[Raapys]

Why don't you explain to us all how gameplay suffers if you can't pay the salaries of multiple designers? You only need one for anything but the largest projects. Programmers don't tend to make gameplay design decisions, and neither do artists.

Of course you benefit from more than one, just as you benefit more from ideas from 10 different people as opposed to the ideas of 1 man. I might think of an ingenius gameplay feature that you would never have thought of. On your last note, isn't it pretty common that a fair amount of designers also do programming?

Of course you need written documentation, or else you're just making the argument because it's popular to complain about graphics on internet gaming forums.

Yeah, that must be the reason. I get off on complaining about companies having way too much focus on graphics and too little focus on gameplay on gaming forums.

You won't get better gameplay by throwing money at a developer, as gameplay is essentially the result of one or two people's work. Once you've paid their salaries, giving them extra money wouldn't make any difference other than to make the design more muddled by adding other opinions.

Yet, everytime I play a game I can think of *uncountable features* to add to it. And again and again we hear developers cut features from the design document because 'there was no time/resources to implement it'. They must all be lying, obviously. The truth is that it was impossible to add anything more because they reached the magical "diminishing returns" limit! For many games it seems to come into play when they've added weapons, walking, jumping, basic AI and a couple of maps.

There's no point in spending greater and greater amounts of money on gameplay because of diminishing returns on your investment.

If developers today were anywhere near reaching the 'diminishing returns' limit, why aren't the games then just full of gameplay features? Or at least hours upon hours long? Don't forget that level/world design and building also goes into the 'gameplay' part. Game length isn't exactly outstanding these days either. Think it took me 6 hours to go through Half-Life 2 the first time.

You're not a Malfador fanboy, you're a gameplay over graphics fanboy.

Well, I suppose it's better than being a graphics fanboy like most people seem to be. Is that what you are? Personally, I'm really just tired of seeing the graphics get better and better over the last years, yet having the gameplay quality stall and diminish. Not to mention the Legend of Innovation and Creativity in games.

Developers of games like Space Empires and Mount&Blade, low-budget, 1-2 man projects, manage to create far more entertaining and featureful games than uncountable high-budget games. That tells me someone is better at placing their resources than others, and those others usually seem to be the mass-appeal companies that coincidently also happen to have top of the line graphics in their games.

Put it this way, presented with the choice of having access to the games of the 90's or those of today's market, I'd not even need to consider it. And it has nothing with fanboyism to do at all, but everything to do with actually appreaciating good games.