Well-crafted games

Hello everyone!
What do you think are some well-crafted games?
By that, I don’t mean well-crafted in terms of story or concept, but the actual execution regarding overall design like UI, modelling, painting, animation, audio, which may include how well it supports the story or concept, of course.

Just to name a somewhat recent game, I think DmC: Devil May Cry is a very well-made game.
Especially effects and lighting had a huge impact on the game’s atmosphere, which completely suited the concept.
Jumping back and forth between the demonic realm and the normal world transforms the whole scenery with the former including distortions of architecture and reddish lighting with sparks and highlights everywhere.
The models and textures (including mesh and texture animations) seem definite with their own style, which I would say is a good thing, compared to the overused voxel look, for example.

Greetings,
Shu

 

As player, I like to see games that has a visual identity, where UI, models, texture, lighting and overall art respect it. StarCraft is a good example that comes in my mind.

 

Well crafted implies more the just a pretty visual interface. You've got to have mechanics and game play that work nicely together too. In fact, these elements are more significant then visual appeal.

A well crafted game also needs a perfect difficulty curve and engagement curve.

 

Gotta go with the Blizzard classics. Warcraft (the RTS), Starcraft and Diablo to include the most recent versions of these games.

Combine great combat mechanics with fast fluid animations and excellent sound. You "feel" it when the Tauren Warrior warstomps, the Barbarian splatters monsters or a Colossus is laser beaming the crud out of your stuff. Even when the graphics were pretty crude by today's standards, the gameplay was visceral.

The mechanics are fairly easy to pick up but take the most talented players in the world to master. In my opinion they definitely qualify.

 

As an interesting comparison, what do you think the difference was with Warcraft 2? Both the original and the third instalment could be considered well crafted. I never managed to finish the second one.

 

Dark Souls. Engine sucks. Performance sucks. Horrible UI. Frankly, bad controls. One of my favourite games.

Well crafted isn't everything.

 

I really loved FTL.
But for AAA games I think one of the most beautiful games that made everything feel customly crafted for the game was Darksiders. I still have not played the sequal because I had a hard time realizing what would be different from the first game.

About Warcraft 2. I loved that game and couldnt get enough. I played both sides all the way through and even bought the expansion pack and played through that completely also. The only expansion pack I ever bought back then.
I really liked WC3 also.

 

Exactly. Dwarf Fortress is in the same boat. Terrible UI and non-existent art, but it's probably the deepest game that will ever be made.

The big issue is well crafted for whom? There are plenty of times where fluid animations really matter, but the rest of the time they are just nice to have. Sometimes music can be melodies and fanfares, but sometimes it's role is to be passive and ambient, without having attention drawn to it. So much of seeing something as well crafted is finding little details of polish. If that polish happens to be in a place you notice, then you are more inclined to perceive it as well made.

 

I haven't played StarCraft (will take a look on youtube, though!), but this makes sense.
The better visual elements fit to each other, the more convincing the game.

I totally agree. I did mention sound, but programming matters a lot, too.
For me, there are three important layers: visual quality (how it looks), auditive quality (how it sounds) and gameplay quality (how interaction "feels"). Of course, "gameplay quality" includes things like difficulty and engagement curves.
On the other hand, I don't think those factors are more significant overall.
I like to compare this to getting into a relationship with someone.
You don't necessarily focus on the other person's looks all the time when you are together, but in most cases it most certainly had a crucial impact on actually choosing to interact with and getting to know that person.
The same is true for games: If you don't like the looks/sound of it, you will probably not even come to a point where gameplay matters because you are not going to experience it anyway.
And even then, let's say you give it a try anyway: As long as it is not relevant to the story, you would probably choose a well-crafted game over a game that isn't polished.

I haven't played those games, but from the insight I had, I would completely agree on that. The overall design is very well fitting to the concept of player immersion.

Of course, this also contributes to the immersion. Being able to jump into a game easily is important to not repel anyone, but afterwards, knowing things about a game that you can apply makes you want to "use your knowledge" / "use your skills".

But have you had those opinions before playing it?

Actually, I was thinking about naming Darksiders II as an example in my original post.
Needless to say, I think Darksiders II is very well-made. Darksiders I already had good design, but I think Darksiders II has some incredible atmospheric elements to it and I'm still trying to figure out how they achieved that. I think that the soundtrack has a huge role there actually and that it's much more important than it might be at first glance.

Those are two different things, in my opinion:
- focus of the player and his/her preferences ("There are plenty of times where fluid animations really matter, but the rest of the time they are just nice to have.")
- design fitting the concept ("sometimes it's role is to be passive and ambient")
I don't really think details of polish makes a well-crafted game. I think it is more about how convincing the game is, which doesn't necessarily come from a range of polished details. In many cases, those will be overlapping, but they don't have to. For example, Angry Birds isn't exactly rich of polished details, but I would still consider it well-crafted, because the design greatly supports the concept, leading to a convincing game.

