Gameplay vs. Experience

[Ketzal]

This is something that I started mulling over in my head after watching the latest Sequelitis video made by Egoraptor (which you can see here. Language warning!). The "Too Long, Didn't Watch" version is that Egoraptor analyzes the original Legend of Zelda, LoZ: A Link to the Past and LoZ: Ocarina of Time. He explains what, in his opinion, made the original Legend of Zelda unique, as well as how aLttP and OoT changed that formula. From what I got out of the video, he loves the way that the original game had so much exploration and discovery to it, yet he doesn't like how much more limited OoT is in this sense. He pointed out several things about the game that he didn't like, but what he hated most overall was the linearity of it compared to the original, as well as aLttP to a certain extent.

Now, I watched this video as a big fan of OoT, so naturally I came out of it with a lot of disagreements to what he said about it. At the same time, though, he had a point: OoT really didn't have the level of free-roaming and exploration that the original game had. Sure, there were secrets to find and dungeons to go through, but for the most part the game goes on a straight line through the main quest: despite some side missions, most of the game is about following a given story and sticking with it, not sidetracking and randomly exploring.

So why do I still like OoT? I can see it for some of flaws that Egoraptor pointed out, but I still enjoy the game, and I would still enjoy playing it despite it's departure from the original's open-ended exploration. And I feel that the answer is the experience.

One of the things I liked best about OoT at the time was that it felt epic, it felt big, it felt like a grand story unfolding right before me on the screen. From the boss battles, to the characters you met, to the settings and how they changed over time (literally), everything was happening for the story, and it served to flesh out and make the world seem more alive. I never got that when I tried out the original game: all I got was that I was a green dude given a wooden sword to go fight rock-spitting octopi with.

Now that doesn't mean that I can't see what made the original game good, because that's obvious: the gameplay. It's all about the gameplay when it comes to the original, and that's fine. But I think that's the biggest factor in explaining how the formula for Legend of Zelda has changed and become the kind of game series it is today. It's become more about the story, as well as the characters and settings within that story.

So to bring this all back to the point, I've found that a lot of games are often either really good for the experience (like Ocarina of Time) or really good for the gameplay (like the original Legend of Zelda). I'm also curious to see what other people think: what do you feel makes a game good for the experience or good for the gameplay, and what kind of games do you feel fit one or the other more?

Also, I know that there are games that have both great gameplay and a great experience (Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones comes to mind), but I'm more interested in looking at games that give you one or the other. It's more of an interesting contrast, and I like looking at games that have weaknesses in some areas, but easily have enough in other areas to still be good.

[Him]

I'd say my favorite part of a game is experience. The first game I got really involved in was Runescape, and that had basically no outstanding gameplay. It was just a lot of possible things to do. Sure, now-a-days it has more of both, but this is back then I am talking about. Another example for me would be Amnesia: The Dark Decent. On my laptop the gameplay was frustrating. The story and the horror more than made up for it.

Experience has always been the best thing to get me involved in a game. A good example I can think of is CoD. It is good enough to play, but there isn't much else. You don't play CoD multiplayer for the experience. IMO, the story in the campaign wasn't good most of the time anyways. That meant I could only deal with it so much.

The story has always been my favorite part. It's why I play games in the first place. Which is also part of the reason I hate spoilers so much. Spoilers damage the experience. They have nothing to do with gameplay.

All of this has just been me saying the same thing. So, TL;DR, I'm an experience kind of guy.

[Ketzal]

-snip-

I forgot to mention this game in the initial post, but if you haven't tried it yet, you should give The Bard's Tale a go. Not the original game, I mean the one for the PS2/Xbox. The gameplay is nothing amazing, but the writing and comedy is fantastic.

I also feel like the KOTOR games were very experience-like. As fun as building up your characters could be, the gameplay definitely got bland and samey at times. But GOD, the depth of the characters!

And a side note, I actually feel like you could argue that playing with all of the possible things to do in Runescape is more a factor of it's gameplay. True, it's fleshing out the world more, but fletching arrows and mining ore and cooking food isn't really doing anything to add to the story or characters of the game. And yes, I do mean the old version, which I played too. Pretty much all I did was sell iron bars for about 85% of the game. XD

[Insomniac]

For me, it's primarily about the experience. The gameplay doesn't have to be as good...but I DO have my limits, which is why I could never get into Runescape; no matter how good the experience, the gameplay just wasn't enough to suck me in in that case. I LOVE Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, mostly for the experience. Though, I also like CoD for the single player story, in the case of the Modern Warfare trilogy. And with Kevin Spacey featured prominently in the trailer, I have higher hopes for Advanced Warfare than I've had for any game since MW3.

