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Comment by Agentlien | Hacker News Reader

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?!"

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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

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