What?!
Section8 said:
No, he's mostly right. You really need to understand what you're
making, and why each part deserves to be part of the bigger picture.
You're assuming that their approach
isn’t some kind of assortment of cool ideas that are patched together.
All of us in the office play a lot of games. So the first thing is we make them for ourselves. People here tend to try and entertain each other. There are more ideas than we can ever possibly do every week. Videogames are absolutely the most energizing creative thing you can ever work on. You have this technology magic and then you have story telling and gameplay. It’s all open. You can get motivation from everything; just from walking around looking at things and going ‘oh that’s really neat.
Which leads me to the next point –
If it's your own vision, then that understanding ought to be simple, though I can think of plenty of examples that show otherwise.
Vision != "neat" , cool or an idea you got from a beer commercial. Vision means you have, in your mind, the final outcome of the original idea, and in the context of this discussion – the gaming experience that a certain idea will lead to.
I think you got confused between vision and creativity, having lots of ideas is good because on average 9 of every 10 of them sucks. A lot of ideas sound good at first but when you start hammering out the details or when you start implementing them, they are all of a sudden don’t look that good.
If you're making decisions along the lines of "hey, lots of fans seem to want this", then you're walking a dangerous path, because it's all too easy to reason in favour of a popular option without actually comprehending it.
Not from the big picture perspective, if you have a committed, dedicated fanbasa, it is actually a very good place to look for ideas i.e. if they complain about something then it is an opportunity to both revaluate the original idea that leaded to the unsatisfying gameplay element AND to fixing it is an opportunity to be creative. Another example is to look at all of the fans "requests" and ask yourself is there some kind of specific direction that all these requests leads to, and if so why.
One of the best ways to look for ideas is to look at other people ideas and to bounce of it, and through that process, taking the original idea to a place where you can better understand it.
And furthermore, after you gave Bethesda the credit of "
really understanding what you're making" and "
vision" now all of a sudden Bethesda doesn’t "
comprehending it"?
At the and of the day, if you just implement ideas you think are cool with out some kind looking at the big picture (game design)
then it doesn’t matter if you are implementing your own ideas or someone else's.
I'm pretty sure that's how "VATS" came into being and the main reason why I've never really had hope for Fallout, even before we knew anything about it. I'm pretty sure Bethesda know what Fallout fans want, and I'm equally sure they don't actually comprehend why we want anything.
This is the result of Bethesda approach to game making – a whole lot of doing and not enough design, implementing stuff because it's neat.
*edit
Or in other words: in Bethesda case this lead to oblivion.
Every community has something like a hive-mind, but it's funny when they make fun of other communities for having a hive-mind.
- simply because I couldn't play all the combat in bullet time. 
