder, I'm perfectly okay with those steps being reduced to "plant crops, wait for crops to grow, harvest crops", and to have workers auto-assigned to those tasks while I'm laying out roads and palisades.

Also, having my village randomly wiped out from time to time by events beyond my control (plague, wars, etc.) would be realistic, but no fun at all in a game.

> Also, having my village randomly wiped out from time to time by events beyond my control (plague, wars, etc.) would be realistic, but no fun at all in a game.

Besides, there’s Dwarf Fortress if you’re into this sort of thing.

Especially with a static game seed, so even reloading won’t save you :)

The "Johnny and the Dead" series by Terry Pratchett included a school mate of Johnny who liked to make computer games.. and he created a realistic game about flying your spaceship to some nearby star or somewhere. Everything was realistic.. you would stare at the black night of space for thousands of years (literally) while going there. For some reason people didn't flock to that game.

I guess they preferred more casual games like “Desert Bus” (1995), a really existing title, built to show how a realistic long-distance bus driving simulator would look like. It is still played today as a joke, mainly for charity events.

In particular, the complaint that 'most villages didn't grow into towns' is a pretty terrible one from a game design point of view, because you could say "Most X don't Y" about almost every game, because players want to do the _exceptional_, not the _every day_.

Also there is the question of _who you are_ in a city builder, because he seems to be assuming that the player is playing as an average villager, and not the people who actually make planning decisions (monasteries and lords, etc).

Most of these games are sort of explicitly designed to be power fantasies on some level. I am sure you could make a truly great game that is sort of down in the muck, a villager eye view, or whatever, but it might not be as popular or fun.

Never let realism get in the way of game play :)

Incidentally, when I last played Banished there was a loophole in its simulation and you could just build a few modules consisting of like 3 or 4 basic buildings and that solved all your survival problems with no need for later intervention.

Gamers gonna optimize.

The article does address this directly at the end, for what it’s worth.

Same for why sim city didn’t have parking

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