Qualities of Great Video Games
Key elements that make a great game
Picture from Sekiro
In this era, there are thousands of games that are being played around the world. Of course, not all of these games can be called great a great games. According to Pluralsight there are 4 key elements that make a game great. However, they can still be amazing games if there missing one or two of them.
The first key element that makes a good game is the gameplay, which means it has to be interactive. The controls have to be easy and clear or else people will get mad when trying to do simple movements. The player has to be in full control of the game so that it doesn’t feel as if they are just watching a movie.
The second element to a good game is the story, sure lots of games are still good without a storyline. The best games have a storyline that makes the player want to keep on playing to see what happens. The story has to fit the genre of the game and be interactive through quests and interactions with other characters.
The third and most important element is the graphics. Some can pull it off without good graphics but it’s what the player will see throughout the game. Adventure games like the Assassin’s Creed and the Uncharted series call for breathtaking graphics.
The fourth element is a good challenge, if the gameplay is too easy or too hard the players will not want to play it. If it stays simple throughout the game then the players will get bored quickly. If it is too hard to play then it won’t be fun for them to play, this isn’t always the case of course.
There is one game, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, that is still pretty good even though it is slightly hard to play. The controls are easy and the graphics are beautiful, but there is no difficulty level. Players might think it’s easy, but after they play through a bit, they realize that’s not the case.
The way Sekiro works is that when players get to a boss they have to kill it twice. Usually in order to kill bosses players have to break their guard and get a critical blow. The critical blow usually happens when you attack them right after they break their guard.
Unfortunately, it isn’t very easy to break their guard because it heals over time. If the player doesn’t hit them constantly, it will heal making it harder. Fortunately If the player can sneak up behind the boss, they can get in one kill. Then they’ll only have to go through the fight once.
The challenge is part of the reason why the game is so good. It’s the challenge that makes the player want to keep on playing and try to beat the bosses. It ignites that flame of stubborn competitiveness that people have locked inside them.
A good challenge isn’t the only thing Sekiro has though, it also has astonishing graphics and a good storyline. It does have some flaws like no map and no directions, which makes it easy for player to get lost. Otherwise, Sekiro is a great games, if you like a good challenge, sometimes seeming almost impossible to beat.
I am Leora Gibbs, a senior at Morgan. I like writing and reading. I like to take pictures and sing as a hobby. I am not much of a current events person,...
Ralph T Sneider • Nov 15, 2021 at 10:04 pm
I miss the days when not every game was either open world or battle royale styled. It’s sad to see more linear games die out. For example, Dead Space is my favorite horror game series, I’ve replayed the first game 3 times, the second game…too many times, and the third game 2 times. Each time I would find a way to do a part differently, or would end up in a different situation than the last. Those games were emotion invoking and fear invoking. It’s a good thing that game makes you feel something through mood and setting and atmosphere and not just the adrenaline of being knocked out by another squad. Point is, yes linear games have limited replayability, but they can tell great stories, better than any online multiplayer game. Yeah, it’s great to play with your friends but when fast-paced games are all that you can play online they all feel the same, so it’s nice to replay an old game, I always find myself going back to my old Ps3 games. This could just be me, but I think the issue is people have less patience these days, and game companies try to match that, and so many games are just following the trends in the gaming industry, like currently battle royale being the main one. But then you have the smaller group but still large of open world game players, they have much more patience and appreciation for stories. For example of games that require patience and planning, I remember watching my father play Socom on the Ps2 when I was little, and then later Socom 4 on the Ps3 I believe. Point is, he’s from that generation of people with more patience, and early 2000s games were more slow-paced, and I believe that was the last Socom made a game. If they tried to make a game now, they would get very little sales, mostly from older more dedicated fans. The gaming industry followed the fact that less old people play video games and since stopped putting out games to suit them, they made fast-paced action games instead. My father refuses to play any online multiplayer game to this day, I can understand why, plus dealing with toxic people online can become a lot fast.
Old ps3 games don’t have top of the line graphics or heck even multiplayer for most of them but they are such great games that not many people pay attention to anymore and it’s sad. Dead Space got shut down because EA wasn’t making enough money off it because they ruined the game and less and less people played because they made it like every other game out there. I remember playing Aliens Colonial Marines with my little brother back then, the game was very generic and unpolished, we found a new glitch or bug each time we played, but it made it very memorable, and the story progressed. Then you go to a battle royale game, after a while of say 10 matches in a given day, they kind of just all meld into one memory and you can’t really pull out and special events from them because they happen the same way every time. Older games also just have more care put into them than newer games in most cases. Just the little things, like extra animations your character does when idle or easter eggs or anything, that and the game being stable and polished when released. I’m sure you’ve heard of the mess Fallout 76 was so I’m sure I don’t need to go into that. That was just an attempt to make money quickly by Bethseda, no love was put into that. Meanwhile, Skyrim has been put on sale for the 21st or so time. A similar issue, Skyrim is a great game, but people will buy it if they want to, you dont need to put it on sale every single year, everyone knows it exists. Todd Howard please stop this madness.
I personally kind of like not having a map in a lot of games, it makes it more of an adventure into each game world. Wandering around aimlessly made the game memorable and unique, and left an impression. Unrelated to the no map thing, I’ve tried Dark Souls 3 which is similar to Sekiro. I found it really rewarding to find the pattern in the way the bosses would go through attacks. The first boss you would have to faint an attack which would cause it to go through a long animation to attack, you would have to roll out of the way, then when it’s recovering you can get one or two hits in if your lucky. That was the only boss I could manage in that game though. I made it past the wall, got into the city area, killed all the enemies in the main rooms, only to die of fall damage right before the mini-boss. (like 10 feet) I then uninstalled the game and haven’t touched it since. Since then I’ve played less daunting games than Dark Souls, like For Honor or Titanfall 2, Dead Space, Halo, even Minecraft occasionally. But hats off to you for keeping with Sekiro, I’ve heard that game is among the top group of difficult games to have come out in modern years.
(Tomb Raider series now: Realistic graphics
Tomb Raider back in the day: So, how do you like cubes and the clunkiest controls known to humankind?)
Leora Gibbs • Nov 16, 2021 at 11:59 am
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