How Player Ideas Become a Reality
At Resolution Games, we truly enjoy the communities we have built around our games and believe that listening to player feedback is extremely important. We know that players have a very different perspective than we do as developers. To ensure our games represent the best of both worlds, we always do our best to listen to our communities’ feedback and make note of things they want to see improved or changed.
No feedback is too big or too small to be valuable and over time trends often appear with common suggestions or ideas from players. We do our best to cater to what players want as long as it works with our goals for the game and vision for the project.
Here’s a high level look at our process for implementing a player requested feature:
A suggestion keeps popping up and our community managers take note of the trends.
The community managers work with our dev team to investigate if the suggestion should be implemented into the game and if it aligns with our goals for the project.
The dev team then looks into the suggestion further to see how much resources it would take to implement the idea, how it fits into our long-term vision for the game and other planned features and more.
If the request feature gets the final sign off, then the dev team reserves time and resources to make it.
Over the years, many player requested items have made it into our games such as balancing tweaks, new game modes, new cosmetics and more. Wondering what the most requested item has been for any of our games? Hint: we released it in May 2022. It’s Demeo’s doubles mode which allows players to control two heroes at once. We saw requests for this feature from players over and over again on Discord, Twitter, Facebook, via emails, on Reddit and anywhere else where players could reach our team. Thanks to the voices of our community we had what we needed to ensure this feature made it into the game. It was incredibly rewarding for us to see the reactions when we were finally able to announce that the doubles mode was coming and it has been amazing to see our players’ reactions once they were able to check out the new game mode.
Another example of us listening to player feedback is from Blaston. In 2021, the game had several issues that impacted the community. Some players were unfortunately playing with unstable connections that would cause projectiles to appear unexpectedly closer to you than anticipated. There were also issues with players getting matched up with players in regions really far away from them that would impact the connection of the matches.
Before we jumped into patching these issues, we talked extensively with players and identified several things that we could change to improve their experience. One of the key points we discovered was that players didn’t know what or who was causing the unstable connection in a match. To reconcile this, we introduced a ping indicator which displays the connection both players have in the lobby.
We actively discussed with the community what this meant and how it would impact them. While there were a lot of worried players who anticipated themselves to be pointed out with bad connections, eventually it led to players that consistently had bad connections despite good conditions to try to improve their network setup. It also led to players having more clear expectations on their matches, instead of unexpected frustration. Along with this change, we also identified that early in the game's development we chose to apply a burst of speed to projectiles as they were created that would then slow down over time. The point of this was to emphasize and create this cool “matrix dodging” feeling to the game. However, in unstable network conditions, the projectiles that are fast, will appear to teleport really close to the player due to the information not being sent to both players at the same time. This caused a ton of frustration for players, and we had to investigate it more closely. In a subsequent update, we changed the velocity curve of the projectiles to be more linear which dramatically improved the experience for players since the “teleporting projectile” situation almost disappeared compared to previous versions of the game.
New game additions aren’t the only thing that our communities have voiced their opinions on though. When we playtest updates our testers often consist of both current players and those who don’t play the game. This helps give us a broad perspective of how the update will be perceived.
Another thing we look at is what players don’t want to see in the game. In the past we have even gone as far as to revert things back based on the strong voice of the players. Additionally, we also monitor our communities’ feedback for non-game related items too. We’ve held tournaments in Blaston because players asked for it, we launched a merch store for Demeo based on player requests, we’ve worked with specific content creators based on player requests and more.
So the next time you leave us feedback or suggestions, please know that we truly appreciate it and are using it to make decisions that impact the future of our games.
