Jerk
I don't think they're bad at them, they're just exposed to the design process. They know how things are supposed to work and how they were concieved to work so they natually gravitate towards those solutions. They have a lot of preconcieved notions about the game going in. Players on the other hand will do any stupid thing looking for an advantage and then keep it up till they win.
"Well why don't I just go grab the 'Sword of Unholy Power,' right now?" "Because that's not the way the story goes, you get it at the end of act 2." "But I can go right?" "Well... yeah, nothings stopping you from going aside from the enemies that are going to slaughter you." Two hours of potion drinking, corpse dragging grind later. "Got it!" And then the game is easy mode for the player who's too dumb to know he's not supposed to do something while the Dev scratches their head in wonderment.
"Tyyr's a necessary evil. " Spirit
Noodle Implements FTW!
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Unless The Dev Team Thinks of Everything, of course. Which is a sign of good game design for a reason =)
One Winged Egret
I think that's the biggest part of it. Then again, there are players like me who try to look for designer intent by reading the game mechanics, so I guess I play right into their hands.
Another issue is that they have to actually spend time making the game, while a lot of expert players simply have more free time as they're college students or even professional gamers. It's obvious that a Korean Starcraft superstar is going to be better than the designers of the game.
That all you got?
Creative Assembly and Bungie people play their own games. Shogun 2: Total War has an achievement for beating a CA employee in a battle, and Bungie has their own signature helmet.
That is the face of a man who just ate a kitten. Raw.
Add Valve and Rockstar to that list. GTA IV has an achievement for killing an employee, and Valve has developer weapons so you can identify them.
"Weird doors open. People fall into things."
I play the games I develop. But nobody else does... :P
<><
One Winged Egret
ZUN plays on Lunatic, which is why Easy mode is often buggy.
pirate girl
that just might explain Icicle Fall...
Sometimes Naughty Dog devs play Uncharted 2 online. Their clan tag was [ND] I think, so you could always tell who they were.
One Winged Egret
Blizzard representatives and developers often claim that they play World Of Warcraft, but since they keep their character names secret to avoid harassment I suppose it's possible that they're lying.
Writer, Artist, Ignored
DUMB
From [1]
Not sure that they liked playing it by then. :/
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.
Hmm, you guys think it might matter on the genre? I mean, FPS, fighters and other multiplayer games don't take too long to play, but RPG, adventure and other take a much longer time to play and they aren't usually fun in short time o-o
well some if not most staff developer tend to have free copy of game. but not saying EVERYONE get same treatment
Gamer-turning-maker
Having been working towards a game development degree for a few years now, I can confirm, with what I've learned, that every company does at least one playtest of their games. Ideally, they can do enough playtests to catch all of the bugs and such, and fix them in time... but then real life isn't always ideal. There's always some kind of intervening factor, be it deadline shifts, budget cuts, personal emergencies, or other such things. If a game has an obscene amount of bugs, these factors can be a tremendous problem when it comes to making the game work.
Long live Cinematech. FC:0259-0435-4987
Zzzzzzzzzz
I'd think that if The Dev Team Thinks of Everything, it's a pretty good indication that they do play it themselves while it's still in development.
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
The creators of a game are usually the worst possible judges of it, and most devs know this.
There's this iOS game called Frogatto by the Battle For Wesnoth creators. They spent 2-3ish years busting their ass on that game trying to make it perfect. But when it came out, it got slammed for its awful controls. It turned out that the bounding boxes for the buttons didn't match the buttons themselves, and the devs had gotten so used to them that they hadn't noticed. It got fixed in a patch, but they're stuck with most of the reviews.
edited 18th Apr '11 5:46:53 PM by Redhead
The new It Just Bugs Me!
Sad.... :(
The Devs. play testing their own games is a sure thing. And I can also kinda see the developers playing their own games in multiplayers. What I can not see, is Devs. playing their own singleplayer games for enjoyment. It would be like a writer reading the book he wrote.
edited 18th Apr '11 5:44:19 PM by Drakovicz
Has a compulsive editing and re-editing disorder.
I can't imagine Stellar Stone ever even installed their own games.
edited 18th Apr '11 6:11:33 PM by Miijhal
HOORAY!
Face Time
Meanwhile, John Romero apparently plays/played a lot of online Deathmatch.
"Hipsters: the most dangerous gang in the US." - Pacific Mackerel
Jerk
Chaotic Greedy
Joe Kucan (okay, not exactly a developer) has stated that he sucks at Command And Conquer.
"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."
Tittle.
Yeah, I'm wondering about it o-o Most developers who play their own games seem to be bad at them, but I'm wondering if developers would enjoy playing their own games...