Manzano elaborated, “If they fall off a cliff, they want a checkpoint at the top of the cliff; if an enemy shoots a bullet and they do absolutely nothing to avoid the bullet, they complain about the difficulty; If they have to repeat a level because they died due to playing without any caution or care, they exclaim ‘Do I have to repeat everything now!?'”
“Basically, these players don’t want a video game, they want a simulation of a video game, something that SEEMS to offer a challenge, but is actually a perfectly balanced system so that no one ever feels frustrated while at the same time no one takes any risks and there is no penalty for playing poorly,” he continued to deride that type of players.
The article is bullshit though, these normie retards who can't play games at all, are their largest market now.
Why cater to a handful of people who actually can play good games, when you can make a gacha, generic MOBA, or CoD remake which will sell fifty times more copies not to mention the microtransactions.
Some of my favorite games sold very well. And I play strategy games. So the reason is because you can make a shitload of money. MOBAs existing doesn't take anything away from that.
Definitely true for me as I got older. I used to always play games on the max difficulty and relish setbacks and repeating until mastery. I played an alliance priest on PVP server at WoW launch and if that isn't the height of gaming masochism I can't tell you what is.
Now I got too much stuff going on to repeat 2 hours of gameplay because I missed one tough jump 3 times.
I want a continuous feeling that I'm making a bit of progress even when I occasionally play dumb and loose and have to restart. The Shadow of Mordor/War games are perfect for that kind of thing. The skill curve isn't fail--->succeed, it is "make slow progress" ---> "make fast progress while looking awesome!"
As it turns out your time becomes more precious the older you get, so losing it to bullshit challenges isn't a worthwhile endeavor. If I want challenge I'll load up a fighting game.
Tedium is a cheap way to make games longer. Maybe the guy in this article takes advantage of that. Independently, there are players that enjoy repeating difficult sequences, to an extent, while they gear up to do the next part right. Punishing style of games existing isn't a bad thing. What the guy in TFA is saying is unreasonable on its face. He insists that MORE players enjoy the type of game he is making. He's complaining that other people making their games better is making his look worse.
Having to repeat an easy and tedious portion of a game to attempt the difficult portion isn't a matter of how difficult a game is, it's a matter of how punishing a game is.
Having a massively unfair/poorly designed game fuck you up constantly is going to be miserable regardless. But a fair game you can improve every time you fuck up.
I don't remember if it was on extreme or not, but I remember getting stuck on the button-mashing torture part of MGS2 on the harder difficulty. I just couldn't mash fast enough and didn't want to buy some sort of "turbo" controller.
Its an okay game. Its basically one of those escort rescue games where you lead people to safety on a given map. Problem is that escort ai is sometimes random. Sometimes they stop for no reason others they will go all the way with a move command.
One level that made me ragequit had the npc locked off in a box and you had to order them to move from the outside. Unfortunately the npc would for no reason shout "screw it" and turn around requiring you to shout at them again to keep going. Doing this required me to move very quickly with the jetpack in a game where you take damage from hitting things while using the jetpack.
Confession, I have mixed feelings about games that require you to redo shit when you die. On one hand there should be a failure state and consequences for failing, so you're not just casually strolling through (as he says) a guided tour. But having to redo large swaths of content sucks, man, especially as you have less time available to you. It's not particularly fun even if you have lots of time; it often causes a hard stop to your gaming session because you just don't want to do the same shit again right away.
So this guy is correct, by and large, about how games are being dumbed down, stripped of challenge, and turned into guided tours. But on that particular point it's hard to find the right balance between punishing failure and valuing the player's time. Kind of like how it's hard for horror games to find a good balance between presenting an actual threat without there being so much of a threat that the player becomes desensitized to it through repeated failure.
Gaming is definitely in a bad place right now, and the constant push for mass appeal, in difficulty and other areas, is the chief cause. That and microtransactions.
Well he ain't wrong.
The DarkSydePhil effect.
The article is bullshit though, these normie retards who can't play games at all, are their largest market now.
Why cater to a handful of people who actually can play good games, when you can make a gacha, generic MOBA, or CoD remake which will sell fifty times more copies not to mention the microtransactions.
Some of my favorite games sold very well. And I play strategy games. So the reason is because you can make a shitload of money. MOBAs existing doesn't take anything away from that.
Definitely true for me as I got older. I used to always play games on the max difficulty and relish setbacks and repeating until mastery. I played an alliance priest on PVP server at WoW launch and if that isn't the height of gaming masochism I can't tell you what is.
Now I got too much stuff going on to repeat 2 hours of gameplay because I missed one tough jump 3 times.
I want a continuous feeling that I'm making a bit of progress even when I occasionally play dumb and loose and have to restart. The Shadow of Mordor/War games are perfect for that kind of thing. The skill curve isn't fail--->succeed, it is "make slow progress" ---> "make fast progress while looking awesome!"
As it turns out your time becomes more precious the older you get, so losing it to bullshit challenges isn't a worthwhile endeavor. If I want challenge I'll load up a fighting game.
One of Yahtzee's principles of game design was to get the player back into gameplay as soon as possible after failure. Gameplay, not "the game."
Tedium is a cheap way to make games longer. Maybe the guy in this article takes advantage of that. Independently, there are players that enjoy repeating difficult sequences, to an extent, while they gear up to do the next part right. Punishing style of games existing isn't a bad thing. What the guy in TFA is saying is unreasonable on its face. He insists that MORE players enjoy the type of game he is making. He's complaining that other people making their games better is making his look worse.
Soulsbro in shambles right now.
And, more to the point, how fair or unfair it is.
Having a massively unfair/poorly designed game fuck you up constantly is going to be miserable regardless. But a fair game you can improve every time you fuck up.
I don't remember if it was on extreme or not, but I remember getting stuck on the button-mashing torture part of MGS2 on the harder difficulty. I just couldn't mash fast enough and didn't want to buy some sort of "turbo" controller.
Making a button-mash minigame harder on higher difficulties is peak sadism.
Easily the worst part of clearing MGS I-IV in my younger years.
Its an okay game. Its basically one of those escort rescue games where you lead people to safety on a given map. Problem is that escort ai is sometimes random. Sometimes they stop for no reason others they will go all the way with a move command.
One level that made me ragequit had the npc locked off in a box and you had to order them to move from the outside. Unfortunately the npc would for no reason shout "screw it" and turn around requiring you to shout at them again to keep going. Doing this required me to move very quickly with the jetpack in a game where you take damage from hitting things while using the jetpack.
Confession, I have mixed feelings about games that require you to redo shit when you die. On one hand there should be a failure state and consequences for failing, so you're not just casually strolling through (as he says) a guided tour. But having to redo large swaths of content sucks, man, especially as you have less time available to you. It's not particularly fun even if you have lots of time; it often causes a hard stop to your gaming session because you just don't want to do the same shit again right away.
So this guy is correct, by and large, about how games are being dumbed down, stripped of challenge, and turned into guided tours. But on that particular point it's hard to find the right balance between punishing failure and valuing the player's time. Kind of like how it's hard for horror games to find a good balance between presenting an actual threat without there being so much of a threat that the player becomes desensitized to it through repeated failure.
Gaming is definitely in a bad place right now, and the constant push for mass appeal, in difficulty and other areas, is the chief cause. That and microtransactions.
As I said in another post, if the game is hard in a fair way (eg you can learn and adjust) then you as a player will feel less shitty about stuff.
Unfair games, or those with tons of rng that lead to unavoidable fail states often, aren't a good experience.
There are many games on SNES that I like to play on an emulator because of save states and X10 speed.
Sue me.