An Open World Game

By Matthew Boyd

PATRIOTIC RETRIBUTION

Overview

Patriotic retribution is an open world adventure game with elements of fast pace action games mixed into it.

• It best described as a mixture between GTA V, Red Dead Redemption and Assassins Creed.

• The main selling point of the game is its diverse story with is constantly evolving. This means whatever the player does will affect the story in some way and some times drastically changing the outcome of the game.

• Another big element to the game is its interactive world with random events such as caravan hijacks and robberies which could be available at any time. The NPC and AI will also interact with you in different ways depending on what you do or how you treat them.

What I did?

• I did a lot of research for my game.

• The objective of this is to try to understand the market, audience and the competition that I would have to face when making this game.

• I searched for any and all useful information which might be useful when making my game.

• I kept an eye on all forms of competitors which are making a similar game such as GTA V and Assassins Creed. On top of these games I also looked out for less known indie games in this genre.

• This type of information is useful as it gives results of games which are doing well or poorly in todays market. Using games which were sold over 5 years ago could be regarded as irrelevant as the times change. By understanding today’s market you can create nearly exactly what the community wants and understand what they don’t want.

Research methods

Primary research – is research carried out by a researcher with knowledge of the subject through secondary research. This is usually carried out for when more information is needed or the secondary research is unclear. Other times it could be used is to target a specific area such as individual companies. This type of research cost a lot of money but is the safest and most accurate method.

Secondary research - is research which is already been carried out. Secondary research can be found in newspapers, online, in the library and on videos/ images (documentaries). This type of research is free and easily accessible but could be faked easily.

Self-generated research – is research carried out by themselves and no external help. They do this by creating questionnaires or online forms for the general public to fill out. This is the simplest form of self-generated research.

Research methods

Quantitative research – is research which relies mainly on quantity. I.e. facts and figures.This mean it relies mainly on cold hard logic through numbers and comparisons. This type of research is mainly carried out by big cooperate companies as it’s the easiest thing to understand and control.

Qualitative research – is research which relies mainly on quality. I.e. the personal opinions of the target market. This means it relies on the opinions and thoughts of the general public through questionnaires, likes and dislikes. This is used mainly by smaller companies which are trying to improve there product instead of increasing sales directly or cutting prices.

• All of these forms of research where used and applied to my research. I discovered a lot of useful information about the publics opinions of my game and compared facts and figures with other games. I even created my own questionnaire and published it. Here

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1CFqWfluxpZkh_CH2gVJrB31IxcYhNPunH777CGHPjxo/edit

Secondary research

Date Sources of the InformationDescription of the Information Obtained

Notes

30/01/15

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/661788-2d-vs-3d-cost-analysis/ 

2D vs. 3D

Also some information about the cost of product

30/01/15

http://www.edge-online.com/features/watch-dogs-and-why-the-open-world-genres-biggest-success-story-is-also-its-own-worst-enemy/ 

Failures in the market which we can learn from

Maybe useful information for the future

6/02/2015

http://whatculture.com/gaming/15-best-open-world-video-games-time.php 

Top 15 open world games on the market

By popularity by the vast majority not just the general demographic

6/02/2015

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.833859-Ubisoft-Says-Open-World-Games-Are-the-Future

Research from Ubisoft

Why open world games are the future

13/02/15

Magazine name “the greatest games of 2015” Date of release: march 2015Page 24 pages 15,16,17 and 19 page 60 “Elite: Dangerous”

Top 100 games of 2014, various up-and –coming games (open world games relevant to my game)

GTA, Minecraft, crew, the new order and other new games as well which are highly anticipated. “TTG”

13/02/15

Magazine article on “the crew” Page 84-87 Date of release: February 2015 “PlayStation official magazine”

Information about “the crew” and how well it has been doing

Failure as it doesn’t have a very enticing story as you are not interacting with any actors just the vehicles.

• The image above is of Pie charts which display the answers to my questionnaire.

• The left image is a comparison between two different games and there game covers.

• The Table shown above displays online research which has been carried out and recorded. It give brief and relevant information which could be useful.

My analysis of my research

Key information – I learned that most big game companies focus on their past successes to try to get safe profits. This is less risky as they know that people liked it in the past so it’s likely that they will still like it. This can back fire as people can get sick of the same repeated idea or game. Example: “Call of Duty” have a habit for creating a similar game as a sequel with minor changes. Yet it is still one of the best selling game franchises.

Information which changed my outlook – The gaming market doesn’t have a lot of companies focused in the open world genre. There are only three companies which dominate this market. (Ubisoft, Rockstar and Bethesda).

The most practice and useful method of gathering information – in my opinion the most useful method of gathering information is self-generated with questionnaires as it give an idea of what the market wants at the current time, the more people being questioned the more accurate the research.

Conclusion of research / final thoughts – I should employ previous successful ideas as well as including new content which it believe will spark the interest of the market.

WHAT WILL I DO NOW WITH MY FINDINGS?

I have decided to evolve my game toward the markets wants from the results of my questionnaire. Example of this is that many of the people questioned wouldn’t buy a game for 1- 2 hours of gameplay and would want to buy a game with 10-20 hours of game time and then replay ability as well. (Multiplayer is where I aim to involve this.)

The research changed my outlook on the amount of indie (independent) open world game. It turned out that there aren’t many indie open world games as they usually take a lot of time, funding and a large development team to create. Yet a lot of the larger open world indie games are really popular even though they require less work through randomly generated terrain, resources, event sand character.

Sometimes less is more.

CONCLUSIONStrengths – I focused towards recent games and learnt form the different success and failures of similar games. I used these to figure out if my game would be received similarly.

As most of my research is recent it is more accurate as the gaming market hasn’t changed.

I got research from magazines, online articles, statistics, questionnaires and video podcasts.

Weaknesses – If I were to redo this research I would focus less on open world games as there are a lot more games which could resemble my game other than open world games. I would also increase the amount of people answering the questionnaire too a lot more as the questionnaires mightn’t be accurate.

RESEARCH SOURCES• https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1CFqWfluxpZkh_CH2gVJrB31IxcYhNPunH777CGHPjxo/edit

• http://store.steampowered.com/tag/en/Open%20World/#p=0&tab=NewReleases

• http://store.steampowered.com/tag/en/Open%20World/#p=0&tab=TopSellers

• http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-10-22-linear-games-going-to-suffer-in-the-market-far-cry-4-dev

• http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/bestsellers/2014/videogames

• http://www.gamespot.com/watch-dogs/

• http://www.gamedev.net/topic/661788-2d-vs-3d-cost-analysis/

• http://www.edge-online.com/features/watch-dogs-and-why-the-open-world-genres-biggest-success-story-is-also-its-own-worst-enemy/

• http://whatculture.com/gaming/15-best-open-world-video-games-time.php

• http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.833859-Ubisoft-Says-Open-World-Games-Are-the-Future

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqfiv6-p5lc

• The greatest games of 2015 - Page 24, 15,16,17,19 and 60

• PlayStation official magazine - Page 84-87

Q&A

Any questions?