Game mechanics that need to die

[Dreiko]

If we're arguing that a game needs to be hard to be experienced the way the devs wanted it to be experienced, then we have to allow for "This game is too hard to enjoy" as a legit criticism of a game. No more Git Gud, no more "You're just a bad player, noob." None of that, because being hard is the experience the devs wanted to give, and therefore is fair game for criticism.
Just like any other aspect of the game, writing, story, characters, etc...being intended parts of the experience and open for criticism, if being hard and struggling through something is part of the experience, it can be judged.
People should have a right to say "Cuphead is too hard, I didn't get passed the 3rd boss, 0/10 waste of money don't buy" and that's a 100% valid complaint because the intended experience is to be hard and they experienced the game as intended and didn't like it.

I think that's definitely a valid concern. The issue is when you couple it with saying it should be easier. No, it's too hard for you and you didn't like it, and that's fine. Nothing need be done about it, give it your 0 and move on.

This all seems quite philosophically dubious

Inherently, the experience of any individual in an audience differs. No two people read the same book the same way, or watch a film and take the same experience, and so on. It's seems to me odd to a gamemaker to try to control that unnecessarily. If a player wants to play the game for a narrative rather than fine motor skill, why not let them? With a set difficulty level, a pr0 who breezes through in four hours and a noob who struggles through in forty have fundamentally different experiences. The "discussion" for some people might even be that they found it too difficult, gave up and de facto wasted the developer's efforts designing content and their own money.

It's not that I don't think there's any reason behind this design philosophy, I just think that as stated, it has some very significant flaws.

I think this is less about making people play a certain way and more making people not play in a certain way. In some games button mashing or using the same sort of weapons or strategies throughout the entire game is feasible, but here they want people to branch out and try new stuff and think creatively to make progress. They actually give you a ton more freedom than other easier games do, the only thing that they don't let you do is the one thing you are used to doing in other games, but when you average it you still have a lot more freedom here overall, you just have some people not interested in the freedom if it doesn't fit their very narrow specifics.


And the thing is that nobody is a pro when the game is new, some people may struggle more but everyone will be a newbie at first for at least a little bit so you can exchange ideas with that much. Someone who is experienced with the style of game will just get better quicker and then they'll be able to help others by figuring out all the optimal stuff in the game and sharing that information.

 

[SilentPony]

I think that's definitely a valid concern. The issue is when you couple it with saying it should be easier. No, it's too hard for you and you didn't like it, and that's fine. Nothing need be done about it, give it your 0 and move on.

And that's true, true, true. I have always felt "too difficult" is a valid criticism. But gamers by and large certainly don't, and review outlets that rely on game devs to float their accounts are almost contractually obligated to give 9/10 and 10/10.
Its one thing to say its a valid criticism for you or I, its another to say a professional game reviewer can say it and not have their outlet mocked, boycotted, and have game devs cut all ties. If AAA game devs are going to insist that some games need to be hard, they need to not also punish reviewers and outlets that say the game is hard and they didn't like that.

 

[Dreiko]

And that's true, true, true. I have always felt "too difficult" is a valid criticism. But gamers by and large certainly don't, and review outlets that rely on game devs to float their accounts are almost contractually obligated to give 9/10 and 10/10.
Its one thing to say its a valid criticism for you or I, its another to say a professional game reviewer can say it and not have their outlet mocked, boycotted, and have game devs cut all ties. If AAA game devs are going to insist that some games need to be hard, they need to not also punish reviewers and outlets that say the game is hard and they didn't like that.

I think there's a different expectations from us than there is from a reviewer, since games are not our job and a random onlooker won't expect us to randomly be super skilled at games.

On the other hand a game reviewer speaks with an air of authority about them, they conduct themselves as though their words are to be heeded leagues beyond yours or mine, and with such a level of self-importance come certain expectations. Someone wearing the mantle of the expert who is deigning to give to us plebs their divine insights claiming something that my little cousin beat while on meth is too hard for him just...doesn't make sense. It makes people see past the charade, and that pisses them off because some asshole who is not any more skilled than they are was just condescending to them for half a review and then it was revealed that he didn't even know what the hell he was talking about and that the reader coulda done a better job reviewing the game. Like I remember this one reviewer had to mod Sekiro to make it slower in order to beat Isshin, this stuff is just a bad look lol.


So the way to avoid this and allow AAA game reviewers to give lower scores due to difficulty is to take them off of their pedestal and stop exalting their opinions way above their station.

 

[Agema]

I think this is less about making people play a certain way and more making people not play in a certain way.

