Game with no challenge removes challenges

[unfairlight]

Rock Paper Shitgun/Cisscum is notorious. Our resident shill, Infinitron, keeps posting RPS articles about anything related to Divinity: Original Sin 2 in it's thread because jews help jews.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/01/13/the-50-best-fps-on-pc/
Another piece of fine jurnalisum.

 

[Multidirectional]

I think of CDPR now as a less insulting Bioware.

I've been thinking of them that way since Witcher 2.

 

[Ash]

@Falski thanks for confirming that I shouldn't play Twitcher 3. As a gameplay enthusiast I've always had strong doubts. But yes, kudos for not being a microtrans-filled cash grab.

No, CDPR cannot into good gameplay. W3 has the least annoying gameplay in series though. There's this wonderful innovation called "jump button" too!
The only reason to play it is storytelling/atmosphere which it is in fact quite good at. Unless, of course, for you there's never a reason like that. I enjoyed it so much I could ignore its flaws in most significant aspect of videogames.
My chosen way to play was on hardest and using "all skills active" mod/cheat. Meaning you use those annoying limited skill slots only for mutagen synergies, all the skills you buy are always active. I was OP for a larger half of the game of course, but that was the idea. Expansion boss fights still kicked my ass though.

If this were back in the day, I could have probably played T3 and enjoyed it for its merits despite mediocre gameplay...but this is the decline era, where gameplay is what has suffered so fucking much despite being what games are all about at their core, so I wont support nor enjoy such a game out of principle.
Who am I kidding...I would have disliked it regardless just as I never liked Bioware games because godawful gameplay, and the rest. Idk why this shit gets a free pass when there are plenty games with great stories and great gameplay, especially when they both compliment each other, rather than half (or more) of the pie being boring lazy shit filler that is so shit a goddamn skip gameplay button is desired...instead of, you know, calling for games to have good gameplay.

 

[Falksi]

I think it's the other way around - not that CDPR, now that they have the popamole mob's attention after selling 10 million copies of Twitcher 3, are ready to unleash a proper, deep RPG on their unsuspecting audience, but rather after seeing how many units they can move with this kind of design, how far can they get with dumbing it down even more.

I think of CDPR now as a less insulting Bioware. With Cyberpunk they might be ready to close the gap.

Indeed, you're probably spot on.

Sometimes I just like to remember a better world and hope for that again

 

[TheRedSnifit]

How much you enjoy Twitcher 3 depends on how much you enjoy the story. All of the quests are pretty much the same (talk to guy -> go kill and/or find something. Throw in some detective vision occasionally to pad it out), the open world is meaningless since most quests appear on the map and can be fast-traveled to, and the consequence system is much more arbitrary and unintuitive than something like New Vegas's reputation. The actual combat is also pretty shitty compared to most similar games.

 

[Zombra]

There's this wonderful innovation called "jump button" too!

Ew, I didn't realize they added jumping back in to W3.

 

[Lahey]

Rock Paper Shitgun/Cisscum is notorious. Our resident shill, Infinitron, keeps posting RPS articles about anything related to Divinity: Original Sin 2 in it's thread because jews help jews. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/01/13/the-50-best-fps-on-pc/ Another piece of fine jurnalisum.

*Complains about Gamer Network shilling*

*Shills for Gamer Network with unarchived link to completely off-topic subject*

Back to topic:

 

[AwesomeButton]

The implication that games are art ruined his argument for me.

His reasoning I agree with though. Which is kind of strange.

 

[Black Angel]

Good God, the comment section.

Crocmaster McGeezax Dude, your hobby can't be crippled by optional settings if you don't play them. Someone playing Dark Souls on easy mode takes nothing away from your experience. It literally doesn't.

Never mind that Dark Souls's difficulty stems from a lot of things like encounter designs and environmental designs, so an easy mode would mean redesigning a lot of things other than simple damage/health modification.

Or that devs in general would have to spend more time and resources to actually design multiple difficulty modes, or would end up going down the easy, lazy route of making bullet sponges and HP bloats

 

[AwesomeButton]

Crocmaster McGeezax Dude, your hobby can't be crippled by optional settings if you don't play them. Someone playing Dark Souls on easy mode takes nothing away from your experience. It literally doesn't.

"Nothing" except the QA budget for testing the easy difficulty, before that the designer budget for placing the encounters, before that the planning. Doesn't look like nothing to me.

And all this time, the guy's point still stands - depending on the kind of game it is, and how central to the designer's vision it was that the game is challenging, it may be that two players who have completed it on different difficulty settings may have experiences so different that it's like they've been playing different games.

