Fans versus creators

Who wins?

In the field of creative arts the question of who's desires trumps who's is closer to a philosophical conundrum than your typically laid-out 'tug of war'. By some people's reckoning the very soul of art is designed to speak to the audience, whether to challenge who they are or simply to entertain them, making the artist a slave to the masses. Others argue that the only master of a work of art is are the hands that make them, and by catering to the whims and wants of the masses you threaten to denigrate the integrity and passion of the work. That dream began with the creator, but should it be moulded in that image or left like putty in the hands of it's audience? I suspect there's no whole sale answer to such a conundrum, nuance and context have their parts to play- still, it's worth keeping in mind when we expand the topic to include game design.

Games are products of Entertainment first and foremost, which means it is the sort of medium where one would be most expected to cater to the wants of a fickle audience- even in the times when that audience isn't exactly forthcoming about what it is they exactly want. 'You can't please everybody', as the saying goes, and with the endless genres, fandoms, niches and cult like forums it really can feel like being pulled from all sides to land somewhere in the good graces of most everybody. Games are beholden also to budget constraints which tie into strict deadlines and man power shortages and all of the plethora of issues that come between want we want to make and what we have to make. Most of the time I think it's outside factors that lead to 'creative solutions' and outcomes that don't exactly align with public interest.

A common refrain that we tend to hear, even if it's not exactly a proudly shared one, is the 'you don't know what you want' excuse. Basically it's the assumption that as creators of games, with greater personal investment and knowledge in the intricacies that go towards game creation, the makers are better poised to make decisions for the good of the player than the player are. They don't have enough information or experience to understand when decisions that feel bad are actually in their favour and when short burst of euphoria right now might sully the experience down the road. And there's some sound logic there; a barrier of jargon and development knowledge does bar the average gamer from diagnosing everything they love or would want to change about the experiences they enjoy, part of the magic is never really knowing how the sausage is cooked and just enjoying the taste- however it's not that cut-and-dry.

At the end of the day it really is the consumer who is experiencing the product in that most direct of fashions- totally blind from the outset. (Ideally) If a player tells you straight up that your game isn't fun, they don't really need to know the intricacies of game design to denote the experiencing you're trying to conduct isn't hitting the notes it should be. The intrinsic nature of quality and trash changes from person to person but it's integral to the ever-assessing human mind. Often times a player doesn't know what they want, but they know what they want to feel like- and that ephemeral value is somewhat more valuable than knowing the ins and outs of every coding language and asset databank- Every player knows what the end product should elicit out of them- that intrinsic feedback is just as valuable as step-by-step instructions if you know how to work with it.

The biggest RPG of all time appears to be on our doorstep with Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 and to the chagrin of some it was a game made lockstep with three years of customer feedback thanks to the extended early-access period.  As the team were busy forming the entire sprawling game around it, fans had their chances to critique every aspect of gameplay in their slice of just the first act, dissect the problems, laud the successes and let the team know what they obsessed over and what they spent little time with. Larian took the desires of the fans very seriously to the point where we now know certain directions of development were entirely shifted in order to feed into what fans were calling for. For example, the changes to the game's 'reaction' system, to be far more detailed than what Divinity Original Sin 1 or 2 boasted, was driven and dictated by fan dissatisfaction with what was there, and we've recently heard even more on this topic.

As it turns out, one of the confined companions that we're going to recruit in the first act of the game is the Druid Halsin who has a small but memorable presence in the early access. Pretty much from the word go fans latched onto the idea of the Druid being more than just a side-character from the way he offers to guide the narrative for players who pass him, emigrating to the team's camp and reminding them what way to guide their investigations. 'Oh, he's definitely a companion' people would say, 'A morally unimpeachable foil to the otherwise dubious core cast we've thus far been introduced to, calling back halcyon memories of Baldur's Gate's glory days with diverse casts of various moral spectrums.' And as it turns out fans were right! Albeit in a 'self fulfilling prophecy' kind of way. Halsin's voice actor recently confirmed on Twitter how the original plan was very much to keep the Druid as merely a guiding NPC until Larian caught wind of how the fans reacted to him, leading to a drastic change in direction to rewrite a chunk of the game to include a fully fledged (albeit non-origin) companion out of the man, complete with a whole Romance quest path and everything! Fan satisfaction clearly guides the hand of Larian just as much as anything else.

Modern Blizzard, on the otherhand, seems driven by their own configuration of their direction even if it runs directly contrary to what it's gamer's demand. Of course, I'm talking about Overwatch which recently revealed a vast deviation in it's stated and lauded direction of making Overwatch 2 a high quality Single Player narrative game alongside a highly competitive online shooter- appealing to fans who have wanted a more comprehensive way into the colourful and promising world that it feels like the franchise has danced around the outskirts of ever since it was first announced approximately two millennia ago. That fit with the direction that Overwatch's developers had at the time, until they recently decided the health of the game precluded the more traditional single-player narrative they once promised and instead demanded a rededication towards the online elements that fans had started to fall out of love with. This actually went so far as to lead to a confrontation where the demands of community and the belief of the developers clashed in a cancellation of the Single Player content which became so massive of a story it still colours the franchise as an enemy to the consuming public. As with Baldur's Gate 3, only time will tell if cutting their own path will end up being a testament to the game or a detriment to it's success.

As with all fruitful topics of discussions there is a wealth of reasons pulling in all directions why one style of development might be more fruitful than another, and even though topics such as 'pride' and 'self belief' might enter the equation, at the end of the day it's always in the hands of the creative team where they want to divest their efforts. Maybe that leads to the mire of trying to please everyone with a project so unfocused it ends up pleasing nobody, like Anthem, and sometimes projects that shut-out the feedback of the world to come out with something utterly unexpected and wild that proves to be everything that gamers didn't know they needed, like 'Tears of the Kingdom' has proven to be. At the end of it all no-one remembers the conflicts, the arguments, who shouted loudest and why- when all that remains is the finished and finalised game in all it's glory or ignominy: all else is transient when that final moment lands.