It sounds to me like nothing more than dubious bullshit to attempt to explain not including a difficulty setting.

And that's true, true, true. I have always felt "too difficult" is a valid criticism. But gamers by and large certainly don't, and review outlets that rely on game devs to float their accounts are almost contractually obligated to give 9/10 and 10/10.
Its one thing to say its a valid criticism for you or I, its another to say a professional game reviewer can say it and not have their outlet mocked, boycotted, and have game devs cut all ties. If AAA game devs are going to insist that some games need to be hard, they need to not also punish reviewers and outlets that say the game is hard and they didn't like that.

I recall Empire magazine (film reviews) was once pretty good at reviewing Hollywood movies when it started. Then it got big, and was given scoops, and started its own awards, and suddenly it started flinging every half-arsed but well-funded piece of shit that stumbled out of LA a minimum of 4/5, because the alternative was losing its privileged access, star interviews, etc.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

It's entirely about time and willingness rather than capability. I doubt you're at the age where your brain and body have degraded to the point you can't actually do this.

Or maybe they are at the age where that is no longer fun and they'd get more enjoyment doing something else with their time.

 

[Dreiko]

Or maybe they are at the age where that is no longer fun and they'd get more enjoyment doing something else with their time.

There's no such age where somehow being an epic badass ninja battling immortal demons and warriors and apes and flaming bulls and giant white snakes magically stops being fun just because you gotta get used to some game mechanics. Might as well be dead if that's the case lol.

 

[Meximagician]

I can't really think of any game where weapon degradation really added anything. Especially since it tends to happen at a ludicrously fast rate or in ways that make no sense(That iron pipe broke because you bashed too many skulls with it..somehow). I know if there's an option to minimize or get rid of it I'd gladly take it.

I can literally one game where it was part of the plot(Balders Gate) and I don't remember if it made the game better or worse because the game was already hard as fuck.

My previous post got a bit lost in the shuffle, but the GBA game Summon Night: Swordcraft Story had human enemies with weapon durability as well as the player. The incentive to break your opponent's weapon was that not only did it end the fight, you could then craft their weapon to add to your collection. Actually changed up the gameplay quite a bit, though it is the only example of a good weapon durability system I can think of.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

There's no such age where somehow being an epic badass ninja battling immortal demons and warriors and apes and flaming bulls and giant white snakes magically stops being fun just because you gotta get used to some game mechanics. Might as well be dead if that's the case lol.

It's not getting used to the mechanics. Sekiro has a much higher skill requirement than any Souls game before it.

 

[Dreiko]

It's not getting used to the mechanics. Sekiro has a much higher skill requirement than any Souls game before it.

To me sekiro felt easier than bloodborne actually, so I dunno what to tell you. The parry window is super forgiving (look at the previous page for my detailed analysis).

 

[SilentPony]

I think there's a different expectations from us than there is from a reviewer, since games are not our job and a random onlooker won't expect us to randomly be super skilled at games.

On the other hand a game reviewer speaks with an air of authority about them, they conduct themselves as though their words are to be heeded leagues beyond yours or mine, and with such a level of self-importance come certain expectations. Someone wearing the mantle of the expert who is deigning to give to us plebs their divine insights claiming something that my little cousin beat while on meth is too hard for him just...doesn't make sense. It makes people see past the charade, and that pisses them off because some asshole who is not any more skilled than they are was just condescending to them for half a review and then it was revealed that he didn't even know what the hell he was talking about and that the reader coulda done a better job reviewing the game. Like I remember this one reviewer had to mod Sekiro to make it slower in order to beat Isshin, this stuff is just a bad look lol.


So the way to avoid this and allow AAA game reviewers to give lower scores due to difficulty is to take them off of their pedestal and stop exalting their opinions way above their station.

I think a legit way to at least alter the reviewer/dev relationship is no more free review copies. It not only waters down the review score, to me it fully invalidates it because the point of a review is to ultimately, this being a capitalist society, determine if the game is worth the market price. And how can any reviewer know that if they got the game for free?
On top of that AAA devs go out of their way to bribe and buy game reviewers.

 

[Dreiko]

I think a legit way to at least alter the reviewer/dev relationship is no more free review copies. It not only waters down the review score, to me it fully invalidates it because the point of a review is to ultimately, this being a capitalist society, determine if the game is worth the market price. And how can any reviewer know that if they got the game for free?
On top of that AAA devs go out of their way to bribe and buy game reviewers.

I'm not against that for sure but if the reviewer is rich already maybe they won't mind paying something that a poorer person would so I dunno how far it'd go. It's not a bad step though.

