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I don't understand this statement. Is Amplitude's games uninnovative?

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8 years ago
Mar 23, 2017, 6:01:33 PM

Been having discussion with someone else about the change that Amplitude made to their game by listening to feedback of players and he made this statement 


"In my opinion it leads to badly built committee games that never change or innovate or do something different. It's why I stopped buying their content.  

Developers should definitely listen to fans and implement great ideas, but they should also be able to say no and follow their own ideas. Amplitude only knows how to do the first."


The change and feedback Amplitude been doing is great and doesn't seem to hurt their games. It is not like some random Joe could tell Amplitude that he doesn't like X and want it gone. We do have Games2Gether system for this very reason, don't we? Maybe it is just lack of language skill but i can't quite put my finger on why all of these is the bad thing. I don't quite want when the game developer doing "Play our game the way we want you to play" either. I'm sicking of that kind already and it plaguing Asian gaming market. They don't listen to you. You can't give them a feedback. You can't give any opinions or rabid fan will chew you up fast. Amplitude is one of the game developer that i first seen, first love for what they are doing. Being transparent about their game, development and listening to feedback. Look, we got our webby wobby tech tree back instead of boring linear era to era tree because we give them feedback. That not going to happen here in Asia games.

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8 years ago
Mar 23, 2017, 7:04:24 PM

That's someone who doesn't have any clue what's going on here. 


Amplitude is perhaps the most innovative 4X developer in the market right now. 



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8 years ago
Mar 23, 2017, 7:36:13 PM

Yes, but they have said no (in an indirect way) to a number of things. Just look at the space battle discussion on the game design forum. Mysterarts didn't cave in when people said they wanted something more interactive. Instead he and the team compromised with the players, while still maintaining  their overall vision.

Updated 8 years ago.
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8 years ago
Mar 23, 2017, 9:41:53 PM

Since I've stopped counting how often Amplitude devs have said "no" to ideas posited to them, due to the sheer amount of times, I find this opinion to be utterly devoid of realism. o_O

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8 years ago
Mar 24, 2017, 4:46:42 PM
Nosferatiel wrote:

Since I've stopped counting how often Amplitude devs have said "no" to ideas posited to them, due to the sheer amount of times, I find this opinion to be utterly devoid of realism. o_O

Be nice. We say "No, but thanks for the suggestion"  :P

But we are pretty formal and up-front with our philosophy, I think. The overall creative vision for the game stays with the studio. The community is full of brilliant people with brilliant ideas, but they don't all fit into our vision (or our resources and budgets) so sometimes we have to refuse them. For the record, here is a view of our method in action:

https://www.games2gether.com/endless-legend/forum/6-game-design/thread/3570-g2g-endless-legend-s-list-of-community-feedback


Updated 8 years ago.
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8 years ago
Mar 24, 2017, 4:56:19 PM
Slashman wrote:

Sounds like someone who is just venting because something went into the game that they didn't like.

Summarizes what I would want to say. The person that OP mentioned sounded a bit bias. 

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8 years ago
Mar 24, 2017, 8:24:11 PM
FreedomFighterEx wrote:

Developers should definitely listen to fans and implement great ideas, but they should also be able to say no and follow their own ideas. Amplitude only knows how to do the first."

That's the most blatantly ignorant thing I've heard in a long time. This person clearly doesn't follow Amplitude at all, and just wanted to come off as too smart for his/her own good.

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8 years ago
Mar 25, 2017, 9:34:35 PM

What I love about Amplitude is that they listen and communicate, if I really want to, I can actually engage the team members about stuff, they even give me a platform to post an idea in if I ever get something worthwhile in my head, etc.


It's a huge contrast to companies like Blizzard who just completely look down on their fans and ignore them entirely, always thinking they know best no matter what. It's very arrogant and leads to very poor results. Every developer team I have seen that listens to their fans has had lots of great success come from it, I honestly don't see anything but positives in doing that.


As someone who has followed the industry closely, and for a long time, I find that the less a developer regards their fans, the more it backfires, as a general trend.


With that said, the point about not caving to everything is completely spot on. Sometimes you just want to make something that only a small number of people will enjoy, and you'll get a lot of complaints, and that's fine as a conscious decision. Or you just have a specific artistic vision or whatever, and you may want to just stick to it, depending on the case. Good example of when Amplitude said no, was when lots of people wanted the fleet battle system to be completely something else than it was designed to be. The simple fact was that they just don't like what Amplitude wanted to make in that case, and didn't really want to improve it, but rather replace it entirely with something completely different. In that kind of case I think compromising is better than letting the fans make you fundamentally change the game because they dislike the gameplay style that was deliberately chosen.


I guess my point is that suggestions for improvements from fans are pretty universally great feedback because they build on foundation already laid out by you, complaints demanding you to completely change a thing into something entirely different may or may not be. Maybe if a system is genuinely terrible and truly needs to be scrapped, but I can't say I've seen Amplitude be guilty of such a mistake yet.

Updated 8 years ago.
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8 years ago
Mar 26, 2017, 6:02:13 AM

This seems a very problematic critique. To say that a developer is of low quality because they account for criticism is nonsensical, to say the least. And the idea that anything made by committee will turn out horribly is also silly; it's not like every suggestion ever will be implemented. Even in a truly democratic game development effort like a fan game, decisions will be voted on and often be cut for practical reasons. Game development itself IS committee based when you think about it; those credits are awfully long!


But if getting my planet decoration idea greenlit and implemented (though it's not been marked as the latter for some reason despite the update incorporating it?) is what "design by committee" looks like, I'll take it.

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