Don wrote:Zeus wrote:Don wrote:I really can't agree with the article about how to make games a learning experience. You shouldn't have to learn how to play a FPS or whatever. It's not like these genres hasn't been around for many, many years. If you're not good at a FPS, you either lack the ability to be good at FPS, or you're not interested in FPS to ever learn to be good at it, and you should not expect a game to suddenly change that.
Games that I don't finish tend to simply be poorly designed. Putting some carrot on a stick isn't going to change the fact that it's still poorly designed.
That mentality would do nothing but stunt innovation and evolution. I don't want to play Wolfenstein/Doom/Quake/Halo for the rest of my life, I want to play Gears or L4D sometimes, too.
It doesn't matter how you innovate, a FPS game is still going to be largely dependent on your accuracy and agility. A platformer still will involve being able to jump through certain stuff and perform certain actions. A fighting game is always going to largely depend on your ability to do combos. Innovation isn't going to solve a problem like if you can't make this shot or jump through that pit.
I continue to see this theme come back in games where you're expected to just learn to get good at the basics for some special game. I think that's stupid. Someone who has no interest in fighting games should not have to master how to do combos to at least see what a fighting game has to offer. You don't have to be good at the said game, but you should at least be able to complete it. Street Fighter 2 comes to mind since even a novice can get to the real ending (I think you only need it on 5 stars out of
with some minimal effort. Now if you want to get the difficulty 8 stars without continuing that's up to you but you're not playing like an inferior version of the game just because you can't get there.
But if you look at the game completion rate references there, clearly a lot of people cannot beat a game at all and just stopped bothering, which means they're getting an inferior version of the product, namely an incomplete one. It doesn't matter whether you're making a Mega Man game or a RPG. All games should be trivial to beat, but difficult to master. If your game is good enough, people will actually want to master it, but even if it isn't so good, at least they will see what the game has to offer instead of just stop playing.
Correction: in its current state, an FPS game is largely dependent on accuracy and agility. At one point, first-person perspective RPGs (ie. Wizardry, Might and Magic) had absolutely nothing to do with either but that's not the case anymore (see Oblivion). As well, in some games, this dependency is lessened somewhat (like Gears of War; sure, it's a third-person perspective, but it's essentially an FPS). Still there but not as prevalent as in more traditional FPSs. And we're seeing a trend towards more exploration as opposed to straight fighting so we'll see that dependency get smaller and smaller.
Innovation isn't going to solve a problem like that? Like I said to Sine in another post, that's a pretty defeatist attitude. If everyone thought like that, we'd still be playing Pong instead of Metal Gear Solid. Hell, we wouldn't be playing Pong or even had a computer invented. Innovation eventually solves all problems whether we can see it now or not.
And I like it when we're learning new game mechanics to play a game. I like the same-old, comfortable mechanics done well as much as the next guy (I am a Mega Man fan after all) but it's awesome to do something different if it's done well. We all had to learn how to navigate in a 3D space when playing Mario 64 (for all that is good and holy in this world, don't rant about that game; you absolutely cannot disagree that it was ground-breaking in that sense and that's all I'm saying) or how to lock on and use a single, context-sensitive button in Zelda or even how to play an FPS with Wolfenstein or, more recently, how to play the hide-and-seek gameplay in Gears or real, proper, actually-help-each-other co-op in L4D.
Yes, some games do use that "learning" thing to a ridiculous, hardcore-gamers-only degree (usually fighting games) but I'm OK with that too. There's often very, very little chance of real innovation there and you're automatically limiting your audience to only a small portion of the population, but there's room for stuff like that as well. Not my cup of tea but that don't mean it shouldn't exist.
The vast, VAST majority of games you can beat quite easily. Without exaggeration, I could probably beat Halo 3 using my feet to control it. Have you played it on Easy? It's a fucking joke. Hell, it was easy when 4 of us did it on Legendary online (that was pretty fun, guys :-). To me, one of the big problems right now is games are TOO easy (ironically, Nintendo made some of the most difficult games in the last generation) even on the hardest difficulty. They want to make sure that the non-gamer with ADHD can beat the game without too much hassle. When you're talking about a big-budget title, they have to appeal to the lowest common denominator in hopes of expanding the audience as much as possible to, hopefully, turn a profit. Bioshock's detested frequency of Vitality Chambers (checkpoints/save spots) is proof of that.
Even with the developers making as easy as possible on you, many people still find it difficult or stop playing for whatever reason. Its finding out why those reasons exist that's important for the industry to understand. It's not necessarily "poor design" like you suggested earlier.
