difficulty and accessibility
PostPosted:Fri Oct 30, 2009 6:18 pm
Inspired from the thread about why people don't complete games. I'm going to only focus on not completing a game due to difficulty. If it sucks in some other way, I'm not going to worry about it. I'm also going to assume difficulty comes from a well-known source, whether it's trying to do a jump in Mario or avoiding lasers of doom in Mega Man. That is, the difficulty isn't created by the fact that you just came up with a mechanism nobody has ever seen before.
I have some further assumptions that skill at most game is:
1. Innate, or at least
2. Cannot be significantly improved without significant effort
That is to say if you want to stop everything you're doing in your life and be good at a Mega Man game, or Street Fighter, or whatever, you can probably do a lot better but there's really no reason to assume anybody is actually going to do this. Whatever skill you started with is most likely going to stay the same unless the game is so good to warrant you spending more time to learn about it.
Let's go to one of the most expensive arcade quarter quencher I can remember: House of the Dead. Though part of the reason is because it costs $1 to play in most place, this game has remained as a mainstay in places like Gameworks so it's quarter-crunching power is considerable. From looking at the arcade I'd say most people (myself included) has no chance of beating Magician on 1 credit, let alone the entire game. Yes I know you're supposed to hit the part on his arm that isn't covered by armor to stop most of his attacks, but the point is most people still can't do it even if they know where the weak points are.
And yet House of the Dead is beaten trivially if you have enough quarters. Does that make the accomplishment of beating the game with 1 credit less significant? I don't know about you but I'm always quite impressed when I see someone who can beat House of the Dead on one credit even though I always relied on the 'throw money at it' strategy. Likewise if the game is ported to console, it doesn't make the accomplishment any less. There's also a high score system and it's pretty clear not continuing is needed for any shot at a good score.
Street Fighter 2 comes to mind as another reasonably balanced game. Now since you continue at the beginning of a round, it is in theory always possible to get into an impossible fight relative to your skill. But the requirement for the best ending is set pretty low, and even on the 8 star setting, M. Bison isn't so powerful that you'll get immediately bulldozed without a chance. This is quite different from some of the fighting games that puts you up against an equivalent of Shin Akuma as the final boss. Shin Akuma is clearly a boss designed for a pretty hardcore fighting game player, and it is entirely possible an average player will never come close to beating him. Now that's fine as long as beating him is not a prerequisite for seeing the whole game, but too many games seem to get this wrong. The funny thing is that Street Fighter has a Shin Akuma, but he's usually not tied to any necessary part. It's usually a fight you do purely for the sake of saying you can do it. If you can never beat Shin Akuma, there's no loss for you so far as what the game has to offer.
On the opposite spectrum we have Mega Man, especially the original ones. Mega Man 1 doesn't even allow continues, and for the NES ones you always get send back to the beginning of the Wily stages. I'm not sure which one where you started getting your energy back after dying, but the first few do not have this and you can get into an absurd situation where even if you had 9 lives left, if you somehow used up most of your energy without beating the boss, then you can no longer beat the boss at all (Mega Man 2 comes to mind where the boss is only vulnerable to the bubble shot). And this is clearly by design. If you can continue through out the first 8 bosses there's no reason why Wily stages are any different. There's no reason why your weapon energy shouldn't be refilled after you die. It's purely a design roadblock designed to keep you from succeeding.
Every game should have some kind of trivial setting that offers everything the game has to offer, with the option for adding signficiant difficulty if the player chooses to. I believe MGS has a setting where if you're spotted you instantly die. I heard that's supposed to make you a better player, but I suspect an average player would find this to be really retarded if this option was forced to be on. There should be a reasonable scoring system so that if you want to just beat the game, you can and you'll be able to see just how much you can improve. God mode inflicts a 90% penalty on scoring in TIE Fighter, but you still get a score. Of course it will never come close to someone who is playing the game without God mode, so if you care about stuff like that and want to get better, you'll go without it. But the guys who don't care can just God mode their way through the game, since it's actually somewhat hard at some point, especially in the expansion.
I have some further assumptions that skill at most game is:
1. Innate, or at least
2. Cannot be significantly improved without significant effort
That is to say if you want to stop everything you're doing in your life and be good at a Mega Man game, or Street Fighter, or whatever, you can probably do a lot better but there's really no reason to assume anybody is actually going to do this. Whatever skill you started with is most likely going to stay the same unless the game is so good to warrant you spending more time to learn about it.
Let's go to one of the most expensive arcade quarter quencher I can remember: House of the Dead. Though part of the reason is because it costs $1 to play in most place, this game has remained as a mainstay in places like Gameworks so it's quarter-crunching power is considerable. From looking at the arcade I'd say most people (myself included) has no chance of beating Magician on 1 credit, let alone the entire game. Yes I know you're supposed to hit the part on his arm that isn't covered by armor to stop most of his attacks, but the point is most people still can't do it even if they know where the weak points are.
And yet House of the Dead is beaten trivially if you have enough quarters. Does that make the accomplishment of beating the game with 1 credit less significant? I don't know about you but I'm always quite impressed when I see someone who can beat House of the Dead on one credit even though I always relied on the 'throw money at it' strategy. Likewise if the game is ported to console, it doesn't make the accomplishment any less. There's also a high score system and it's pretty clear not continuing is needed for any shot at a good score.
Street Fighter 2 comes to mind as another reasonably balanced game. Now since you continue at the beginning of a round, it is in theory always possible to get into an impossible fight relative to your skill. But the requirement for the best ending is set pretty low, and even on the 8 star setting, M. Bison isn't so powerful that you'll get immediately bulldozed without a chance. This is quite different from some of the fighting games that puts you up against an equivalent of Shin Akuma as the final boss. Shin Akuma is clearly a boss designed for a pretty hardcore fighting game player, and it is entirely possible an average player will never come close to beating him. Now that's fine as long as beating him is not a prerequisite for seeing the whole game, but too many games seem to get this wrong. The funny thing is that Street Fighter has a Shin Akuma, but he's usually not tied to any necessary part. It's usually a fight you do purely for the sake of saying you can do it. If you can never beat Shin Akuma, there's no loss for you so far as what the game has to offer.
On the opposite spectrum we have Mega Man, especially the original ones. Mega Man 1 doesn't even allow continues, and for the NES ones you always get send back to the beginning of the Wily stages. I'm not sure which one where you started getting your energy back after dying, but the first few do not have this and you can get into an absurd situation where even if you had 9 lives left, if you somehow used up most of your energy without beating the boss, then you can no longer beat the boss at all (Mega Man 2 comes to mind where the boss is only vulnerable to the bubble shot). And this is clearly by design. If you can continue through out the first 8 bosses there's no reason why Wily stages are any different. There's no reason why your weapon energy shouldn't be refilled after you die. It's purely a design roadblock designed to keep you from succeeding.
Every game should have some kind of trivial setting that offers everything the game has to offer, with the option for adding signficiant difficulty if the player chooses to. I believe MGS has a setting where if you're spotted you instantly die. I heard that's supposed to make you a better player, but I suspect an average player would find this to be really retarded if this option was forced to be on. There should be a reasonable scoring system so that if you want to just beat the game, you can and you'll be able to see just how much you can improve. God mode inflicts a 90% penalty on scoring in TIE Fighter, but you still get a score. Of course it will never come close to someone who is playing the game without God mode, so if you care about stuff like that and want to get better, you'll go without it. But the guys who don't care can just God mode their way through the game, since it's actually somewhat hard at some point, especially in the expansion.
