There are so many things that go into making a great and memorable game. From engaging characters to life-like open worlds. Over the years, game developers have taken advantage of the ever expanding technological opportunities available to them to make games bigger and better through refined mechanics, explosive originality, and deeper, more personal storytelling.
It’s hard to believe how far games have come in just the past 40 years from the release of the arcade cabinet Pong to modern blockbuster titles such as God of War, Super Mario Odyssey, and many more. And while we can talk about game characters and breaking edge graphics all day long, today I wanted to talk about a more subtle aspect of games that can really make or break a player’s experience. Quality of Life.
Now when I talk about quality of life, I’m not talking about if your commute to work is easy or if you're able to purchase the finer things in life like a bluetooth alexa-enabled refrigerator that allows you to order groceries just by talking to it. While that might be cool (and maybe a little excessive), I’m talking about the little things that go into a game that make your gaming experience more fluid and enjoyable.
Quality of life in games is a very interesting concept because it can incorporate so many things, such as a game’s UI and menu system and the amount of responsiveness a character has in the world. It’s not something big and grandiose as an immense open world or a complex fighting system. It tends to be the little things that can really make a game feel perfect or something that bogs the player down, hindering the overall gaming experience. Quality of Life can mean different things depending on the type of game you’re playing.
Let’s take a game like Horizon Zero Dawn, for example. This was a groundbreaking-game when it came out back in 2017 because it was an post-apocalyptic open world, except you didn’t have your cliché zombies or mad max-esque degenerates
running throughout the world. Instead, you were placed in a world after the fall of modern civilization where mechanical creatures roamed the earth.
Nothing, like had ever been done before, so the game was already a step above the rest of the open-world games that were out around the same time. I first played it a few years ago, and it’s a good game. The combat is fluid and fresh and there’s a great sense of exploration as you scour the remnants of human civilization trying to understand what role the machines serve in this new age of man.
I played through it non-stop and thought it was a very well put together game. However, with the recent release of the sequel, I’ve gone back to play this game again to re-familiarize myself with the franchise and I’ve noticed something that kind bothers me that, 4 years ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice about.
It’s something as simple as an animation that my character does when she picks up an item in a world. The game is based in an open-world and has a crafting system in place where you can create armor, weapons, and ammo to aid in your fight against the machines.
So, there’s plenty of materials that I need to pick up in the world in order to craft my equipment and whenever I go to pick up something my character stops, picks up the item, and then I can continue to move her as usual.
Ok, so my character picks up an item, big whoop. This is something that literally almost every game does. So, what’s the big deal?
Well, there are a lot of items that I can pick up in this world and my character plays this pick up animation every time I want to grab something. So, I’m constantly running to an item, stopping, picking that item up, then running to the next item. I rinse and repeat this same action over and over again until I’ve picked up everything that I want in the area. This is where something like quality of life plays an integral role in a player’s experience.
If I’m constantly picking up stuff, I’m therefore constantly interrupting the game so I can pick up an item. Once you do this about 100 times, it starts to get a little old. It takes time away from the stuff that I want to do such as exploring the terrain to find secrets or picking fights with a herd of machines in the distance.
It’s such a simple thing, but can make a big difference in the minutia of the everyday activities I do in the world.
Now am I going to stop playing the game because of something like this, probably not. It’s far from a dealbreaker, but it is interesting to think about how this seemingly simple action cuts into my player experience in this game compared to another game like Ghost of Tsushima.
This game came out about two years ago and while the setting is very different from Horizon there are a few similarities. They are both open world games and they both require the player to pick up items in order to craft equipment necessary for combat and for enhancing your character. One of the big differences though is how I can pick up items in Ghost of Tsushima compared to Horizon.
In Ghost of Tsushima, I can pick up items no matter what I’m doing. I can be standing up, running around, or riding on horseback. No matter how I’m moving, I can pick up items and not interrupt the movement of the game at all. I can focus on accomplishing whatever task I want whether that’s me heading to the next story mission or looking for collectibles in the corner of the map.
There are several animation blendspaces built into the character for grabbing items, so I can get what I need without having to needlessly stop and play an animation to pick up something as mundane as leather or tree branches. This seems like a trivial thing at first glance, but when you’re actually playing the game things like being able to pick up items on the go can make a big difference in your experience in the game.
