slacker09 said:
CrystalShadow said:
>_< - And here you see the exact opposite set of complaints to those seen with the Wii U controller.
People don't like a standard hardware feature being more elaborate than a standard controller...
But also don't like it when a game is designed with features that require an optional device.
Eh. It's probably not going to be anything meaningful. - You can't do anything important in a game if it requires entirely optional hardware that some people don't have.
If it's not compulsory to have the hardware such a feature depends on, it's going to be a pointless gimmick. If it weren't, the game would be broken without it.
So... Yeah. Can't have it both ways.
Maybe I am misunderstanding but I feel like you are saying those two views are incompatible. People don't like devices more complicated then the standard controller and don't like games that require extra hardware that seems superfluous, i.e the smartphone. People don't want games that require more then the standard controller, whether it be a single piece of unwieldy hardware or multiple devices. That is not wanting it both ways, but wanting the same basic thing, something easy to control.
I suppose I could've been a bit clearer. I guess what I was actually getting at is that sometimes the only way to improve an experience is to try new things with hardware design.
What would've happened if people had said the NES controller was good enough, and rejected any attempt to create a control scheme with more buttons?
What I actually meant here, is you cannot build a meaningful new experience on an 'optional' hardware device, because all you'll do is create a gimmick that seems to prove the point of the people that imply these kind of hardware improvements are pointless.
Adding such optional features to a game is a self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of proving that these features would ever actually add anything beneficial to a game.
I guess what I was really reminded of here is the people that were complaining that for instance, the Wii U's (or the Wii's motion controls before it) standard controller should've been an optional extra (if it existed at all), yet that would immediately undermine any attempt for it to ever even try to be more than a meaningless gimmick.
And now we see people complaining about a game containing such a near meaningless gimmick because it requires additional optional hardware...
(or to put it differently, don't ever experiment with anything that requires unusual, optional hardware... And don't design anything with unusual hardware either until you've already proven that it does something amazing...)
Ah well. That probably doesn't make much sense. It just annoys me is all.
Although, honestly,the same kind of problem can be seen in other technically driven areas besides gaming;
For instance, Ground effect vehicles (think something between a hovercraft and an aircraft) have amazing potential, but because people are unwilling to fund anything other than very small vehicles, and the physics principles behind it show the usefulness of such a vehicle to grow exponentially with size (eg. A car-sized ground effect vehicle isn't much use, but a cruise ship sized one would radically change a lot of things about transportation), the technology has never really gotten off the ground, and remains little more than a minor curiosity.
Guess that can't be helped though.
