Tony hawk like games handles difficulty pretty well IMO. If you're new to the game, you can at least do some simple flips and stuff and make some points. As you get better, you learn more and more ways to chain together combos, by learning tricks and the level layouts. There's virtually no limit to how far you can go, starting with landing 1000 point tricks, up to crazy 40 million in one combo (and maybe even more).
What isn't too good in Tony hawk IMO, is that you HAVE TO do some pretty insane stuff to get through it. It's not a big problem, but i think it's better to design a game so that almost anyone can get through, while leaving lots of room for good players to get through it BETTER, with higher scores etc.

BH: I never said I disagreed with your idea. It's entirely possible that the guys who made FF7 came up with the gameplay first, and this kind of gameplay is what they preferred. Same thing with RPG's that require reflexes to play.

It's also entirely possible that going into a game from the story perspective, after a while you could think "no I'd better not do that, that wouldn't be fun enough" without actually focusing 100% on gameplay.

Personally, I think it's impossible to create an RPG without heavily considering the gameplay at some point. Every choice you make will be affected by what kind of stat system you're using, how important stats are, what the levelling curve is (if you even want levels), whether you want player's inventory to be limited by carrying capacity or infinite, whether you want player to end up with a huge inventory or try to get through with as few items as possible, etc etc etc.

However, the fact is, as long as you think through the implications of all your decisions, it doesn't make a huge amount of difference which element you start with, because the player only sees the final product. If you started out working on the story but then decided it'd be interesting if the PC might not be able to lift the Sword of Doom, then you could go back and work out how the item weight/carrying capacity system worked, and the player wouldn't be any the wiser.

It's interesting to look at chess for moment, if you're looking at gameplay. Chess on the computer is almost all gameplay. However, Battle Chess (1989), is a game where graphics and sounds are included to make the game more entertaining.
Indeed, when I was young, I played the game more for graphics and sounds than the actual chess. Not because the graphics and sounds were stunning, but because they were entertaining.
Add to that the new game I enjoy playing now and then from http://kungfuchess.com (which is basically real-time chess vs. human opponents, which means that you can move any number of pieces at the same time)

Kungfuchess is again all gameplay.

Claiming that gameplay is never designed first is folly. And as someone said, we focus on what we want to focus. Because gameplay is NOT king.

This system won't always make sure a game is fun. It just means that, that was your first priority. You could still screw it up just as if you had tried to make a great storyline and nobody liked it.

So you're right, the people working at Square could have made the gameplay first. However, I doubt that due to the more obvious differences between story and gameplay.

Sure you could make the story and design the gameplay. This is just one of many options, not a necessity.

I will have to comment on some other people here:

Some of you said that you played games due to the graphics and sound. I'm sorry, but if you were playing just for the graphics and sound then I doubt me spending lots of effort to make a great game would even matter? I could simply make a small demo with tons of high poly models running and fighting while your randomly click buttons.

I'm not saying you still do this, but graphics can never be the focus of a game. Sadly, they are often given a much higher priority than gameplay and storyline in many modern games. Result? You get great looking games that are short and aren't fun.

Being an individual developer I cannot compete with fancy visuals down in retail. Even storyline is hard to compete with because I cannot realistically make these epic games others make. (sure I can make a cool story, but I can't spend 5 years developing the game for it). So gameplay is the one area I feel that with some persistance and imagination I can compete. Perhaps the advantage even goes to me seeing as I can take risks and try things bigger companies wouldn't be willing to finance.

What is Game Play? It's that thing we used to put in the games we designed before the year 1995 roughly. Game Play is a thing that no matter what direction your mind goes within the game there are sensations generated. You test your inventiveness and decision making abilities and have a lot of fun trying different approaches to a problem and getting almost immediate results, good ones for pleasure and bad ones creating a bigger appetite.

Sure it's an art form. Every song writer creates their work in so many different ways. Some music first, some lyrics first, some with a play on words or a few bars/riffs. When I do a game I do the graphics, game play and interface all basically in parallel. It's a strange way but creates great results for me. I'm very visual, so by having interface and graphics along side my game design generates all kinds of interesting things. The old pioneer Sid Mieir I believe insisted on getting a functioning playing game up as fast as possible as a constant validation method while design of it is further carried out.

If you want to make money first then you can get away with not bothering with strong game play, there's other ways to make a game addictive like with the MMORPG's now a days. But if you keep putting game play first on your list and you get it right one day with flying colors you've just become a valuable developer :) and a rare one at that. Not worrying about game play anyone can do. I wish you the best with your next project.

If you decide to put gameplay first, you may have to make sacrifices when it comes to the story. In the example in your OP, you say that the player's success level in one mission decides the next mission. This criteria places restrictions on the story, as you never know which mission will be next. If you decide to make the gameplay tell the story, you have no idea what order the player will see the story in; the mission where he learns that his brother was the one to sabatoge his ship could come before the one that demonstrates how much he trusted his brother. (Or you could completely seperate gameplay and story, or do without any story at all.)

Sacrifices aren't always bad, by the way. Instead of risking that the player see the PC's trust in his brother after seeing the betrayal, you could always cheat and make them play those two missions when you want them to, regardless of their success level. That would be lame - much better to follow the rules that you've set. So what if the emotional impact of the betrayal is lessened? I'm still playing missions that match my skill level.