One of the first years we were lucky enough to go to GDC (a yearly game developer conference), we had breakfast with a guy who worked at Bullfrog during their heyday. He told us a story about one of their games that’s been echoing in my head for years since.
Warning: this image constitutes a spoiler for the contents of this blog post.
During development of the title (which we will call “Cheese Wrangler” to protect the innocent) they created a sophisticated simulation of the environment to determine which challenges to present to the player. Months of painstaking work went into cheese wrangling challenge* simulation in an attempt to create a model that would feel intuitive to players, but the system was taking way too long to finish. Eventually they decided to test players against a purely random event driver, and they found that after all that work players couldn’t tell the difference between simulation and chance. So they threw out the simulation.
(*Not actually cheese wrangling challenges, but we’re sticking with that theme.)
Simulation just doesn’t matter if the player doesn’t care about it.
