Five tricks required for every modern game.
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Add spider sense. Ever game needs to have a button that makes the world monochrome and highlights everything the player can interact with.
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Dora the Explorer. Every modern game requires a character who talks constantly and narrates everything going on. Don't let your players solve puzzles themselves, instead put a bitch in their ear telling them exactly where to go and what to do. If your player dares to explore off the main path, make sure to nag them constantly so that's its too annoying to go anywhere but forward. And if you don't have another character in budget, just make the main player character into a schizophrenic who talks to himself constantly.
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Yellow Paint. Add decals guiding the player forward, could be signs or you could design an elegant scene to show the way, but it's cheaper to just add yellow paint on the objects, walls, floors and ledges.
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Make the entire game into a tutorial by having controls on the screen constantly. It doesn't matter if they've played for 1000hrs, make sure you stamp "Press X to Open" in the center of the screen whenever they approach a door. Make sure to have the main objective in bold. And don't expect your players to remember the common controls either, keep them on the screen at all times. "Move: (L) - Look: (R) - Jump: (A)"
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Abolish any remaining challenge. After highlighting things through walls, placing paint showing where to go, adding an annoying character telling exactly what to do, and having the UI forever display controls and objective; there will STILL be players unable to beat your challenge / puzzle / obstacle. Instead of letting them play the game normally, just warp them forward if they spend too long. Make failure impossible.
How do these tricks make money? It comes down to one word: ACCESSIBILITY
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Spidy sense mode is in every game to appease the colorblind. Some gamedevs will add a colorblind mode, but it's easier to copy the spider sense script into every game. Who cares if it makes no sense or completely breaks the lore!
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Adding Dora the Explorer to nag your player is to appease the even more visually impaired. The nearly blind. They can't see what's going on so they need a narrator.
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Like spidersense to appease the colorblind and the narrator trick is to appease those who are even more visually impaired, yellow paint is to appease the deaf. They can't hear anything, they can't even hear Dora, so all audible queues must also have corresponding visual queues.
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The cluttered UI is to appease the gamers with cognitive impairment. These are the people who have trouble with memory or attention. So just treat all your players like dementia patients and it'll be fine.
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And the last group we must make the game accessible to, after we have appeased the blind, the deaf, and the ADHD folk; is the dumb folk. That's right, expect your players to be retarded and cater your game towards retards. Many of your players will be dimwitted idiots who are going to return the game if they can't beat the first few levels.
Where's my money??
By making your game accessible, you will immediately gain millions of potential customers. Colorblindness affects 8% of men and 0.5% of women. And about 28% of people have some sort of vision impairment but are not quite blind. About 5% of the population is hearing impaired, but most (350m/430m) are elderly so it's more like 1.4% for gamers. About 2% of people have memory disorders, 0.7% dementia and 1.3% MCI (mild cognitive impairment). Self reports of memory and attention problems is 9.7% for ages 18-39 which is a 90% increase from the 2013 report of 5.1%. And with the spread of the internet into the third world, the number of low IQ players has risen rapidly and is still increasing.
It's a no-brainer at this point. You alienate those customers by not making your game into generic modern garbage. If your game doesn't have the accessibility tag on Steam, it's won't be considered by millions of potential customers.
Bonus tip: Have your main character be androgynous and hope that you get a letter from sweetbaby offering you $$$ to make the character and storyline gay. Cha-ching!
It would be one thing if those accessibility options really were for the visually/hearing impaired, but mostly they are for the stupid and inept.
Or to bandaid compensate for chaotic and "loud" UI/HUD designs. Or to compensate for poor level/environment design.
Radar "ping" mechanics can be okay. Like in the instance of detecting lootable containers in a messy open-world environment (Dying Light) it does sort of work as a viable solution. (Even if It's a little goofy looking and can get a little grating to use constantly).
Radar ping mechanics are only appropriate if you are playing as a submarine or a bat. Otherwise they are always bad design. If your open world environment is messy, then do something to highlight lootable containers automatically. Do not require players to constantly manually activate a second visual spectrum. That shit is just tedious.
You don't know how right you are, bro.
I have sight issues. I cannot tell you how many of these games that tout "accessibility" completely lack UI scale options. Doesn't allow elements of the UI to be moved, resized, etc.
God forbid a character talks outside the UI with the tiny text above their heads or near their model, that shit is impossible to read for people like me.
In fairness, Dragon Age: Origins was a classic and it just plain wouldn't have worked without Spider Sense.
I agree with most of this, but Spider Sense definitely has its place. I don't want to play a game where I'm wandering around with my face up to the screen squinting to see if any collection of six pixels look interesting. I played Myst when it came out, and if you set nostalgia aside, Myst really fucking sucked.
In MGSV, a prequel to the legendary stealth game series Metal Gear Solid, they added spider sense in the form of a pill. You took the pill and could see enemies and interactable objects through walls. The problem was
The game is black and white about 90% of the time because of it
It totally destroys the lore of MGS.
The game series is full of crazy technology and other oddities, but the see-people-through-walls pill is by far the most insane. Not only does this pill exist, it is possessed and manufactured by the very same characters who are the villains in the other games. Which means the guards you sneak passed in MGS1, 2 & 4 had spider sense. Ridiculous.
As someone who actually has the Platinum trophy for MGSV: TPP (PS4), I have no idea what you're talking about.
Noctocyanin was one of the last items I ever recall using (probably a late unlock), you are never forced to equip it, and I saw no reason to equip it. Consequently, I used it for no more than a few minutes in 200+ hours of gameplay, and not anywhere near '90% of the time'.
