Should Designers Listen to Negative Feedback?

There has been a lot of discussion about DOOM Eternal’s Marauder enemy. So, if you don't know him, he's this big ugly blighter with an axe and a shield, and he fights unlike any other demon in DOOM. If you get too close, he'll shoot you with a shotgun. If you get too far away, he'll throw projectiles at you. And when you're in that middle ground sweet spot, he'll instantly block your attacks with his shield and spawn a glowing orange wolf.

To defeat him, you've got to wait for him to pounce and then during the split-second moment his eyes flash green, counter with an attack of your own. It's like a dude from Bloodborne took the wrong door and ended up in DOOM Eternal. He can be incredibly annoying to fight - not because he's hard, but because he feels antithetical to a lot of DOOM's design goals. And I'm not alone in disliking this chap. Ars Technica called him "by far the most frustrating part of any encounter".

Vice said "he sucks all the fun out of the room." The Steam forums are full of angry threads, and social media is packed with arguments about his design. Some people even want to see him changed, or removed from the game. Which… is actually not an uncommon sentiment in games. Ultimately, this is just the latest in a long line of contentious design decisions that players have demanded be changed or removed, like Animal Crossing's endless eggs, XCOM 2's restrictive turn timers, Breath of the Wild's glass weapons, and Mass Effect 3's disappointing ending.

Developers aren't being asked to fix a bug or a technical hiccup, but change something based on the subjective preferences of their audience. So it's less like fixing a crucial flaw in a car that might kill people, and more like swapping Sonic the Hedgehog’s face in a movie because the first one gave small children nightmares. And all of this this got me thinking: how should developers react to this sort of negative feedback?

What should they do when players demand that entire mechanics be changed or removed? That's what I'm going to explore in this episode of Game Maker's Toolkit. To start, it's important to dispel any notion that developers don't already listen to player feedback. In fact, it's essential when making games and developers seek it out constantly. Whether that's conducting playtesting sessions within a studio, getting opinions from random players at PAX, using beta branches and early access, or tracking player sentiment to help balance a multiplayer game.

And lots of developers have listened to feedback and changed things. Nintendo did tweak the egg drop rate in Animal Crossing. CD Projekt Red provided better movement controls for The Witcher 3. Ubisoft rewrote a controversial scene in a piece of Assassin's Creed DLC. And Bioware revisited that infamous Mass Effect 3 ending. And it's undeniable that at least some of these changes have lead to much better games. Gods Will Be Watching launched to a crushing 20% positive reviews thanks to issues with difficulty and randomness.

So developer Deconstructeam released a "Mercy Update" that fixed those flaws - and, in the process, took the game's user reviews to a whopping 70% positive ratings. There's a similar story with Swords of Ditto, which removed some of the more challenging features such as time limits and permadeath, and swapped its Steam reviews from Mixed to Very Positive. Plus games like No Man's Sky, Diablo 3, and pretty much every Ubisoft game, have been completely overhauled in response to negative player feedback, leading to significantly improved games.

Feedback can also be used to make games more accessible to a wider audience. The game SOMA, for example, scared some players away due to its spooky survival horror gameplay - so Frictional released an update called "Safe Mode" which let players disable all the baddies and just focus on the storyline. Elsewhere, Yooka Laylee and the Impossible Lair was made significantly less, well, impossible, with an update that adds checkpoints to its hardest level.

The atmospheric roguelike Below just got a new mode called "Explore" which turns off the game's most challenging aspects. And even the notoriously unfriendly Pathologic 2 can now be made easier, thanks to difficulty sliders - with one of the game's devs noting that it was "not right on a fundamental level" to leave out players who were unable to improve their twitch skills or sense of time. And by listening to how people play a game, developers can successfully skew their design to fit the way players actually end up interacting with the thing.

So while Don't Starve was very much intended to be a solo experience of one man versus the unknown, many players surprised developer Klei by saying that they wanted to experience the game cooperatively: leading to the successful multiplayer spin-off, Don't Starve Together. And when Burnout Paradise dev Criterion realised that players were more interested in just mucking about in the open world than doing the set races, the studio decided to make future DLC packs that catered to this more casual, party-like atmosphere.

