I hate that I sometimes play video games. They are my dirty little unproductive secret. They are to me what food is to fat people: comfort and escape. Ultimately unhealthy, but still OCD'd into life. They also piss me off because they could be so much better. It wouldn't take much for a lot of them. To that end...
Tips for Game Devs:
1. Smoothness--Your Graphics may be pretty, but you live and die by the smoothness of the controls and animations. This must be hard to get right because many MANY games look like a photograph in a screenshot, but live feel like an amateur claymation short. I'll give you a hint: smoothness is all about transitions. Focus on getting transitions right and this should take care of itself... mostly.
2. Uniqueness/Customization--On the graphics front: Make tons of different things and give each of them their own model. On today's computers storage space is not at a premium anymore. Feel free to spend 10GB getting this one right. There's really no excuse for using the same 15 or 20 ugly faces over and over for the characters in the game. With the right tools it should only take 5 minutes per NPC to make everyone unique. That's only a week or two of work for every model in your game.
Audio: Most games do pretty well on variety for gunshots and sword clashes now, if only because they modify the sounds based on the environment. Where they fail is in human voices. I realize voice actors are expensive, but some developers have no excuse. Bethesda used the same voice actor for every NPC of a given race/sex in Oblivion, and then reused the SAME ACTORS in the same way in Fallout 3. Did they seriously think that no one who played Oblivion would be tired of those voices when they played Oblivion-With-Guns?? Come on.
Demeanor: This is something I've only seen implemented in a game once (can't remember which game), but always wished for. People walk differently. Some people walk tall and proud, others slouch and shuffle or wiggle their ass, or double bounce. I can understand making most animations the same for a given gender as motion capture takes a lot of work, but there are only 4 animations that the player is going to have to spend hours and hours watching: walk, run, jump & ride. It would be nice to have some choice or variety to keep things interesting. Even if you only make several for run & walk that would be a huge improvement to the experience, and it would add TONS of immersion for those wacko roleplayers. Provide variety, but don't make the choices all polar opposites--it would be stupid to only be able to choose between the gangster shuffle or a pole-in-the-ass butler's gait.
3. Simple Can Be Impressive--Game artists seem to be stuck in a rut where they think that higher level items need to be more and more intricate looking and have random lighting, smoke and fire effects and lots of weird shiney colors like purple, violet, fushia, pink and aqua. This is just stupid. Tone it the fuck down, and save the girl colors for female characters and flowers. Many games now have top tier gear that is obviously unusable from shape, size and color. The other negative effect is that these oversized items fuck up the beauty of good animation by creating all sorts of weird clipping problems. Cloth should almost always be matte with the possible exception of something silk, and even metal doesn't reflect the sun from EVERY angle.