I absolutely adored Mirror's Edge, for its gameplay and story. I see the high potential of games with good first person parkour. I was heavily disappointed in the lack of Experience in Brink and Titanfall, despite the GOOD gameplay of the latter (though I wasn't able to play it myself. Let's just say someone I follow on YouTube that isn't that great at action games pulled off some IMPRESSIVE parkour stunts). Let's see...That's all I've got for now. I'm primarily about Experience, but also need some Gameplay. Though I'm willing ton sacrifice Gameplay in favor of GOOD Experience.

[Zylver]

The first idea that came to my mind obviously:



And the perfect examples for this category would be Dust: An Elisian Tail, The Witcher games, the Mass Effect Trilogy (though the controls of the first game were a but tricky, especially the team controls...) or the Assassin's Creed Series (though I haven't played out the third instalment fully, nor Black Flag or Liberation)

But since then, I had lunch and some time with it to reconsider the topic, so I have another thing figured out:
Experience contains gameplay, but not every gameplay can make it into the experience.

And this is true: for the The Elder Scrolls games never made it to the experience, although they have one of the best character levelling systems, beautiful landscapes and a lot of freedom. And even it has a great gameplay, it's world just can suck me in, like the games I mentioned above...
Or here is the opposite: Gothic I and Gothic II: Night of the Raven was often criticized because of its strange controls and strict, linear levelling system, yet the games themselves were able to impress and make you believe that you are actually in a LIVELY world with reoccurring characters in each episode and a story that pinned me to the screen just to finish it as fast as I can!

And yes, I have to agree with the statement that experience is becoming more and more important for the gaming industry. Graphics are already pushed to the limit and gamers who give a lot of damn can't be bought with it. The gameplay is part of the experience but it alone can't and will never be able to carry the whole game on it's shoulders (a good example for this is the "XYZ hours of gameplay" worth nothing, if it is too repetitive). So, this leads only to the experience now to be perfected, because making a game nowadays is easy.
But making a GOOD game is going to be the future challenge of the industry!

[Schrodinger]

For me, I take it on a case by case basis. Sometimes all I need is fantastic gameplay (Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance), sometimes competent gameplay is marred by a bad overall experience (Halo 4), and sometimes a great experience can make me forgive some deficiencies in the gameplay (Bioshock, Bioshock Infinite). I look at it like this, good gameplay will keep me playing a game but a good experience makes me want to play to the end.

[HeckobA]

-snip-

I forgot to mention this game in the initial post, but if you haven't tried it yet, you should give The Bard's Tale a go. Not the original game, I mean the one for the PS2/Xbox. The gameplay is nothing amazing, but the writing and comedy is fantastic.

Care to explain why the one for the PS2/Xbox is good but not the original? I played it on the PC and loved it and the PS2/Xbox version seems to be pretty much the same game. The Bard is such a fun guy to play.

Also, http://www.thebardstale.com/music.htm THE MUSIC!
I love these songs and know all the words by heart.

[Ketzal]

Care to explain why the one for the PS2/Xbox is good but not the original? I played it on the PC and loved it and the PS2/Xbox version seems to be pretty much the same game. The Bard is such a fun guy to play.

Oh, I don't mean to imply the original isn't worth playing. I just said that because I never played it, so I don't know whether to recommend it or not.

[Insomniac]

I'm someone who wants a good experience, but if the gameplay is bad I won't play it. A good example is resident evil 6. I remember playing that game for the first time on Leon's campaign. It felt well paced, and bosses were good fun. Then I found the assault rifle. That broke gameplay completely. Boss fights and zombie hordes became easy on any difficulty, and it was sad to me. The other campaigns had the same issue, with Chris's having that issue quickly.

See here's the thing, and I've said this to death and back, but...From a narrative perspective, the more actiony shift in ResEvil 6 (and on the same subject, Dead Space 3) makes perfect sense, whether it was intentional good writing or not. In the case of ResEvil 6, these characters aren't the same terrified amateurs from the original games. They know what they're doing now. [censored] still scares them of course, but this is their DAY JOB now. They've made a CAREER out of dealing with horrible monstrosities that're an affront to nature and good sense, I EXPECT them to be not only competent at their job, but BECAUSE it's their job with, may I remind you, a government sponsored, multinational paramilitary organization, WELL EQUIPPED for the job. In the case of Dead Space 3, Isaac is still very rightly terrified of Necromorphs, but it's his third time dealing with them. He's gone from improvising weapons, to making them, to stapling them together out of spare parts. He's tired of dealing with this [censored], yes, but he's tired of it because of how many times too dumb to live [censored] have made him deal with it. So to me, the shift in gameplay styles is justified by the experience, not a detriment to it.