However, responding to feedback is no easy task, and many considerations must be made before committing to any changes. So, over the last couple weeks I've been watching loads of talks, reading endless interviews, and chatting to a whole bunch of game developers about how best to deal with criticism. With everything I've learned, here's four tips to keep in mind when navigating player feedback. One: Don't listen to a vocal minority Insomniac Games brand officer Ryan Schneider says "just because you see it online and you see it in the forums, that doesn't necessarily represent the majority viewpoint", meaning criticism might be coming from a tiny subset of your players.

In fact, he reckons the game Resistance 2 suffered because his studio listened too intently to a small group of noisy players. Whenever you receive criticism you have to consider how many people are saying it, and what sort of person they are. So, when it comes to something like DOOM's Marauder, people who are fed up and frustrated are much more likely to speak up than those who don't really have an opinion either way - skewing the perception of how many people hate it.

On other games, devs tend to find that the most vocal critics want games to be more difficult and complex - which would likely alienate the more casual fanbase, who don't interact with forums and other sources of feedback. One massive way to help with this is data. So every live game imaginable is tracking an overwhelming amount of information about players. Every kill is tracked in Overwatch. Every quest is monitored for engagement in Sea of Thieves.

And every piece of loot is analysed in Destiny. This helps provide accurate and objective data to confirm, clarify, or contest player feedback. And in 2020, there's nothing stopping single player games from doing the same thing. In fact, way back in 2006, Valve tracked players in Half Life 2: Episode One, identified a nasty difficulty spike during a certain battle, and released a patch to rebalance it. In truth, it's not uncommon for developers to track data about players on all sorts of games - and I wouldn't be surprised if id Software knew exactly how many people were dying to the Marauder.

But data has to be used carefully. In Slay the Spire, Megacrit found that the card Madness was showing up in an overwhelming number of winning decks. Was it an overpowered card that needed to be nerfed? Not necessarily - it was just being given too regularly in a late-game event, meaning players who won the game were likely to have the card, regardless of whether they used it. Data is just one source of information, which is why Ubisoft's Rainbow Six Siege team say they're data informed, not data driven.

Two: Identify problems, not solutions A lot of player feedback comes in the form of a proposed change. You know: nerf this! Buff that! Remove him! But in truth, those suggestions are rarely the correct answer, and would often create new knock-on effects that the player can't be expected to foresee. So as the game designer, the goal is to drill down deeper into what the actual problem is, and from there you can find potential solutions that will actually work.

Super Meat Boy maker Edmund McMillen says "If people don't like how your game controls, this could mean one of hundreds of things, from how things move in the game to what buttons it uses. When responding to feedback, ask specific questions and try to find the root of the problem". So, when Team Ninja released an alpha build of Nioh, players told the studio to remove the annoying item durability mechanic. But that was in there for a reason: to stop players using the same weapon over and over again.

So instead of removing it outright, the developers flipped the mechanic on its head to create item familiarity. Now, when you use a weapon a lot you'll be able to transfer its best stats into a new one - which still encourages players to swap items on a regular basis. The game's director, Fumihiko Yasuda, said that player feedback shouldn't be used to find solutions, but rather generate questions that the developers can ask themselves.

To help with this, it's useful to think about the emotions that a mechanic evokes, rather than the mechanics themselves. So with XCOM 2's contentious turn timers, Firaxis was hoping that by forcing players to speed up, they would take more risks and end up in interestingly sticky situations. But, as I've discussed before, there are other routes to this same feeling, but with different - and less annoying - mechanics.

Like rewarding fast-play in Mario and Rabbids, or ramping up challenge over time with Invisible Inc's brilliant alarm system. When it comes to the Marauder, perhaps the problem is not the dude himself but the way he's introduced to the player. For example, this tutorial doesn't highlight some of the most effective strategies that can make encounters with him much, much less frustrating. Three: Don't let changes lead to a boring game Sean Davies, technical director at Rare, says "if all you do is respond to feedback, then you end up converging on a fairly middle of the road [game] and you don't surprise people".

And I think that's largely true: feedback should be used to sand off the roughest edges of a game - but shouldn't lead to the removal of everything that makes the game interesting. As an example of this, DUSK programmer Dillon Rogers had a good Twitter thread about the invincible baddies of Raccoon City. So, the Resident Evil 2 remake features Mr. X: an unstoppable, jackboot bastard who relentlessly chases you through the Racoon City police department, regardless of the doors, and walls, in his way.

