Hi
what makes a game , a top-notch game ?
money $_$ ? , Time ? , Hard Work ? , Concept ? , GamePlay ?
Textures…
Textures…
DukDuk is a great example here 
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All of the above except money, you can make entire games in Blender without paying a dime.
Gameplay is number 1. Then graphics.
Hard work is just something that goes into the other aspects. I’m sure for some people the work is not that challenging, but I know for me, it is, because of my lack of free time. This means that I skip a lot of the planning stage, and just jump right in.
Quality of the content boils down to hard work. But people won’t play it if the gameplay is bad.
I would say that gameplay is your number one aspect of the game that you MUST focus on, but when you get into the eye candy kinda thing, you really want to focus on the textures, shaping, and shading. Poly conservation is also good as long as things still look right. Good Luck!
bull!
the answer is none of the above…
nobody cares about gameplay anymore, take kingdom hearts for instance. all you did was push the controll stick forward and tap x for the entire game.
you need a good storyline and a gimick (ie smacking disney characters with oversized keys :rolleyes:)
but you might be saying “kingdom hearts story line sucked!” and yes it did. so how did they do so well? gimick, gimick, gimcik!
mercenaries- walk around war game where you can blow building up
battlefield bad company- total destruction via frostbite engine
call of duty 4- mind melting animations
final fantasy- “complex” storyline that its creator makes up as he goes along and laughs as the bucks come rolling in
kingdom hearts- final fantasy vs disney 
wtf
grand theft auto- walk around game that has great amout of freedom
medal of honor- blast nazis, damn thats so cliche but so much fun
everygood game has a gimick, thats the bottom line:mad:
NJROTC , i kind of agree with you , spcecially because i have played most of the games you mentioned , it’s something cool that express the game , the core , the concept , as example let’s pick metal gear solid 1 (cool story , and sneaking theme ) , etc …
Story line is great, but one of my all time favorites that I often look at when planning the aspects of my game is the Guild Wars games. Of course the graphics and stuff cannot be mimicked in blender, but the background and gameplay stuns me. There’s also a third element that I can’t put my finger on…
Hello. The best games are the most fun games. Games aren’t meant to be looked at. They’re meant to be PLAYED. P. L. A. Y. E. D. Spell it fah me, baby!
Take Chibi-Robo for the GameCube or Kingdom Hearts 2. Graphically, they are good (not Chibi-robo as much as KH2), but the gameplay on both is dope too. The reason that games look good are good planning, good art direction, good LIGHTING, and good ideas. Good games are original, like Harvest Moon or Pacman, and are good takes on games. For example, the reason MMORPG games work are because they are about working together and working with communities, which cannot be complete without being online. They have tasks and side-quests as well as individual quests you can venture toward yourself. Some games rock because they look, act, and sound good, not because of just one thing. The Blender Game Engine is extremely powerful, but most people who work with it are individual hobbysists who want to create the next Dark Cloud 2 in a few weeks (Me too. . .). Hobbyists can create PS2 quality games rather quickly.
If professionals got a hold of the BGE, who knows what games would be created. I think I read somewhere that the BGE used to be used for PS1 games. . . I wonder if any new games were created with the BGE?
GURU, I believe that the most important aspect of game making is making the player feel that he is being rewarded by succeeding at the game.
Having said that, the easiest way to frustrate the player is with a poorly designed control system. If the controls do not work well, the player will not be able to advance as quickly as he feels he should, and he will feel cheated and abandon the game.
Secondly, the player should either feel connected to the story (if the game is linear) or feel free to create his own story (if the game is open-ended). What is his goal in playing the game? If he has no goal, then why is he playing the game? He will most likely abandon it for something else.
Third, the game should cause the player to feel immersed in the environment. Artwork, sounds, physics, and artificial intelligence all work together here. No one environment feature is more important than the other, though artwork (textures and models) is the hardest to succeed at in my opinion.
On the other hand, if you want to make a lot of money with your game, the most important aspects of the game are fancy graphics, lots of advertising, and high quality animations and renders that mislead the purchaser into believing that the game looks much better than it actually does.
Money, of course.