In general though, I think the problem isn't so much with how many difficulty settings there will be as with the philosophy - do you design the game from the easiest difficulty and go up (what seems to be the general rule), or do you design it from a tough midline and then go a little upwards and a little downwards for the "hard" and "easy" modes.

 

[Lahey]

Crocmaster McGeezax Dude, your hobby can't be crippled by optional settings if you don't play them. Someone playing Dark Souls on easy mode takes nothing away from your experience. It literally doesn't.

This guy doesn't seem to be aware of Souls games being always online. Multiple difficulties can't into that framework without splitting the playerbase, let alone the other factors y'all pointed out already.

I'm surprised more devs don't design difficulty top-down considering those who enjoy challenge tend to be naturally more observant by necessity. People who play on easier difficulties seem less likely to care about balance so "making it too easy" or even lazily removing HP wouldn't be as big a concern. This would also likely cost more in dollars and time during QA...nevermind I understand why they shoot for the middle. Still, it's interesting to speculate whether or not this cost would be offset by fewer updates, especially in multiplatform cases where fees have to be paid to do so.

 

[Dexter]

Btw. I turned that rant from pages back into an article - Gaming Journalists Want To Take Your Gameplay Away: https://www.minds.com/blog/view/762663941707931648

I disapprove of difficulty levels in general. Make one coherent, intended experience for your audience. Doing otherwise essentially splits development into creating and balancing two or more different games.

Regarding difficulty, I tend to agree with this guy though minus the part of adding different "game modes" afterwards. The best designed and balanced games tend to be the ones that have just one difficulty mode tested and balanced and rebalanced for months or years to a polished shine, and not the ones where you can HP bloat enemies or similar with the push of a button and you'll never know which "difficulty" to pick starting up since you don't know how it'll manifest itself or how well it was tested/balanced against.

 

[Zombra]

I disapprove of difficulty levels in general. Make one coherent, intended experience for your audience. Doing otherwise essentially splits development into creating and balancing two or more different games.

Regarding difficulty, I tend to agree with this guy though minus the part of adding different "game modes" afterwards. The best designed and balanced games tend to be the ones that have just one difficulty mode tested and balanced and rebalanced for months or years to a polished shine, and not the ones where you can HP bloat enemies or similar with the push of a button and you'll never know which "difficulty" to pick starting up since you don't know how it'll manifest itself or how well it was tested/balanced against.

We're actually in 100% agreement. (Except for the part where you think you disagree with me!)

 

[AwesomeButton]

Great article, Dexter !

I normally avoid commenting on the gaming press scene, because I think everything that can be said on the subject has already been said. Making an exception in this case, mostly because my outrage has accumulated from reading your article and watching those videos.

It is my impression that we are dealing with a small group of people who are themselves a niche within all those who play games and read about games. They combine in a repulsive way (or, in a "toxic" way, as people with a limited vocabulary tend to say) an inferiority complex of "real art" like cinema, a feeling of superiority towards what they imagine "the average gamer", and a strive to educate "the truth" about what is good taste, as it has been revealed to them by a mediocre education they got in a useless discipline.

The evidence you are listing for the case that "shilling doesn't help non-games with sales" was very interesting in how it demonstrates just how little influence this clique has on consumer behavior.

Another thing that struck me was the guy's question to Sterling - how will you view this video you made, ten years from now? It really made me wonder, how stupid would most of these people and their writings look even just five years from now, when their whole movement dies out, purely because the generations of gamers will shift. They will look just as outdated, old news, irrelevant and pathetic as an old guy trying to be impressive with a hippie outlook and mannerisms to a generation that has moved past this hype.

So, if they are not able to produce quality analysis and reviews, if they are also not able to earn their pay as shills, if they are running their whole sharade for the amusement and confirmation of a small circlejerk of like-minded SJWs, late-to-the-party hippies, failed artists and intellectuals, what purpose do these people serve? What is stopping a real gaming outlet from emerging, that takes its judgement of the games it is reviewing seriously, that puts reviews out on time, and that does not compromise?

My answer is that, for a large part, the target audience is content with this level of professionalism, and there are two small minorities of outraged people - those like Walker or Sterling, abd those like us who ridicule them. The majority of players are not invested enough in the matter in order to notice the low quality of journalism.

 

[Beastro]

My philosophy is easy mode should be like a training wheel that help you learn instead of what these fucktard journalists think it should be self driving mode equipped with pacifier that pump dopamine into them.

I thought that definition was ubiquitous that it was the only one.