I don't think Noctocyanin made any visual changes to the game outside of how enemies appear, either. It's like you're conflating Reflex Mode (which I usually switched off), which indeed does greatly alter the game's appearance to remove colour for a few seconds, with it.
Acceleramin can be used to artificially induce Reflex Mode, but still doesn't do what Noctocyanin does for enemies.
I mostly played FOB. At higher levels it's basically required once they drop the time limit down to 10 minutes. The level was designed to be tricky.
Yeah I got all the trophies too, twice lol
I mean, in the lore of MGS, the villian's name is Big Boss, but later you find out that a woman was The Boss and she was besties with a ghost named The Sorrow, and there's a Solid Snake and a Liquid Snake and Solidus Snake and.. premature aging.. and.. clones.. and jfc what the fuck is the lore of MGS
When Hideo said "I'm gonna make a simpler franchise where Daryl from The Walking Dead throws bags of pee at his ghosts and the goal is not to fall down too often," I was all in.
Lol.
At the end of MGS3, naked snake inherits the title of Big Boss. He's then cloned into the other 3 snakes. In MGSV, you play as the big boss in the original Metal Gear. The big boss at the series finale at the end of MGS4 is the same guy you play as in MGS3.
There's 5 snakes and 3 big bosses lmfao
Hideo did make one thing clear, though: he has a particular fetish for women who have a beautiful face but a hideously deformed body.
My favorite thing to do in MGS was throw an unsuspecting guard over my shoulder and quickly hide. Then the guard gets up and says "what was that!?," looks around and goes back on patrol.
Never got tired of that.
I like how BG1+2 did it where you could find traps/secrets with a high detection skill, but you still had the option to press a key and see all the lootable boxes/items on screen.
I played that briefly a long time ago, I think. It was isometric and used a shader to see characters through walls when in smaller rooms and hallways. Right? I never played Myst.
I think it's an excuse to skimp on design which is really lazy, all it takes is shading the object slightly differently. I remember when basically every game just made the important things slightly shiny sometimes. Or add an outline. Better games would use color, composition and lighting to draw your attention to important areas. The best games were designed to not need any of those tricks; like the spinning yellow coin in Mario.
Dragon age origins had a button you hit to label everything, it didn’t make everything heavily tinted in one color and have special objects glow. It wasn’t needed at all, just mildly helpful. hematomato is a retard
More like Homotomato.
Maybe he just has a small monitor.
I think a lot of times, Spider Sense is a way of saying: okay, what your character is doing is humanly impossible. No one could possibly find every clue; no one could possibly find everything buried behind every stray brick. So you can roleplay that and bash your brains against a wall for a year of your life, or we'll just tell you if you hit L2. Your choice.
That's a design problem. If your game requires the use of a manually activated or visually intrusive spider sense, then you fucked up. Improve your environmental design or make your spider sense unobtrusive and automatic. The worst result is players having to randomly turn on an alternative vision that also destroys the game's aesthetic. See: Far Cry Primal.
You're right. Some games need it for the design. I just personally don't like the design. My complaints are subjective, I am annoyed when every modern game requires me to "scan". So I think the best place for spider sense is with Spider-Man and used for lore rather than a required game mechanic.
I really hate the character talking to themselves. Playing the resident evil 2/3 remake I realized that they have the character bluntly say what the player is thinking or to tell the character what emotion to feel. When jumping into the sewers the character doesn’t have to mention how gross it is, we already know that. It comes off as insecure or something, as if the writer has to mock what’s happening because they’re worried the player will. They used to use music to give players a feeling of danger now Jill just says it “That monster coming after me I can’t stay here!” “A rocket launcher are you kidding me!” Yeah I know it’s ridiculous for a monster to use weapons, why is the game character saying that to nobody instead of running?
Coming from the original tomb raider and playing modern games is like sitting by yourself peacefully before you drunk female relative gets dumped on you and won’t shut up ever for any reason
The blind players don't know about the rocket launcher, so they need Dora the RCPD zombie slayer to tell them. And how else will the Indian customers know the sewer is gross? Lol
Btw are those RE remakes any good? I heard they're pretty true to the originals.
They’re pretty bland and not at all faithful. The original Resident Evil 2 had a system where depending on who you played first and second changed the story. So there was Claire A/B and Leon A/B. In the remake it’s just whoever you played first and you never get the other characters side of the story. You
both fight the same bosses in the same area. Instead of improving the story some lazy in creative faggot just decided to play opposites with the character traits. Oh in the original Leon bitched about nobody listening to him and running off? Well I’m going to make Leon grab some chicks wrist and aggressively tell her “you cant walk away from me”
I could go on but neither is faithful, they’re ok games with massive character and story changes none of which are good.
Depends on how naturally it's done. A lot of games have done it pretty well over the years. The Dark Forces/Jedi Knight games, Shadow Warrior. Can't remember if Artyom in Metro did it outside of the level loading screen monologues. Graphic adventure games did it a lot. (Monkey Island, Fate of Atlantis, Sam and Max, The Longest Journey, etc)
What's funny is they do all this stuff then force 24/7 online connectivity, require an account (only available in US+EU), don't optimize the game at all so you need a "pro" console or high end PC, don't support 1440p resolution (20% of steam users), etc. They cut off 30% of the audience like it's nothing.
Like Sony forcing PSN accounts on Helldivers 2 probably cost them $100M even with the walkback.
Classic-game-if-made-today videos drive the point home pretty hard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KC656o7_zVk
I think 1 and 3 are fair compromises to the jank that is the vast majority of games, to an extent. A new player should have a clear window into what game logic exists versus what he expects in the real world. I'm not excusing shallow gameplay and unimaginative level design.