Reviews (was RE: [GD-Design] Indie games?)

[Ivan-Assen I. <as...@ha...>]

> A better example might be the aforementioned Combat Mission or CA's 
> Medieval: Total War.  The Total War stuff has sold very, very well, 
> and I think it's partly because it wasn't the same resource 
> management RTS that everyone else has written a million times.

While Total War is a fine game by itself, I believe a large amount
of its sales can be attributed to its pretense of realism and
"historism". 
There are a lot of history buffs. On our forum and our support email
we get quite a lot of emails of the following two types:

1. "Your game is great! Why don't you do a historical campaign about
the battles of King Umperdincus the Greenbearded and his conquest of
Zashmorzonia? I have a lot of friend who are interested in the
history of Zashmorzonia [read: 2] and they would all buy it!"

2. "Your game sucks! I bought it because I'm interested in Roman
history,
but what's with all those 'spells' and 'healing' and 'druids'?
It's totally unrealistic."

So I guess Total War took some part of the substantial, although not
very large wargame market.

> Not to belabor the point -- and without having seen your game even 
> once -- then I would think that the design wasn't sufficiently 
> different for the reviewers to retain interest.

(BTW, if you have any interest in RTS games, EBGames already list it
for $9.99... not exactly a plug, because, obviously, at that price
nothing would come to us. And no, Jan, it's not a clickfest by any
means.)

There is a fine line between making your game too similar in apparent
gameplay
to one of the classics, and making it too different so that no reviewer
gets it in the 30 or so minutes he is able to devote.
As our lead designer put it after the first few reviews, "No more
*different*
games from me".
We've seen wildly varying reviews - people who "got it" and played the
game
we play, and people who didnt "get it" and play a vastly different,
shallow and bland game. (Of course, the blame for this sits squarely on
us, not them.) For that matter, we've seen reviews which say
"great multiplayer/skirmish mode, but the single-player is a totally
lame, boring attempt at an RPG" AND reviews which say
"great single-player missions, but the multiplayer/skirmish mode
is a totally lame standard RTS". We got good scores both from
people who obviously had played the game for 5 minutes (probably
due to good marketing on part of our publishers), and from people who
understood it; however, most of the bad scores we got were from
reviewers who judged the game completely superficially
(what, 2D graphics? only two races? shallow tech tree? must be bad).

Maybe in the long term, it's gameplay that matters. But for good
reviews in the initial period, you need not only glitzy technology,
but also very accessible gameplay. No one cares if two of your advanced
units form a very interesting symbiotic combination in the endspiel,
or if there's a great scripted sequence after the incredibly difficult
mission 8. The game must be obviously good, not just good.