He was a contentious feature at the game's launch, leading to complaints about him being too stressful. This year's Resident Evil 3 remake has its own big ugly bugger in the Nemesis, but unlike Mr. X he very rarely chases you. Instead, he's largely limited to boss fights and set pieces. We don't know for sure, but Rogers argues that it's "very possible that Capcom listened to people complain about Mr. X's roaming sequences, and decided to limit Nemesis to only a few short sections".

And the result was a far worse game, with almost every critic noting how Nemesis is disappointingly neutered compared to last year's Mr. X, as well as the Nemesis in the PlayStation original. "Devs need to be careful not to let their own fans ruin their games," says Rogers. A similar thing cropped up in DOOM 3. That game infamously forced you to pick between holding a torch or holding a gun: which was a bit fiddly but also a big component in driving forward that game's spooky atmosphere.

Fans demanded it be taken away, though, and so in the the re-released BFG Edition, you get to have both items at once - arguably spoiling the survival horror theme. Ultimately, if there's a way to open your game to more people with a simple and well communicated optional mode, then great. But trying to please everyone is impossible. David Bocek from Respawn told me, "as a designer at some point you just have to be brave.

You can't shy away from making any major changes just because a subset of players may dislike it, or you will never ship anything interesting and your game will become stale." Four: Create a conversation between developers and players Chris Avellone, who let players help guide the development of Pillars of Eternity during its Kickstarter campaign, said "once you explain why a certain feature is a certain way and make a very structured argument for it, we find that generally that level of frankness causes a lot of buy-in".

Developers often find that players are more forgiving of a contentious game mechanic if they understand the reasons and motivations behind its inclusion. And so it's not uncommon for games makers to open their doors and communicate freely with players - from Warframe's weekly Twitch streams to game designers diving into the community forums. Also, things like beta branches and early access builds allow developers to experiment with new game mechanics while the game is still under development.

This signals that the game is still in flux, and so players generally give the developers the benefit of the doubt. However, that’s not always the case. NARRATOR: "Make no mistake. We will face ever greater threats" During early access, the game Darkest Dungeon introduced the corpse mechanic, where killed-off enemies would leave behind a dead body. It was designed to give combat more depth, kill off a dominant strategy, promote interesting party compositions, and more.

The designers thought it was a great mechanic. But some players vehemently despised it. Designer Tyler Sigman says the change sparked "a hateful crusade by a select few against the game, the company, and us as individuals," and lead to review bombing, a splintered community, and the false narrative that a promising game was suddenly irrevocably ruined by one experiment. Because, ultimately, it's impossible to talk about player feedback without mentioning abuse and entitlement.

To frame this topic as helpful players giving constructive feedback to developers would be wholly disingenuous. Because while that definitely does happen, there's also harassment, death threats, and review bombing. People push agendas, construct narratives, create schisms, and poison the well. Now Tyler Sigman admits that the studio could have communicated the change better, and is sympathetic to the concern that people paid money for the game only to see it significantly changed - but, ultimately, he found himself held hostage to player sentiment.

Sigman says "we decided [the corpse mechanic was] right for the game. So we were in this weird dilemma of do we remove this and make what we consider a 'worse game' to make people happy?". The ultimate solution for Red Hook was to, one, make corpses an optional feature - and, two, hire a community manager, John Lindvay, who helped the developer redefine the relationship between the people who make the game, and the people who play it.

He says he shifted the dynamic from "help us make the best version of the game", to "help us make the game we're aiming for". That's a subtle shift in language, but he says it helps frame the relationship as developers leading the charge with a creative vision - and players helping them to achieve it. Here's the thing. The idea of a game designer doggedly sticking to their creative vision without caring what players think is a myth.

Games are made to entertain people, so it's critically important that those people are being heard. And sometimes, that feedback can lead to better games, more accessible products, and experiences that the original developer had never even thought of. But developers also have to know how to interpret that feedback. The call might just be coming from a vocal minority. It might actually end up making the game worse, or create a knock-on effect that breaks another part of the game.

And worst of all, it might come as an entitled, angry, volley of destructive vitriol. Whatever the case, it's better to have a game that people love so much that they get invested in how it's made, than a game people don't care about at all. NARRATOR: "As victories mount, so too will resistance" Hey, thanks for watching! And cheers to the many developers who spoke to me, on and off the record, about their experiences with player feedback.

Players and developers alike: please let me know what you think in the comments down below. Oh, and if you're player and want to see what things are like on the other side of the fence - maybe join the GMTK Game Jam? This is the latest game development marathon and it kicks off in July. Full details in the video link that should be on screen right now.