Yes, because other forms of sports and entertainment aren't the same in this regard....Zhukov said:
A Skip Button for Boss Fights
- Thread starter maninahat
- Start date
The point was there's no satisfaction in skipping, just relief that you won't be needing to do that anymore. You may even feel some guilt.maninahat said:
Apply this to challenging boss fights and it becomes really easy to just press the button. One thing I like about the Souls series is how many people come from it with stories of "I nearly threw my controller on that one boss, fought him like 30 times, but in the end I was victorious! This game is amazing!". What would you think would happen if all these people could just press a button and move on? I'll tell you: "Man this game is full of shitty fights, I'm happy I could press this here button and just not do them heh".
You may not like it, but this is what would happen. People do not generally seek adversity, as a group. Those who wouldn't use such actions do not constitute a majority of the playerbase. Those who would, probably don't know they can do it and thus choose to rid themselves of the uncertainty. In any case, the game would suffer for it.
Which also reminds me: how do you think developers themselves would design their games if this becomes common practice?
"Hey this boss has a bullshit attack that kills you half the time and there's no way to stop it"
"Who cares, we put a skip button on it, didn't we? If they don't want the challenge they can move to the next level anyway"
Yes, I'm saying developers are affected by their own design choices. It happens - it happened with Diablo 3's real money auction house as a primary example, and I'm sure it happens all the time, the effects are just not as visible due to us not knowing the circumstances behind development. Hell, it already happens in some games with many difficulty modes - I was bored of Devil May Cry on easy mode but had problems with it on normal mode due to the devs expecting you to play it on easy first, then normal, then hard etc since the upgrades carried over. So I had to endure through a boring game to get to the good one in a manageable way.
That's not a great example considering the Souls series has a variation on the skip button already: summons. Sure, how effective they are depends on the fight and the summons themselves, but generally they range between making the fight dramatically easier or outright breaking it.Dalsyne said:
And that's the kind of "skip" option I'd suggest, one that doesn't outright skip the section, but more or less(or even literally) plays it for you. It gives the player a way to continue if they hit a wall they can't get past, but it technically doesn't skip the section, so any context given by it is preserved. I don't see myself ever using that option, but I don't see it ruining anyone's experience either.
It's not a button. Summoning requires effort, risk and resources. It's not the best designed feature since your experience can vary so wildly, going as far as making the fight trivial, but it's definitely better than a simple button. I even mentioned it in another post.Req said:
Touche sir. Although the comment doesn't make sense even in mocking my original "moto", as if you make a game meant to be skipped, then what did you actually make?altnameJag said:
Dalsyne said:
I don't care if that is what would happen.
From a dev perspective, I imagine the most likely outcome would be them thinking "more people seem to be skipping this boss fight than we'd like. Perhaps we should better balance this fight to make them a more reasonable challenge, and people would be less tempted to skip it." Perhaps there already is a similar perspective when it comes to designing game cutscenes, where the dev's mentality is "let's try to make this cutscene as quality and unobtrusive as possible, that way less people will want to skip it". These days, if a dev includes unskippable cut scenes, they get a hammering for it from fans. Devs can either get precious about making people see every last bit of their hard work, or they can accept that players would rather have the option and adapt to it.
There's those videos on Youtube of just a game's cutscenes, stitched together sans gameplay.CritialGaming said:
So ... a poorly written, badly acted and disjointed movie?
You don't think Tom Brady was motivated by recognition and rewards as he worked to become the best QB in world? He now has 5 Super Bowl rings, multiple MVP awards, hundreds of millions of dollars and is married to a super model. That was his reward.Zhukov said:
Are you saying Tom Brady is "pathetic?"
That's obviously an extreme example, but that theme exists in all levels of sports and yes, games, including video games. People are driven to excel and overcome obstacles because of self-pride, recognition, and rewards. That's not "wrong." What's "wrong" is jealous people crying that it's unfair that better players get better rewards. Like it's discrimination or something.
It effectively is a button. What effort is there in pressing "Accept"? True, there's some risk due to the higher likelihood of being invaded, but the summons themselves mitigate that risk, not to mention most summons are found right outside a boss door, past which you can't be invaded. As for resources, those have always been laughably common, you could even earn them by being summoned yourself. The pros of summoning have always vastly outweighed the negligible cons.Dalsyne said:
Oh don't be so pretentious, gaming is entertainment and only in specific circumstances considered a 'sport' which is highly regulated as it is.Kerg3927 said:
Kerg3927 said:
Whoooooo, boy. That analogy is woefully off target.
You're comparing a competition between professional competitors to people playing with a toy for their own enjoyment. We're not even talking about competitive multiplayer games here.
I haven't seen anybody suggest that people who aren't much good at games should be awarded a share of the prize pool of the pro-Starcraft league.
I was actually trying to come up with analogy of my own for my initial post, but I was struggling to find something that encapsulated the sheer pettiness and pathetically low stakes of it all.
Best I can do is that it's like if someone learned how to solve a Rubik's Cube then he hears that someone else just peeled the coloured stickers off and rearranged them to "solve" it. So he gets all snooty and says they shouldn't be allowed to put it on their mantelpiece until they do it "properly" and demands that Rubik's Cubes be made with indelible paint to prevent the common folk from possessing completed cubes. Because apparently he can't take pride in his own amusing but ultimately useless skill unless he thinks it's giving him something that someone else can't get.