It can buy up all the best talent, and that’s really all it takes to create something that most people would label “High Quality”.
I don’t think that money makes good games. Take, for example, Nitrobike for the Wii. That game had money behind it, but people didn’t like it. Maybe that was a bad example. . . Okay, take, for another example, Katamari Damacy (the ball rolling game where you stick living things and objects to your ball, for whatever systems it’s on; it was originally on PS2). That game sold for only $20 and wasn’t great-looking, but it was fun, original, and people loved it; it was professional. 
That being said, games don’t need money to be professional. For example, some PS1 games, I think, were created with the Blender engine, and that was BEFORE the upgrades to the Blender engine we have now, so we have a PS2, perhaps PS3 quality engine on our hands, but we just need to use it and get good with it. 
I’m going to join the controversial side of this and say gameplay absolutely isn’t king anymore, and it shouldn’t be.
the world is full of “high quality” games with “innovative” gameplay that’ll never find an audience. “man, those publishers really screwed us with their marketing” is a common phrase bandied around to excuse these inaccessible masturbatory affairs.
the world is full of games that are highly successful that “suck” according to those in the “know”.
A game must be engaging and entertaining and have a strong personality.
That could be in the breathtaking beauty of its graphics ontop of an unoriginal gameplay mechanic that’s only executed “ok”, it could be the ugly game that just has an addictive quality…
there are many theories on how to “bottle” this, but all the tests in the world have exceptions…
I personally like the “high concept” idea… that the whole thing is built around a central hook that if delivered will allow all other areas of the game to be “average”. Sadly these “big ideas” are few and far between, but can be worked at.
The bigger the central idea the less perfect other areas need to be delivered to be successful. (then, should they deliver above “entry level” it’s pure gravy!)
Here’s the obligatory list:
1)what’s the big idea?
2) will that idea find an audience?
3) Does it have “personality?”
4) is the personality big enough and appealing enough?
5)how will the game innovate? gameplay? tech? concept?
6)how does the content of the game communicate the “big idea” to the audience?
7)when everything’s written and all the content is in does it still deliver on the above?
point 4 explains why licenses are so popular (as well as the prevalence of “fan” games) It’s much easier to “borrow” personality than to “have” personality!
Actually, scracth all of the above, it’s all personality!
EDIT: And of course a lot of plain hard work and passion! Hard work and passion are no substitute for personality, but personality without belief is nothing.
Money + Talent = HQ game
Definitely
Today its more about how much money you can get not how fun you can make it.
Nah, that just gives it the POTENTIAL to be good!
X all the way!
EDIT: I’ve seen a lot of money thrown at a lot of talented people get turned to sh*t!
yea, I guess your right here (+ story the the people like)
Story isn’t as universal as personality… what’s the story in “the Sims?”
Medal of Honor’s initial appeal is “play every WWII movie you’ve ever seen” (or perhaps “goldeneye on the ps2 set in WWII” all it needed to do was deliver a strong atmosphere
compare that to Wolfenstein - competing on supernatural premise-- > more original story —> less mass market appeal.
By the time we get to Call of Duty it really is just competing on perfect execution
Tony Hawks was a massively successful franchise- it had the culture and personality of skateboarding in lieu of story… its final success probably couldn’t be predicted before it happenned, nor could the bursting bubble of extreme sports games…
What’s more important?.. story, premise, personality - attiitude…
the other end of the spectrum… the Resident Evil series doesn’t depend on story… if the story was good the films wouldn’t suck! the games were fantastically enjoyable DESPITE terrible controls and clunky mechanisms and incrdeibly cliched key and door and manipulation puzzles. they succeed at delivernig atmoshere and engaging the player… they are almost as enjoyable to WATCH someone play as they are to play directly. Thats unique! just think, technologically very achievable in Blender right now!
I’m off sick today, so excuse the “too much time on my hands” ramblings.
Simpson and Bruckheimer’s approach is still the strongest guage for games success, even if out of favour in hollywood right now…
Cultural relevance, big ideas distilled to simplest easy to digest form communicating to the largest audience are the keys to success (as long as delivered in a slick package thats big on style and soundtracK")
More LEMSIP for me!