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I could list the relevant answers for you almost by rote - but it’s much more useful (to you) if you track down the previous debates and get to see all that was said and why.
I’m not singling you out here, but to be honest, this is why I was never keen on a game-design area on JGO - this is a topic that has been discussed in detail several times over, and if anyone’s interested in the answers (and the new unanswered questions they generate), they really ought to go to the relevant places for these discussions. Places like the games-development mailing lists over on Sourceforge. Can’t remember the URL’s, but should be easy to find…a couple are run by Brian Hook (ex id-Software) IIRC.
The major point is that I see few mainstream games developers here on JGO. OTOH, the SF lists are full of pro games devs (even if lurking or only reading indirectly, via a company-feed), and they’re a friendly bunch. And there’s other places like that too, where mainstream developers hang out who live and breath this stuff and have lots of additional thoughts etc to add. If you want to discuss stuff like this, you should go there, because you’ll find lots of people who know a lot about it (though of course that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right ;)). Here on JGO there’s only a few (inevitably leads to fairly one-sided conversations - simply because there’s only a small number of perspectives from people with first-hand experience/knowledge), and so most people are just theorising, rather than adding new information.
What’s the point in having this conversation here, when you could instead have it with the involvement of EA’s employees, and Blizzard’s, and…etc ?
Kevglass’s post about improving the design of a game he already had clearly broke new ground, and led to the forming of this Topic. Now the topic’s moving back towards chat about game-design in general. Whilst that’s quite fun, it’s producing a very low signal-to-noise ratio.
Right, sorry about that. I’ll get off my soapbox now.