When I was playing Ghost of Tsushima I felt like the movement was so fluid and seamless that I could do everything that I wanted to do without any interruptions to my experience, whereas with Horizon Zero Dawn I’m constantly feeling small little interruptions when I picking up items and after awhile those small interruptions start to add up.
These are the types of things to consider when developers are making a game. You can have the coolest looking game in the world with cool fighting mechanics and intricate storytelling, but if you have these little things that can bog the player down, it can take away from the game rather than enhance it.
We live in an ever growing society where things need to be efficient and responsive to our everyday needs. And part of that translates to games as well. There’s so many new games that are hitting the market and something like a sloppy UI system or a game filled with time wasting mechanics can really turn off players who just want to jump into a game and go.
This can apply to a whole bunch of things, such as having an efficient inventory system like in Animal Crossing, where you can see all the items in your bag in one clear and simple inventory menu.
Or maybe it’s being able to skip cutscenes before a boss battle in a game like Final Fantasy.
It can even be grounded in more intricate details such as how you move in a game.
Infamous: Second Son allows you to climb, phase, and slingshot your way across the city of Seattle in a way that not only looks cool, but also allows you to get to where you want to go quickly without being dragged down by the slow and mundane movement of running wherever you need to go in other open world games like Fallout.
What’s really cool about a game like Infamous: Second Son is that the developers were able to figure out a movement system that not only fits with the character, but allows a fun, convenient, and original way of traversing an open world that players can easily accomplish with just the push of a button. In this case they were able to solve several problems at once and put something like exploration and traversal at the forefront of the game without little problems or obstacles getting in the way of the player’s experience.
Even some of the most enjoyable games can suffer from a lack of quality of life and the more modern games continue to advance and pursue a quality of life mentality in their games the more attention these small flaws get from past titles.
Take a game like Skyrim, for example. This is a game that has been played over and over again for the past 10 years. And while it can still hold up a decade later, there are some very apparent quality of life issues that can be seen throughout the game.
One of these is the inventory stem. In Skyrim, you can pick up virtually anything in the world, which is both a good and bad thing. It’s a good thing because it allows you a lot of freedom in how you use items in the world such as creating weapons, cooking food, or being a hoarder and throwing a pile of crap in the corner of your house.
Although, with so many things to collect in the world, trying to organize your items can be a real challenge. In the inventory menu, you have tabs for different categories of items, such as weapons, ingredients, books, etc.
However, with the ability to carry so many items, you fall into the trap of having a huge list of items in your inventory menu that you now have to sift through in order to find the thing you’re looking for. Skyrim kinda solves this problem by having a favorites menu you can click on with the touch of a button that allows you to equip any common weapons, spells, or other items quickly. While this may be helpful in the early game, the more collect and build up your character this favorites option tends to get bogged down pretty easily later on.
This causes the player to pause whatever they’re doing to equip and manage their inventory in the way they need to for that moment and if the situation changes, such as new enemies enter combat or if you need heal from a devastating blow to the face you have to pause the game again to deal with the new situation that’s in front of you. Just like in Horizon, there’s a rinse and repeat process that happens that can become annoying and break away from the experience.
There are so many other quality of life features built into games that we may not even realize are there as we’re playing our favorite titles. From being able to change your loadout on the fly in a high stakes battle royale match or an intuitive and immediate fast travel system built into an open world game to get you where you want to go with minimal wait times. These are the kind of things that can keep players engaged in their game and keep them coming back for more.
Now does this mean that if a title doesn’t have the most convenient features built into every tiny detail of the game that players are just going to hang up their controllers and move onto something else?
Probably not.
Some games are just so fun that players can look past the small inconveniences and be caught up in the atmosphere of whatever world they’re thrown in. However, I think that a game that clearly considers the quality of life of a player’s gaming experience can really enhance a game’s potential and can make the difference of a 1 hour playtime to a whole weekend binge.
What games do you like that have great quality of life features? What are some games you know that don’t consider quality of life at all? Comment below and I’ll see you guys next time!
Dean Willms
~Gamer. Designer. Friend.
