I Hate That Cliché!

Always poignant, sometimes pungent David Wong recently posted an article about the "20 things gamers want from the seventh generation of game consoles." Aside from his very true observations about crates, stale genres and straight-out lying about in-game graphics, he also mentioned a few design items I thought were dead-on:

Doors aren't indestructible. Big wooden doors can be obliterated by a rocket launcher. A padlock won't help.

Games shouldn't have load times. It's true - now that I have next to no free time, I don't want to waste it trying to find the CD, then loading, then waiting for the distributor's movie to roll, then the producer's movie to roll, then the studio's movie to roll, then the intro cinematic to roll so I can go to the menu, load the last savegame, wait for the level to load, then get into actual gameplay. I'm already bored by the time I see any action.

Women are a HUUUUUUUUUUUGE audience that's being overlooked by nearly every single major release. Go to WomenGamers.com sometime and look around. Not only do they have better observations on the market than most sites (they were the first to actually convince me that Ageia's Physics Processing Unit might actually be worthwhile), but they also make excellent points about how game studios have absolutely no clue how to relate to the female gender. If any other business was so stupid, they'd be laughed off the planet. The gaming industry, however, is content to lose 50% of their audience because they never got past having gum spit at them by girls in high school.

I'm hoping that by actually listening to the dissent out there... most of which I can really agree with... I can avoid some of the same design pitfalls.