Any careful development or thoughtful planning on the part of anyone making games can be undone in one fell swoop from every game’s worst possible enemy. Their nemesis. Their one stumbling block on the way to greatness.
The player.
Any player has a unique ability to completely and utterly destroy any game. There are several ways they can do this with some of the most popular methods being to play another game along the lines of making sure everyone else isn’t having fun, but the one that can scupper just about anything, online or offline, is where the player is given free reign to exercise their creativity.
Playing Space Marine at the preview event I went along to the other day (and look, here is my write up over at Bit-Tech), I started thinking about how the developers must dread players when we started playing the multiplayer part of the game. Space Marine comes with the option to customize your power armoured super soldier down to the colours of individual parts of armour. The intention here is that you can create unique designs or anything you might have painted if you happen to have been a fan of the miniatures. The reality in most cases is however wildly different.