 

I'm pretty happy with Mad Max and also liked Shadow of Mordor quite a lot. By no means are those my all time favorites, but I think they are very well crafted in the sense that they have rather few "rough edges" imho.
I've had a lot of fun and suspenseful moments with the DayZ mod in the past, but "well-crafted" is not an attribute that I would use to describe Dayz (neither mod nor standalone).
So like @hippocoder said, there is more to it than being "inoffensive".

 

Shadow was fun, but not particularly well crafted. The difficulty curve was messed up. The QTEs were just annoying. The mechanics didn't fit well together. Nor did the mechanics and theme fit the setting.

Sure I'm picking holes at the games weak points. But you are asking for the best of the best.

 

Dying light is the most well-crafted, well-executed game I've seen in a while.

 

This is probably going down a semantic rabbit hole, but craftsmanship has almost nothing to do with "the idea" or the design. It's entirely about the skill of the people who made it, divorced from inspiration. It's the last part that's the clincher, because without inspiration, it's hard to see the bigger picture, so you're driven almost entirely by skill. Even with inspiration, skill isn't evident, but people get swept up enough that it's hard to notice. Angry Birds is a perfect example, because even though it has a decent premise, it's still evident that there wasn't that much care and attention put into the levels.

 

Off the top of my head, FEZ is a well crafted indie game.

 

I say EVE online, but I guess this is an opinionated thing.

 

I think OP meant polished by saying well crafted.

Batman Arkham Asylum was pretty polished, first game that I saw where the ragdolls didn't turned into a mess of jumpy limbs.

 

This is a useful distinction. To me polish is all about production values. How well is everything built.

Craft is more about the game design. How well does everything fit together.

That's why you can have well crafted games like Dark Souls that are lacking in polish.

 

I was thinking more about the polish angle than about gamedesign questions from the start. Maybe that is why we disagreed on Shadow of Mordor.
By the way I generally don't like QTEs in games, but I found the way Shadow of Mordor did them pretty good. For people who haven't played it: You get struck down in a fight and have to quickly execute a QTE that requires a bit more skill than just "press x to not die" (move the marker with the analog stick inside a closing circle in time and then press the correct button) and if you manage that you get back into the fight with a scripted sequence where your hero does something impressive. The next times you die in that fight though the QTE gets harder to execute untill it is impossible for you. I liked that mechanic because it gives you a slap on the wrist for not blocking in combat but still gives you a chance to save the situation that you just screwed up. It requires some actual skill and quick reflexes which I find translates well to what is happening in the fight.
But still, I really could do without QTEs in games and I'm not gonna claim the game is perfect. But overall I was pretty happy with Shadow of Mordor and played it to the end. Can't say that about too many games these days.

 

We could think o polish vs well crafted, the same way we'd talk about a chair. A polished chair is smooth and well varnished and all. And well crafted means it won't break, you can stand on it and it wont even creak.

So it's kind of the look and feel vs solid game mechanics.

 

Thanks for your replies! Very interesting thoughts there!

Actually, I mean both. At least if you think of polished and well-crafted like this (which is pretty similar to my understanding):

Yes, to some extent, this topic is opinionated, but I guess, especially when it comes to games being well-crafted (vs polished), it's not that opinionated. Because in the end, you could actually get statistical data on games concerning their impression on the players. By that norm you could measure how well a game's components fit together. Of course, the group of people you would check is opinionated also, but at least you could relativize those opinions.

This sounds very stressful. And, in a way, very fitting to what you described. If it's just a last split second when it is decided whether or not your virtual character will die, it should be stressful, shouldn't it?
Same goes for the zombie dogs in the Resident Evil series. You will have to rotate the control stick mad to get those dogs off of your character quickly.

Interesting statement. I highly disagree.
Except for the first half sentence, which is why I will completely agree to disagree here.

Thanks for naming it! I will have to check this one out. My fist impression is very ambivalent.
For the most part, it looks rather standard, but some of the screenshots I've been looking at show some interesting sceneries.

 

I've almost mentioned Dying Light too, but the list of complaints I have about it is rather long. I'd say it is pretty polished, but there were still a lot of choices made that I didn't really like.

 

Turn away from games. If you are looking at a well crafted car or a block of cheese, what wacky ideas that went into it are irrelevant compared to whether the cheese has a good flavor and texture or the car makes for a comfortable ride. People are judging based on already established qualities, where novelty has little say.