I think a big problem is the increasing age of the average game player. As a kid, aimlessly dicking around without any desire to finish a game, was the norm. It was very much having fun while training opposed to those solidly invested periods where you had the time and desire to deliberately sit down to try to finish a game, then increase the difficulty or look for self-made challenges once a games completion became an easy, every day sitting for you.

Today, however, the "playthrough" mindset dominates and it comes from the different way the adult mind works and things like more limited time/less tolerance of bullshit, that results in an expectation of a full game playthrough to completion within the span of time expected to finish the game before one moves onto the next game in their backlog.

All of this brings to mind visiting my cousins year ago and seeing their son play Red Dead Redemption where all he did was aimlessly wander around fiddling with things, not even finishing any quests even by accident, usually get a laugh from roping people and horses and dragging them around to death. I realize how much of how I played games at his age and younger was the same where the entire point of the game didn't matter one bit until boredom hit and the desire for challenge came that resulted in one looking for something else to do in the game.

Only today with the way games are, where you can own so many, I wonder if kids just move onto new games to dick around in instead of sitting down and going down the path to finishing them.

Another thing that struck me was the guy's question to Sterling - how will you view this video you made, ten years from now? It really made me wonder, how stupid would most of these people and their writings look even just five years from now, when their whole movement dies out, purely because the generations of gamers will shift. They will look just as outdated, old news, irrelevant and pathetic as an old guy trying to be impressive with a hippie outlook and mannerisms to a generation that has moved past this hype.

I think that question hits on why you should even care about what people will think about a game in the future while also not trying to put too much pretense into a game to shove shit like ideology into it.

Look at something like Sonic the Hedgehog and how much it reeks of the "90s cool fad", and yet that doesn't ruin the game, because the fundamental gameplay is solid and enjoyable. All the while the "coolness" is enough on the periphery that you can smile and get a chuckle at what you see of the dated fad within the game without being turned off by it.

 

[Ash]

Eh, speak for yourself. I've followed the "playthrough" mindset for almost as long as I can remember. There was some dicking around at an early age, but I definitely realised early on (good) games were most fun when played as intended by design, and you weren't getting as much out of them if you just dick around.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

Videogames are suposed to be games. Simply as that. All the aspects of a game must converge into the benefit of the gameplay, the diferential factor that makes videogames what they are. You can put all the work that you want into the story, the art direction or the music. But those aspects must reinforce the game as a game. As it happens in games like Silent hill 2 or Planescape: Torment. Experiences that can only truly be enjoyed as videogames, nor as films or novels. That's why I find games like Hellblade: Senua's sacrifice so afjkafjkoejewgjkskljfgjskl, you know

Shit, even the less "gamey" games like Until dawn have an important gameplay factor which determines lot of things in the story. Don't think in challenges, think in purposes. Games must offer a purpose to the player. A purpose that only can be experienced as a game by the interaction of the player, because otherwise you'll make a better choice picking another format to your product.

 

[Zombra]

Videogames are suposed to be games. Simply as that.

That's dumb as hell. Next you're going to say that music is supposed to be for ballroom dancing only.

 

[sullynathan]

It's actually impossible to die in Assassin's Creed

 

[Tehdagah]

Rock Paper Shitgun/Cisscum is notorious. Our resident shill, Infinitron, keeps posting RPS articles about anything related to Divinity: Original Sin 2 in it's thread because jews help jews. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/01/13/the-50-best-fps-on-pc/ Another piece of fine jurnalisum.

*Complains about Gamer Network shilling*

*Shills for Gamer Network with unarchived link to completely off-topic subject*

Back to topic:

DMC4 and Metal Gear Rising shouldn't really be on this video.

The implication that games are art ruined his argument for me.

His reasoning I agree with though. Which is kind of strange.

TheGamingBrit is a storyfag who pretends he isn't a storyfag. His Uncharted 3 review is mostly about "ludonarrative dissonance" and at one moment he complained about "forced" boss fights.

 

[Mark Richard]

how stupid would most of these people and their writings look even just five years from now, when their whole movement dies out, purely because the generations of gamers will shift.

They won't age well. I think it'll quickly become like sifting through Victorian newspapers for laughs.

 

[Dexter]

http://archive.is/sPbsN

 

[Zombra]

It's ridiculous to shame people for wanting to play your game. If you really don't intend for anyone to play that low, don't put it in in the first place.

 

[Grauken]

True, don't put in easy difficulties, that is dev time that could be spent on something worthwhile

That said stealth shooters are the devils work

 

[HoboForEternity]

at this point, i would think it is all just intentional bad joke.