I don't mind free or early review copies personally, I just mind the criteria for getting one being who you know or who you work for and not how big of a fan you are of these games. Like I am totally fine with some super passionate youtuber or streamer of a game getting their hands on the sequel early or something like that, but I can't stand some random nobody doing the same just because they work for Kotaku or something.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

And that's true, true, true. I have always felt "too difficult" is a valid criticism. But gamers by and large certainly don't, and review outlets that rely on game devs to float their accounts are almost contractually obligated to give 9/10 and 10/10.
Its one thing to say its a valid criticism for you or I, its another to say a professional game reviewer can say it and not have their outlet mocked, boycotted, and have game devs cut all ties. If AAA game devs are going to insist that some games need to be hard, they need to not also punish reviewers and outlets that say the game is hard and they didn't like that.

"Too difficult" is a very subjective criticism.

The problem with a game reviewer making the claim that a game is "hard" is that game reviewers are notoriously terrible at video games. It's not their fault really, they don't have time to actually master the challenges of a game when they need to get the review of a 40 hour game out in 4 days, but what a game reviewer might find hard the players the devs are actually targeting might not.

To take another example, I don't really like execution heavy fighting games where moves require you to do pretzel motions. Yes, I could make the claim that the game is making me do something that's "too hard" but I'm also someone who doesn't play a lot of those game and has very little practice doing those moves. I am not the core audience that game is made for, and the core audience probably has no problems doing those motions as some of them have likely been doing them for 20+ years.

 

[Dreiko]

"Too difficult" is a very subjective criticism.

The problem with a game reviewer making the claim that a game is "hard" is that game reviewers are notoriously terrible at video games. It's not their fault really, they don't have time to actually master the challenges of a game when they need to get the review of a 40 hour game out in 4 days, but what a game reviewer might find hard the players the devs are actually targeting might not.

To take another example, I don't really like execution heavy fighting games where moves require you to do pretzel motions. Yes, I could make the claim that the game is making me do something that's "too hard" but I'm also someone who doesn't play a lot of those game and has very little practice doing those moves. I am not the core audience that game is made for, and the core audience probably has no problems doing those motions as some of them have likely been doing them for 20+ years.

Haha yeah, fighting game reviews vary drastically in quality because of this. You have some people who are pretty decent at fighting games who do great work reviewing them (full with references from like 15 years ago) and then you get other people who don't know what a super meter even is about who complain about random things that nobody who actually plays the game is even bothering with.


And you know, pretzel inputs usually have an easy way of doing them with a shortcut or in some other way that lets you "cheat" the input detection, like a double half circle input or a 360/720 input performed really fast or something. They're the sort of thing where if you are shown the trick to it then it's super easy.

 

[dreng3]

I genuinely don't think you couldn't beat it, I just think it'd take you longer (maybe much longer) than other people.

In Sekiro the parrying system works in such a way where if you parry too soon and then hold the input it transitions into a guarding action, as opposed to having a vulnerable opening that could be punished by the enemy. This trivializes the punishment for failing to parry most things, because at worst you just lose some posture.

Now, I think this thing I just did is what Miyazaki had in mind, now it's in your ballpark, you can choose to have fun discussing the intricacies of the game and the troubles you had in your path, or you can not, but for us fans of the game this is the sort of thing we enjoy having a chat about which is where he was going with that comment.

It was rather the signalling of attacks that had to be dodged compared to attacks that had to be parried. I simply couldn't notice and understand the prompt fast enough for my hands to act on the information. Likely due to my fairly poor eyesight and tendency to hyperfocus on specific areas of the screen when playing.

Perhaps I could have beaten the thing if I practiced more, if I'd kept grinding enemies and perfecting mechanics, but if the game has a natural path and progression then being unprepared for boss encounters and having to practice a lot more seems odd. Then we suddenly go from high paced action game and cool ninjas doing cool stuff to grinding.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

It's not getting used to the mechanics. Sekiro has a much higher skill requirement than any Souls game before it.

In a way that's true, although another angle would be the learning curve just looks different. Once you learn the rhythm aspect to deflecting attacks, it becomes arguably far more manageable than melee combat in SoulsBorne. There's no stamina bar to deal with, you have a ton more mobility including being able to retreat vertically with ease, and most enemies can be stealthed, including mini-bosses at least to some extent. You also get gear which exploits enemy weaknesses far more effectively than the bulk of stuff in SoulsBorne games. Even the core mechanic of deflecting itself can be cheesed somewhat by fluttering L1 when you're not quite sure of the exact timing.

