Here are my suggestions on how to keep (almost) everyone happy:
1. Replace locked content with checklists. In other words you can jump to whichever checkpoint you want, whenever you want, and the game will keep track of the ones you've completed.
2. Unlock the 'Customisation' mode from the start so players can alter the game to how they want to play it (including making it harder).
3. Match official Achievements to certain (usually default) settings as appropriate for simple bragging rights.
4. Allow players to upload to Facebook (or their social networking site of choice) which levels they have completed and under which conditions/customisations (and have a video recording mode if possible) so that they can show off and challenge their friends to do the same or better.
5. Include an optional rewind feature (if the hardware will allow it) in addition to the usual checkpoints. (Also add a fast-forward feature for all cut-scenes...)
6. Do everything you can to keep the game moving and interactive (in other words don't punish your player with non-interactivity and pointless repetition for being crap).
To explain:
1. Replace locked content with checklists.
Locked content is the biggest sign that videogaming hasn't matured as a mainstream medium. Every other medium, such as books and DVDs have all of the content unlocked at the start, and that's the way it should be for games too.
Actually, that's not quite true. DVDs do have locked content in the form of Easter Eggs, that the viewer has to either:
i. Find themselves by laboriously trudging through menus.
ii. Find by looking for the instructions on the internet.
This is meant to be fun, and I'm sure that it is for a certain demographic of people (let's call those people 'idiots' as a shorthand), but for the rest of us it's at best an annoyance, and at worst a reminder that all human beings are selfish, evil, repressed misanthropes who hate existence and want to make it worse for the rest of us.
This isn't a digression, the point I'm making is that modern videogames are ALL Easter Egg in their horrible, sado-masochistic (or should that be sado-machoistic?) attitude to locking out content that their customers have paid for.
It's annoying because the solution is so simple: have the content unlocked from the start (but greyed-out to avoid spoilers) and have a simple checklist system that tells the player if they've completed that particular task, and under which particular conditions (easy, medium, hard, custom, etc).
To those players who would complain that this takes away the sense of achievment we can easily cater for you too: let's have something in the options menu called something like "Lock content until completed in sequential order" and then Bob's your uncle. [As an aside though: wouldn't such a thing just highlight how stupid locking content is in the first place?]
There's a big difference between being frustrated because you can't perform a particular skill (let's call this 'good frustration'), and being stopped from seeing the next story point in a game (let's call this 'bad frustration'). The latter leads to massive annoyance because it's being caused by someone else (the game designer), and the former is much less annoying because it's being caused by you, and you're in control of it.
The only thing that the player should be unlocking is their own skill level: the content should always be available.
2. Unlock the 'Customisation' mode from the start so players can alter the game to how they want to play it (including making it harder).
Not much more to say on this one, but it might be necessary for the makers to state something like "Customised modes have not been fully play-tested for quality" as a disclaimer. Or something.
3. Match official Achievements to certain (usually default) settings as appropriate for simple bragging rights.
In other words, if you have certain things activated/de-activated in the Customisation mode then you can't get the Achievement.
4. Allow players to upload to facebook (or their social networking site of choice) which levels they have completed and under which conditions (and have a video recording mode if possible) so that they can show off and challenge their friends to do the same, or better.
This is to cover people who have made the game harder using the customisation mode, and also want the bragging rights that go along with it. Not sure why I suggested facebook as you could probably do this stuff on Xbox Live or PSN instead, but unfortunately it's impossible to delete a piece of text that you've written it on a computer.
5. Include an optional rewind feature (if the hardware will allow it) as well as the usual checkpoints.
Edge magazine did an interview with the makers of Limbo, and one of them said something like this:
"Never make your player complete the same puzzle twice."
All game designers should have that statement tattooed on their souls.
If you add an instant rewind feature to 90% of the videogames that people have cited as being too annoying in this column, then most of them instantly become engaging and fun.
Some people would say that such a feature would make the game too easy, but it would actually do the opposite. Imagine how good you could get on a game like Ninja Gaiden with a feature like that. You'd more quickly trial-and-error your way through every enemy and combination of enemies (which is essentially what the game is anyway) and you'd be demanding harder enemies as a result. The designers would have to allow you to make the enemies harder and the game deeper and more satisfying: Hello Customisation mode.
6. Do everything you can to keep the game moving and interactive (in other words don't punish your player with non-interactivity and pointless repetition for being crap).
Consider something like a scrolling beat-em-up. The challenge of the game is to reduce your numerous enemies's health to zero before yours does. There's no real reason why you can't still have this game mechanic in place, but without the annoying reloading. Just have it so that you have an energy bar for each small stage of enemies, and if yours goes to zero, then both yours and theirs resets to 100% (resurrecting the ones you've killed) and you have to beat them all over again.
It's the same game mechanic but without the reload (albeit you might need a teleport as part of the reset) and the interactivity is uninterupted. Admittedly there's repetition involved, but if you unlock all the content from the start (see point 1) then the frustration is just about player skill which is what the game is designed to help improve, as all games are really just the training for themselves.
As a final note on all of the above: I think it would sell more games and get higher review scores, and hence get higher bonuses for the people making them. Imagine Ninja Gaiden 2 with all of the above recommendations being followed. It would stop being an annoying trudge through the same loading screen, and instead become an accessible and (what it really is) a fun and deep fighting game. AND it would garner much higher review scores and better sales, AND players would also regulary customise it to make it more hardcore than it already is (albeit still with a crap camera). It wouldn't just belong to the domain of the small-minded people of this world who think that something is only worth doing because other people can't do it (but I get the impression that that particular game was made by someone with that backward attitude, which is a shame).
As any keen student of the perverted arts will tell you: sado-masochism is only enjoyable when it's optional.
*Achievement Unlocked: Read an entire post even though it's more than three paragraphs long. 20g.*