[Ketzal]

-focus shift snip-

True, but at the same time I feel like using the same characters over and over for the same series takes away the possibility of reinventing the experience that the first one gave you. It's true that the newer ones can't do that with more mature characters, but why not have new characters that are unfamiliar with the situation? Why not make a genuine horror Resident Evil like the first one was? If the general consensus on this thread is any indication, people what a game with genuine story, feel, and characters, not just another action shooter with zombies and monsters.

[Insomniac]

-focus shift snip-

True, but at the same time I feel like using the same characters over and over for the same series takes away the possibility of reinventing the experience that the first one gave you. It's true that the newer ones can't do that with more mature characters, but why not have new characters that are unfamiliar with the situation? Why not make a genuine horror Resident Evil like the first one was? If the general consensus on this thread is any indication, people what a game with genuine story, feel, and characters, not just another action shooter with zombies and monsters.

A fair point, to be sure, but surely one can agree that, when the same characters are used, it's unfair to fault a game for having good writing and remembering that those characters are more experienced and better equipped at this point, right?

[Lief]

In my experience with RE6 I barely found any AR Ammo, so it balanced itself out that way. Usually only had a full mag in it and maybe 10-20 rounds to spare, which wasn't enough considering its RoF.

[MeaCulpa, S.C.M.]

If a game's core gameplay isn't fun or interesting, I can't really enjoy it. My friends have invited me to play EVE Online countless times and every time, despite how often I was lectured concerning the essentially player-created world, the massive PvP, or how it was the Wild West of MMOs, clicking an enemy with all my guns and watching their health bars go down just isn't interesting, especially since they're usually so far away that it just looks like dots shooting dots at each other. That and the hideously unfriendly UI just made it unplayable for me (and I suspect quite a few others--not that I look down on EVE fans. I'll read a good EVE story any day, but I sure as hell don't want to play it.)

That said, I can enjoy a good setpiece as much as anyone, and there's some games where I'll forgive shoddy/mediocre gameplay by fantastic environments and characterization (see Spec Ops: The Line, The Wolf Among Us, etc.) But my favorites will always be the ones with engaging gameplay mechanics.

[Jonesy]

Both play a role to some degree. It's not good to have one excel while the other is rubbish, and just the whole game down.

Overall, I'd have to go with experience. Very rarely have I ever fell in love with a game because of its gameplay alone. Many of my favorite games, like Thief, Deus Ex and The Elder Scrolls, manage to have a very good experience based on many factors done right (usually including gameplay). In others, like Command and Conquer, the gameplay forms a core part of the experience.

[Nuff]

Perhaps the word experience wasn't quite the one you were looking for. As far as I see it surely gameplay is part of the experience of a game. Most people seem to be talking about story & freedom against flat out mechanics so I guess I'll chip in with that line of discussion. The balance between how a game plays and how much of a world there is to explore doesn't always add up, in fact more often than not if you are given an 'open world' I've found the actual mechanics of the game to be lacking. Fallout 3, although it had a very deep a rich world with countless hours worth of exploring and adventuring to be done suffered from have a rather [censored] combat system. Almost all the guns felt like cap guns and that is definetly something that bothers me. If you are in a FPS (note: despite being able to change to 3rd persont he game was even worse in that mode) the star of the show is in fact the guns/weaponary you are using. The star of the show here was the 'lets pause combat and watch the game shoot [censored] in slow motion' VATS system. Cool the first time you used it. [censored] awful once the 'ooooh shiney' factor wore out. So although I really enjoyed discovering what weird and wonderful things the game devs had thought up for the side missions I found the game itself a chore to play, which is probably the reason I never finished New Vegas.

This brings me onto the Morrowind series of games too (sorry Bethesda fans.) Although I never played Morrowind (which I have heard was the peak of the series) I have played Oblivion & Skyrim. Both suffer from a simular fate as Fallout in my eyes, with combat really not feeling that interesting or fun. It's mostly backpeddling if you are a mage, or swinging whatever weapon you have around like a nutter and hoping things fall over. Also no reward for shooting things in the face with an arrow? Retarded. It's not like sword combat in a FPS can't work either, I remember having a great time while playing Dark Dark Messiah. Once I've pushed through to get to all the good story and exploration the butt combat catches up and starts dragging downt he experience.

I think ultimately, it's much easier to specialise in one area than it is to bring both together. A game made almost entirely to tell a story (The Walking Dead, Wolf Among Us) can really focus on that element and bring that forward. Criticism still lands on their gameplay but then it is normally ignored because that's not the point of it. Dota 2 has pretty much no story, with just little blurbs about characters available and it making no difference to how you play them in a game. It's purely gameplay & mechanics. A game like Dota 2 is extremly deep in the way it can and is played and with some many different combinations and experiences out there it's gameplay alone makes it what it is.

I could probably rant on more about other games that have been mention but I'll perhaps save that for later xD