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I recently realized how important level design is in a game. For example, you can have a game with really well developed gameplay, but if you're bored with the environent because it's all monotonous, then it's just gonna be Assassin's Creed 1, which is fine to play through once, but I'm never picking it up again.

But sometimes you could have fairly good gameplay, unpolished and sometimes repetitive, but if the levels are unique and interesting, it can easily keep a game from being boring.

well if its good game i still play if its repitive.

Yeah I'm the same. I wouldn't play something like WOW either because I don't like having "endless" gameplay where things aren't controlled to a certain degree or lead by a story. I like to be involved with a character and feel that at some point I will finish the game; resolve the conflict, end the story. Because otherwise it's just repetative. I don't like MMORPGs because they're just so repetative and boring to me.

Assassin's Creed 1 was an reasonable game. There were elements of it I enjoyed that I actually wish had been put in the sequel. But because I was never involved with Altair because I just didn't care about him or any of the characters, and because the gameplay was just repetative, I only played i through twice, and the second time was just because I wanted to find the flags.

Yeah I bought it in that Premier collection when it was really cheap. That was only because I was really interested in the second one and wanted to play through the first one first.

well you cant really define a good or great game becuse each person has a diff idea. and well on ac1 you dont have to replay the game to collect all the flags. i did every thing except kill all the timlairs which i need to go do and some of the lil help citaziens, ect..

You can to an extent. I mean, if the camera is twitchy, the controls are glitchy and you fall through the world constantly, well, that's clearly a bad game. There are defining factors that can make a game just bad, where it's not being a matter of opinion. But that's pretty much the equivalent of developers biting off more than they can chew. They're saying, "We're gonna have this and this and this in our game!" but then they don't get enough money, or time, and all those things are done so half assed that none of them work properly. That's a bad game. Now, if that game has amazing storyline, excellent voice acting, beautiful graphics, and a kick a** soundtrack, then it's a bad game with a good narrative. Which CAN make it enjoyable on some level.
But just the same, I personally think that a game with amazing, solid gameplay, and a piss poor storyline would constitute for a bad game. If you go through the whole thing, and there IS a storyline, but it's told so poorly that you don't even care if you skip over the cinematics, then I don't see why people should just let that go and say "It's a good game" anyway.
At this point in time, Gameplay, Graphics and Storyline are all equally important in a Video Game, I think.


The thing about flags is... The common problem these days I find, developers are relying on trophies too much. You know what one of my biggest problems with trophies is? The fact that people are just okay with getting trophies, or achievments, or whatever. Why do I bring this up? Because it was the same deal with AC1, even before the PS3 had trophies. You collect these flags and then what?

In the previous generation, pretty much 75% of hardcore games (by that, I'm excluding party games and kids games) rewarded your accomplishments with concept art, bonus movies, costumes, etc.
What do you get for collecting all these flags in AC1?
And that's the case with so many games these days. I was playing Revenge of the Wounded Dragons, which was fun, and a total throw back to Double Dragon, which IS awesome. But in it, there's all kinds of things to collect, there's these golden statues, 15 per level, teeth that you randomly knock out of your opponents... Etc. etc. etc. So I looked it up, what do you get from collecting them? Trophies, you get damn trophies. So you know, I'm not even gonna bother.
If they rewarded me with new special moves, or concept art or something, then hell yes I'd collect them.
Or if collecting them got you like a really good powerful weapon at the end of the game right before the final boss, or increased the size of your life bar, or whatever... Yeah, then I'd collect that stuff, but if you collect them just for the sake of saying, "I collected them" or for trophies then I see no point. Same goes for the flags and the templars and all that useless stuff in AC. Though at least Templars were fun to kill. But the flags were pointless.