When to Innovate

August 15, 2006 on 6:27 pm | In Playstyles, Innovation

In a recent thread over at F13, we've started discussing what to do with players who either are done with the Raiding endgame of a typical diku-inspired experience, or who just want more options than that. As part of this discussion, we've been talking about innovation in game play experiences and what features matter to the most players.

One of my favorite topics came up within this discussion. The question is: do you launch a game with a broad array of innovative features to try and capture a wide variety of players, or do you launch the game for an established audience and scale into the new variety of players by integrating innovation (or at least, broader) features later?

I've long wondered if it wouldn't just be smarter for a company to launch a game for one type of audience (in the case of this genre: diku) and then over time replace certain features with ones that would allow the integration of more virtual lifestyle-like systems. Start with a proven success and use that to bankroll into innovative thinking. That, of course, grossly understates the complexity of doing so. And as with anything in this genre, God is in the details. But I still think it's a valid question to continue asking.

But if we assume quality and experiential goals are met, there still remains some very complex questions. For example, Rithrin asked:

Why not just add in the innovation right from the start alongside the proven method? No need to start off by limiting options then opening them later…

The problem is that the more you add into your feature list for launch, the more money and team size you need to pull it off. And the more complex your final test becomes, because it's attempting to integrate a wider array of features. So, basically, if you want a broad featureset all complete and well playing, you need to convince management or VC folks that it's worth the even greater risk up front, both in money and resources and time.

Scaling into innovation meanwhile means you can focus specifically on the known desired features and therefore tap a well-defined market. With the success you gain here you can fund the innovation you want later. Some of this innovation will be appreciated by your existing players, but it can also be used to market the game to new players, getting a potential bump in PR (good PR) and therefore raising awareness of your game which may have begun to plateau in interest due to age and the launch of other titles.

In a way, SWG would have served as a great example of this had a lot of things worked out. One of the problems was that the most polished system (resources, crafting) was one with a relatively narrow appeal. Had they launched with combat being awesome, supported by a good narrative based questing system and with well-integrated PvP, they could have gained their initial success and then launched a good crafting resource system and then vehicles and then Cities and then JTL, all of which radically changed the game.

Of course, this grossly oversimplifies the task of actually doing that in practice. But that's the hypothesis anyway. It comes down to this question:

Would a game with ok housing, ok crafting, ok economy, ok questing and ok combat and everything else being the same do as well at launch as a game with great questing and great combat? If not, then maybe focus on doing what the players expect done right first, yet with an eye towards how the total system will be scaled later.

So it's not just a matter of what you launch, it's when you can afford to launch it and in what order best serves the amount of type of players you want in your game.