If you count magic and ranged combat from Souls then sure that could be easier, but it also takes a ton of grinding to be so which is its own difficulty in terms of time investment. But someone not knowing anything about either Dark Souls, Bloodborne, or Sekiro, might struggle through the entirety of the first two, while the combat of Sekiro might click for them early on and feel like a relatively easier experience. The mechanics yield a greater means of improving above whatever challenges are presented to the player vs just grinding out levels and stats to gain an advantage.

pretzel motions.

HA, that's a new one.

 

[Dalisclock]

It's been a number of years but I seem to remember The Last of Us using weapon degradation fairly well. You only got a couple uses out of each weapon so you had to use some strategy as to when to use it.

See, I understand the shanks(Shivs?) being easily breakable, since you were duct taping shit together, but Joel Really can't find a damn combat knife that doesn't break? Especially in the light that Ellies Switchblade NEVER breaks. A fucking swtichblade!

Also, I get a stick breaking after a few uses, but a metal pipe somehow not being able to survive a few bashes to the skull is where the weapons degradation logic starts to break down. I can hit a metal pipe against another piece of metal for hours and it won't break(my eardrums might not be as lucky) but in video games, metal pipes break like they're made of paper mache' for reasons.

My previous post got a bit lost in the shuffle, but the GBA game Summon Night: Swordcraft Story had human enemies with weapon durability as well as the player. The incentive to break your opponent's weapon was that not only did it end the fight, you could then craft their weapon to add to your collection. Actually changed up the gameplay quite a bit, though it is the only example of a good weapon durability system I can think of.

I'd never heard of that but now I kinda want to look into it to see if it's worth getting a copy of, because that sounds like a cool idea.

 

[Drathnoxis]

See, I understand the shanks(Shivs?) being easily breakable, since you were duct taping shit together, but Joel Really can't find a damn combat knife that doesn't break? Especially in the light that Ellies Switchblade NEVER breaks. A fucking swtichblade!

Also, I get a stick breaking after a few uses, but a metal pipe somehow not being able to survive a few bashes to the skull is where the weapons degradation logic starts to break down. I can hit a metal pipe against another piece of metal for hours and it won't break(my eardrums might not be as lucky) but in video games, metal pipes break like they're made of paper mache' for reasons.

Well, yeah. From a realism perspective it doesn't make much sense, but I think it worked from a gameplay perspective. I'm not too bothered by having games be too realistic as long as they are fun. I've played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, I've seen what too much 'realism' can do to a game.

 

[immortalfrieza]

See, I understand the shanks(Shivs?) being easily breakable, since you were duct taping shit together, but Joel Really can't find a damn combat knife that doesn't break? Especially in the light that Ellies Switchblade NEVER breaks. A fucking swtichblade!

At your post I couldn't help but think of this:

 

[Agema]

See, I understand the shanks(Shivs?) being easily breakable, since you were duct taping shit together, but Joel Really can't find a damn combat knife that doesn't break? Especially in the light that Ellies Switchblade NEVER breaks. A fucking swtichblade!

Reminds me of some indy game I played where pretty much all items had a lifespan, and even walking boots and backpacks starting at 100% would only last a few game months. How the hell does anyone think a decent quality backpack lasts only a few months?

 

[Dreiko]

It was rather the signalling of attacks that had to be dodged compared to attacks that had to be parried. I simply couldn't notice and understand the prompt fast enough for my hands to act on the information. Likely due to my fairly poor eyesight and tendency to hyperfocus on specific areas of the screen when playing.

Perhaps I could have beaten the thing if I practiced more, if I'd kept grinding enemies and perfecting mechanics, but if the game has a natural path and progression then being unprepared for boss encounters and having to practice a lot more seems odd. Then we suddenly go from high paced action game and cool ninjas doing cool stuff to grinding.

The game doesn't have a linear progression, you can do multiple things in any order you want. If you've played the game through you can prolly figure out a sequence that goes from easier to harder but you're not supposed to know that on a blind playthrough. You're supposed to either keep grinding a boss fight until you can beat it or put it off for later and explore a different area. Like the flaming estate you unlock pretty early but the final boss there is actually super hard if you don't put her off for later since you unlock the place so early that you have barely any life and damage enhancements, but if you wanna stick with it you still can do it.

And you really don't need to focus on the red kanji prompt as much as on the actual animation of the enemy and the sound effect, most thrusts and grabs have a pretty telegraphed startup so you can memorize it if you just take it slow.