 

That's exactly what I did before replying to your post.
I'm not saying you are wrong, we just have different opinions on this.
For me, game development cannot be easily compared to something like building a car.
Because of two things:
- The way I see it, an engineer that works on cars doesn't have the freedom that comes with game development. Of course, there are some jobs in the game industry which include more freedom, others not so much.
- For me, the cultural value of video games is far higher than, for example, of a wooden table. Both are products of human work, yet I don't really see much of a cultural reflection inside of a (standard) wooden table. So when it comes to the craft itself, I don't think you can reduce working on video games to such a level of pure mechanical working. Especially if you are creating something new, which is true for video games most of the time. The wooden table, on the other hand, needs to be produced, let's say, another 2000 times. That's not what I think of "well-crafted". That's just reproducing the same.

I'd probably say there is no such thing as a "perfect game". I guess nobody on this whole planet is 100% content with everything that is included in a game. Maybe when it comes to Pong or something similarly reduced.
But well, as you said there were "a lot of choices" that you didn't like, that may of course be more drastic then.
By the way, I've look at it for a while on youtube and while I was impressed by the lighting, the characters didn't seem very convincing.

 

Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix has to be one of my favourites
Can't really say about difficulty as I've only played it on critical
Everything else though (bar how terrible party members other than riku can be) is just perfect

 

And yet even movies have established notions of craftsmanship that stand alone from the big ideas. It's those things like acting, shot composition, lighting, special effects, editing, ... pretty much everything besides the script, but also including most of that too, go in to a work without any inspiration to them. An actor goes into a scene understanding their character and understanding the scene, so that they can deliver the performance the scene needs. Meanwhile every other step of production is working to do the exact same thing of delivering what the work needs.

Even Micheal Bay films can be considered well crafted from the perspective of visuals, because even though they end up being mind numbingly stupid, they still create a visual spectacle with more attention to detail paid to both shot composition and editing apiece than many movies get in their entirety.

 

Everytime I play dark souls

 

I think that you are confusing design and manufacture. Its every bit as challenging designing a car as it is designing a game, indeed many of the tools are similar if not the same (CAD, Physics Simulations, 2d graphic design, etc)

Reproducing 1000 is much like selling a game through Steam where each download represents another deliverable unit. Of course to reproduce cars or video games also takes a huge amount of infrastructure and teams of highly skilled, specialized people from programmers and artists to marketing gurus and management. Each moving part has a world of options that need to be bound into a single service and the freedom is mostly limited by commercial viability and fashion but its often much less cynical than you'd think (until the marketing bods get hold of it at least lol).

Manufacture relies not only on huge machines and engineering talent but also expertly crafted tools and molds, many of which are hand made by extremely talented individual artists. Sales are also heavily influenced by good atheistic design that's not really the focus of mechanical engineering. That said we all have our constraints be they the number of polys we're restricted to or being limited to designing to the width of a lane on the road. A good design works within those parameters and manages to be appealing none the less.

Simple tables like simple games still require a huge amount of thought on the target market you are designing for - is it Ikea minimalist (culture->fashion) or bones-of-your-butt poor (culture->status). These considerations are always present and very much inform and underpin our cultures. Often the craft is in designing something suitable in the constraints of time, money and quality (and the three colour process lol).

I wish I could say the overheads in manufacture are far higher or that the design is more or less complex but alas when it comes down to the detail the main differences these days are storage and transport. Hell I can design a car from home and have it made in China, assembled in Hungary and sold in Germany without leaving the couch if I have the money - similar to the way we can design games from home but some other stiff has to go into the office every day to make sure steam's servers are running or into the factory to get my doors made.

An engineer that works on cars is analog to a network engineer that lays cabling for a network not a CPU designer, its an important distinction.

When you talk about crafting games you need to determine if you are focusing on telling a story almost like an interactive cut-scene (assassins creed), developing a behavior and associating it with reward (solitaire, minesweeper, etc), creating a social platform (poker, mahjong, etc), creating a competition (where to start) or some combination of the above, but then you'll have to apply much more resource... and then we have the alternate reality simulation (WOW, DayZ, minecraft, etc) This approach is very common at the moment as they require little design up front and can evolve naturally and don't actually require a win/lose condition, how many on steam now?

In my mind, a game in the traditional definition should have clear win/lose conditions and a set of rules based principally on skill like jacks . A parlor game like craps is similar but relies mostly on luck. Competitive games that should really focus on manipulating other players towards a win/lose, part luck, part skill but mostly being stronger tactically or physically than your counterpart. Interactive story types I believe should be centered on suspension of disbelief and should not overly cloud the story with complex interactions - naturally these don't have win/lose but only outcome and work best when viewed as a traditional story but with the erased margin notes left in just in case someone would prefer them.

From that point of view perhaps it would be worth talking about a category specifically because I can't see how angry birds would be helped by assassins creed style cut scenes and a competitive round of A Wolf Among Us might not draw the biggest crowd...

Just my opinion though...