Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: I knew when I put "combat" in people would get twitchy

[quote name="jeep"][quote name="Hans Clastorp"]I'm of two minds about this. If you think of a video game as just an interface for navigating content, then there's no reason not to allow the user absolute control over how/when/whether the content is consumed. I don't have an XBox, but I watched some youtube playthrough videos of Dark Souls because I was curious about the mechanics, and now feel like I've experienced the game (in some sense) without having to muddle through myself. This is kind of similar to skipping the combat and is even interactive in a way, since I can watch the video segments in any order I choose, skipping sections if I so desire. On the other hand, watching videos of someone else playing Dark Souls isn't anything like "playing a game" -- it was just straight-up media consumption. And the fact that it was a human rather than an AI routine playing the game for me doesn't make any conceptual difference I don't think. Clearly something pretty important to the game experience is missing here. I'm all in favour of more games having narratives that are strong enough to stand on their own. Let's maybe focus on that part first, and work on allowing skippable gameplay later(/never). [/quote] I'm talking about a technical/design feasibility issue created by a marketing requirement, what play styles can we enable in a game without undermining other play styles. the thing I'm recommending here won't include anything new to games, just maybe I think these things should be 'expected to be present' and they would be if game devs thought about bringing in more customers the way their investors do. all I'm thinking about here is broadening the appeal beyond the current players without losing the current players, I don't give a shit which one interaction with the game is right because my opinion on "how to enjoy a thing" isn't any more valid than yours, and that's been a stupid argument since I had it with chet forever ago: two people debating their fucking feelings provide no information, because the debate can never reveal any data that isn't subjective. instead of thinking of this as me threatening the integrity of the very hobby everyone in this thread loves, imagine I went back in time and changed half life 2 before it came out to try to accommodate more players. I know you guys, some friends who worked at looking glass, some people who I got into valve games because they all had macs when portal was free, some women who only play games on their own private servers because they don't like to be called bitches via mumble, some people who complain that hard modes in games are too easy, some people who never played anything like hl2 before, some people who just want to cruise through a story so they can get all the references and memes later. I'm not trying to make the game experience different for you than what you already had, not focusing on making it awesome for one group or another, just giving people some options to avoid things that reduce their fun <i>where I can avoid reducing someone else's</i>: now when you start playing hl2 it asks you if you want any of the existing difficulty modes, plus the new options: ironman, casual, and pure story mode. note these aren't only easy->normal->hard linear changes, but crafted a different enough experience on playthrough that may have elements of changes to combat difficulty but are more about how people want to experience the game. they'd just be in the difficulty list, though, no need to add more menus. if it were linear, pure story is "no twitch," casual is "very easy," ironman is "very hard" I got some extra coding to do to cover these things, some of which already exists in hl2, but basically I'm 'featuring' these elements on top of the gameplay we all remember for the alternate difficulty you pick: ironman (very hard): - save points <i>in place of</i> save anywhere - multiple shots to kill every enemy - size of the crowd of enemies changes (gets bigger) - number of health packs drops - ammo drops to only ~125% of what you need to kill if you have perfect accuracy (I'm guessing at the number) - timers everywhere for battles, maybe there's a bomb or reinforcements are coming. maybe even an overall timer per level or for the whole game. - occasional 'cheap' moves like taking away your guns or limiting you to only one type of gun and making the enemy immune to force you to use environmental effects - extra steam achievement for completing levels under this difficulty casual (very easy): - save anywhere - one shot kills all the time - crowd of enemies severely reduced - health and ammo way up - no timers anywhere (casual, get it?) - no cheap combat changes - no steam achievement for completing pure story (no challenge): - save anywhere - conversation->combat sequences are scripted where combat is basically a POV cutscene of you fighting - the only real challenges here are occasional environmental puzzles - no achievement for completion because lol now if we go back in time and release hl2 with these no one says a damn thing because we just play it on normal or hard or ironman (maybe that's a new game+ challenge) and who cares what other people do? call the pure story people carebears and move on with your life. but in skyrim you can change the difficulty at any time. this is almost as cheap as savescumming, and yet whining about savescumming in skyrim would be stupid, all it does is back you up to the save point 2 feet behind you. having 6 difficulties and only giving you 'achievements' for the lowest one you used while you played makes the skyrim experience we each had no goddamned different than it is right now. breaking the elements of six difficulties into control options that made the changes to the game on the fly also doesn't affect you. you personally. your preferred gameplay is not affected. 'press x to skip this horseshit cutscene' is the best thing that ever happened to final fantasy-style games, so now in half life, in skyrim, wherever: <blockquote>you died! the battle is lost. do you want to try again? if you get frustrated, these commands are available, but remember they mark the game difficulty as casual for steam achievement purposes! shift-f5 force save shift-f6 reduce enemy armor for this combat shift-f7 ammo and medpack refill shift-f8 freeze timers shift-f9 all guns available shift-f10 combat is a cutscene shift-f11 puzzle hint</blockquote> I know you guys don't want devs to do this because it means they'll put effort into it instead of making the 'hard' difficulty better, but they have this pressure to expand their audience and go after another market and that pressure is never going away, so you have already lost this fight. This is the thing: if it's my money invested in making the game to begin with, and the team comes up with a story that appeals to a lot of people, but the lead dev is a prick about only making a game for the 20% of players who are hardcore, I'm fucking suing the company for mismanagement. put this in the goddamned game because, game aesthetics aside, why leave money on the table? how can you laud valve for spending all their energy into serving their customers as well as they can, for growing their market, and then be like "welp maybe 10% more people would be served buy this but I'd never use it so fuck them." I've been on the other side of this kind of situation in another industry and I know it sucks. I play a ton of tabletop rpgs, right? for 30 years now. and I fell out with d&d back in like 94, just so many other games do so many things better. but I have to live with d&d anyway, and keep up with it, and play it now and again because it's like the lingua franca of the hobby. and the guys making 4e optimize the game for dungeon crawl skirmishes, <i>except less than half the people played that way anymore</i>. they did the best job you could do, but it narrowed down the game to appeal to less than 50% of their existing audience. they literally murdered the lingua franca of an industry and now they're scrambling to unfuck it. and I was on the reactionary side of it, right? "don't do this, I won't like it, don't change it" and they did such an awesome job with the one thing they should just add to it to cover the other half of the audience, they changed it before because they had this pressure to go after new customers and that pressure will always win. now that everything's fucked the pressure is the other way and they literally are being forced to move back to re-adopt the broken shit rather than expand the improvements they made. because it isn't any of our subjective experiences of play that make these decisions, it's the money and nothing else. there's no invisible hand in games, there's the hands of the guys using spreadsheets to paper over their gut instincts and fever dreams about what will sell, and the simple logic of chasing another 10% or 25% or 50% of players is too much, the force of me demanding roi is too much. in this case devs can make the change to the way videogames are released to chase a bigger audience without undermining your experience, and they have to do it. mandatory change never sounds good, and they'll need some playtesting and market analysis to see which games it will help, but the truth is they are going to be forced to do it. 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