You ever play a game and it’s all competently made and such but somehow it just feels 20% off for what it’s supposed to be? And then you play something else of similar genre and it just feels SO much better to play.
What’s the esoteric part about gamefeel? Why’s 2013 Tomb Raiders and it’s sequels feel like 20% off? Why is Black Ops - rated on Gameplay - so much better than Singularity which came out the same year despite both being made by Raven?
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Sound.
underestimated usually for sure but it can’t be all of it, otherwise the Tomb Raiders combat would suck hard instead of being serviceable. the sound design is terrible
What are you asking then? you said the final 20% or the “esoteric” part. I would even argue that sound could be considered even more important than either of those. i’m not particularly married to this but i’ll keep it going for the sake of discussion
Sound is the final touch of suspending disbelief. Video games are incredible feats of trickery. A game could have tight responsive controls, pixar tier animations, and giga brain design; but if it’s missing sounds to match the animations and a proper soundtrack or environment noises etc then your brain has to work a lot harder to imagine another world
I feel it’s a mix of vibes and a bit if attention to detail with programming. You need to feel out things like movement speed, jump speed, sound and recoil of guns.
Then there’s also small things you can code into a game that make a big difference. A big one in 2D platformers id the coyote jump where you have a split second after walking off a ledge where the player can still jump. I also just learnt about jump queuing where if a player presses jump a fraction of a second before touching the ground you still let them jump when they land.
And then there’s things like animation cancelling. An animation may go for longer than a player realises, but a good game will let you end that animation early if another input is detected.
And then there’s other small stuff. Like I’m playing Devastation at the moment that came out around the same time as Half Life 2 but the game feel is all off with the physics.
You can pick up and throw things in Devastation, but objects just float through the air and it feels off. In HL2 they put a bit if backspin on throws so s chair won’t just sail through the air and land upright on all 4 legs like in Devastation. Walking into physics objects in Devastation just sucks all your momentum and it feels lime things get caught under your legs, whereas in HL2 you feel planted on the ground and everything bowls out of your way when you walk into it
yeah it’s a lot about minimizing friction between your intent and the in-game action. buffers that are too narrow feel bad, especially when there’s any input or response delay, but it also feels bad if it’s too loose and you get locked into some shit you pressed a minute ago. witcher 3 had a bunch of weird momentum on the movement that people really didn’t like at launch because of the disconnect it created.
there’s also stuff like consonance between your input and the game, down to jump would be a terrible input most of the time.
for tomb raider in particular iirc there’s a thing with the QTE mashing where there’s a rhythm to it because if you mash too fast it skips cycles, and that feels awful. we just shouldn’t have quicktime events in games though.
For me, it’s when a game has difficulty balance. On normal, you can’t button mash and win, you have to know what you’re doing. But once you do realise what you’re meant to do, putting forth a decent effort to do it lets you pass. On hard, you have to not only know how to do it, but do it very well. On expert/whatever funky term they wanna use for the fourth difficulty, mastery is necessary. And on easy, button mashing is all you need since you’re just playing for the story.
A good story can make a difference, too. There’s a lot of jank in Mass Effect, but I’m forgiving because it’s not straight up broken and the series is awesome. I’m also playing Legendary, so they should have fixed more of this shit. Mass Effect 1 had the nausea inducing Mako rides. There was no reason for them to make those planets that bumpy. You should never have to go up a mountain or across bumpy terrain. Mass Effect 2 didn’t have the Mako (you do find it crashed though, which was nice) but it did have the hovercraft, which was fun until you got to the platforming parts and it felt like late 90s/early 00s N64/PS1/2 3D platforming. Who signed off on this shit? And why TF wasn’t it fixed (more) for Legendary? Not whining, I got it for six bucks (and I think it’s still on sale for that for Black Friday), but damn, this was their chance to fix shit like that. But I’m gonna keep coming back for the story.
20% is accountable to taste imo, there are some technical things people that like & dislike an experience can agree on, but those are what i’d class as a bit larger scale. a paradox game is all about staring at a map–everyone agrees on that but its far more than 20% of the experience.
camera angle/feel is a good “20%” metric and it can go it many directions even in the same genre. yet i don’t feel there are any “correct” camera perspectives. no setup will satisfy everyone.
music is in the same approximate area i think
This made me think of Star Citizen where they spent like two years doing “physics-based movement” for player characters before scrapping it and rigging everything because it just felt like absolute garbage to play.
To me it illustrates that feel can only come from an iterative process of exploring & trying new things, not first principles.
one of the most unique things about games as a medium is that they’re sort of tactile, you want to have a priority of repaying the player’s actions with reactions, things like animation tweening/acceleration aren’t really covered in this video but are also important for adding a sense of heft and momentum to the naturally non-hefty virtual objects you’re interacting with, if an addition could be described with a good-tactile adjective like “crunchy” or “springy” you’re probably on the right track
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Someone said sound which is really important and worth saying again.
Also from experience: animation and also acceleration/acceleration curves. You want your input to connect logically to what you’re looking at so your brain can give you the illusion of resistance and feedback.
If everything just moves instantly or at a constant velocity it feels wrong. There needs to be weight, a sense of wind up and momentum that corresponds with the action and it’s surprisingly not to hard to implement. Just remembering that something has to accelerate against inirtia for animations and movement really helps establish that.
I’m not sure if “gamefeel” is any one thing, really. There are lots of suggestions in this thread of things that are part of games, but “gamefeel” is so non-specific a term it becomes kind of useless when applied to games in general. Why are some games good to play and others not good to play? Lots of reasons, some of which are contradictory. Some games are too fast, others too slow, some have a good story at their heart, others no story at all, some because they are tightly defined linear experiences, others because of you can wander aimlessly in an open world, etc etc.
For me, its mostly technical:
- Needs to be running smooth; no random framedrops
- Low input latency
- No screenspace effect crap: SSR, vignette, chromatic aberation, etc.
- No slow input holds/animations. “Hold A for 5 seconds to open chest” UGH
Those would be my priorities. Then after that, like others say, things like smooth animation curves (native fps, not locked), smooth UIs that run at native framerates (some games lock UI to 30 fps for some reason, looks awful.)