Oh, and if Tom Brady, whoever that is, went about trying to rub his accomplishments in the faces of people who aren't interested in playing professional sports but just want to kick a ball around the park with their kids for fun then yes, that would be utterly fucking pathetic.
I didn't say it was a sport. I said the motivations that drive people who play sports also drive people who play video games. When I come home from work and play video games, I see it as not much different than playing golf, going bowling or playing poker. Yes, it serves as entertainment, but it's not the same as watching a movie or reading a book. People are driven to be good at games, and it's not "wrong" if they are rewarded for success. It's a good thing.Xsjadoblayde said:
A(n American) football is a toy, too. And ultimately, what happens in professional sports is useless, too. It's not solving any pressing world problems.Zhukov said:
No, you've got it backwards. In the current situation, the colors are already painted on to prevent people from cheating and rearranging them. But there are people crying that it's not fair, that they should switch the colors to stickers so that everyone can cheat and rearrange them and complete it.
Who said anything about rubbing accomplishments in anyone's faces? I would certainly never do anything like that. But I do feel self-pride when I beat a difficult encounter in a game. And I am motivated by that self-pride. I am also motivated by the fact that beating a certain boss rewards me with being able to see the next part of the game. And there is nothing wrong with that.
Recovering your humanity at a bonfire, using an item, finding summon signs, using them, and then pressing Accept. That, and you still have to do the fight, and you can still die on the boss if you're careless or if the summons aren't very good. It effectively is NOT a button, not even close. It's multiple buttons, and not to skip, but to roll the dice and make the boss fight easier.Req said:
Balancing things for a single-player game after the game is launched is usually a bit too late, as the majority of sales happen shortly after and before launch. People will have already concluded something about the game by then. How many devs balance boss fights? How many games change mechanics post-launch? How many will they still want to if the option to skip it is already there? I find your thinking to be a bit dismissive.maninahat said:
I don't expect bosses to be super hard overnight. I expect this to happen very gradually, to the point where videogame bosses will just be "for the hardcore" and completely separate from the difficulty curve, because the casual audience is where most sales factor in.
Not the point.Kerg3927 said:
You're comparing professional competition with solo amusement. Two very different things.
Same thing.
The point is that you're not satisfied with your own trivial accomplishments if someone else accomplished the same trivial thing in a way you don't like.
Nope, nothing wrong with that.
But if self-pride was all that was motivating you then you wouldn't be concerned with how other people go about playing their games. But apparently you really, really are.
The bit you quoted in your first post and agreed with summed it up pretty well:
That right there is not a description of self-pride.
...
Let me put it another way, with an example from an actual video game.
There's a door in Dishonored 2 that you need to get through to progress. It's locked by a logic puzzle. You can get the password by doing secondary missions. Or you can solve the puzzle, which is rather tough. (Or at least it was for me, maybe I'm just thick.)
I chose to solve the puzzle without finding the solution as a point of, well, self-pride I suppose. Doing this gives you an achievement. (Then I loaded my save and did the secondary missions anyway because I wanted to see all the game's content.)
I feel confident in saying that there are people out there who "cheated" for that achievement. They could have saved at the puzzle, done the secondary missions, written down the solution and then reloaded and "solved" it. Or of course they could have just googled the solution. There are people out there with that achievement who didn't "earn" it like I did.
Also, we all progressed to the next stage of the game, regardless of how we did it.
And I don't give a single flying fuck. Why the hell would I? How they play their games is their business and has no impact on how I chose to play mine and whatever enjoyment and satisfaction I got from it.
Just contemplating the idea of getting uppity over something so trivial makes me feel petty.
See, this irks me. Maybe it shouldn't, but I'm an irkable person, easily irked, and this is as irking as irkishness comes.maninahat said:
You want to see *some* developers keeping your not-willing-to-put-in-the-practice-to-earn-your-ending-attitude in mind? That's fine I guess. It takes all sorts to make a world.
And I get that since you got toddlers your playing time vanished in a puff and your thumbs just plain fell off, but that's the way the cookie crumbles okay? Some games want you to eat the dirt, learn from your mistakes, and git gud all the way to victory, and that's the goddamn way it goddamn should be.
You git gud at changing diapers, but get your paws off our bragging rights.
(and with you I don't mean you, OP - just the advocates of this silliness in general)
Skip button for boss fights, I can't even *mumble grumble*
That's what this is all about? "Bragging rights" about a consumerist hobby? Do you really have nothing else in your life to base your self-esteem upon that excluding others from enjoying the same media as you becomes a necessity?Potjeslatinist said:
Regardless, you still would have your "bragging rights" that let you put others down over a meaningless toy. They would simply change from "you noobs couldn't even beat dark souls" to "you noobs couldn't even beat dark souls on hardcore difficulty" or "you noobs couldn't beat the Bed of Chaos without the skip button."
Why does it upset you so much that others might get to enjoy the game in a different manner than you? The person who beat dark souls using a plastic guitar for input is better than either of us, but I haven't seen them arguing that dark souls should mandate the use of plastic instruments as the only input devices; he can still "brag" about his accomplishment if he feels its necessary though.