Just curious. What games have you played that have given you a sense of creative freedom. It could be in terms of making things, or something you do (or even something else). I''d have to say Alpha Centauri would be my pick. Not only can I lay out the roads and infrastructure for my civ, with the feeling of building up and customizing a whole country, but I can terraform the world, as well as invent new units. Another question: What do you think the major drawbacks are to giving the player creative freedom? I tend to think "the more the better," but maybe this isn''t wise. -------------------- Just waiting for the mothership...

quote: Original post by Wavinator

Another question: What do you think the major drawbacks are to giving the player creative freedom? I tend to think "the more the better," but maybe this isn't wise.

The drawbacks only exist if you adopt hacks to simulate response. If you research and investigate deeper solutions (i.e. agent knowledge modeling, justification of randomly generated material, etc.) then I believe the drawbacks go away and the world opens up.

Edit: This may not apply to creating things, as you proposed, but to just plain broader interactivity.



Edited by - bishop_pass on November 23, 2000 2:02:51 AM

Rollercoaster Tycoon comes to mind.

One drawback is that some people just arent that creative. If you give them too much that they have to make up themselves then they don''t have fun.

eg. When playing Rollercoaster Tycoon with my girlfriend she does all the ride choosing and color scheme deciding and looking after the finances. But when it comes to actually designing a rollercoaster she just isn''t interested. The variables for playing the game aren''t constricted enough for her. Which is where I come in to build a huge nausea-inducing monster that uses up all the money in her carefully planned budget.

People are different. Its very hard to cater for everyone and probably not a good idea anyway because you end up with something that everyone likes a bit of but noone likes it all.

ro

I don''t think that I have EVER played a game that gave me enough creative freedom... Unless you call C++ (Visual, Borland and any others that I can find) [or any other programming language for that matter] a game...

I think that there needs to be MORE creative freedom. That is just the problem, but also allow enough to be done without requiring thought - just to keep the drones happy

-Chris Bennett of Dwarfsoft - Site:"The Philosophers'' Stone of Programming Alchemy" - IOL
The future of RPGs - Thanks to all the goblins over in our little Game Design Corner niche
          

I have to agree with dwarfsoft, games just don''t give me a satisfying amount of creative freedrom. I''m not saying I don''t enjoy games, because I do for other reasons, but I''m a very creative person and I always prefer to be doing something in PSP or Lightwave, or working on a website to playing a game.

But I think one of the best ways to allow creative freedom without getting in a mess with the design getting out of hand is just to allow modifyable graphics, levels, sounds, etc.

Sure most FPS games have editors bundled with them, but it takes learning how to use the editor to do anything good. I think more 2d games would be really good if you could make your own gfx for them. Like GTA if you could draw your own car, even if it handled the same as one of the existing ones, people could make some really groovy cars.

I can remember having loads of fun on the Amiga where some games'' graphics files were just ordinary files that you could load straight into a paint program, play around with them and the game would load them in none the wiser.