EA Exec Says Its Games Are "Too Hard to Learn" For New Players

[TallanKhan]

"The average player probably spends two hours to learn how to play the most basic game."

Funny he was speaking at the DICE summit. The last DICE game I played was Battlefield 4 and that barely had 2 hours of gameplay in the entire single player campaign, inclusive of learning how to play the damn thing.

"Every game is an RPG now," he said. "You wouldn't make a game without progression and levels and XP."

No it isn't and yes you would. RPG elements belong in RPGs, and the reason they work so well is investment. The value of experience points and character progression in RPGs is that work you put in early on pays out and rewards you later in the game, you see the benefit of your time an effort investment in the options you unlock and the powers your character acquires. This works fantastically well in a fantasy epic with 80 hours + of gameplay. But for a FPS with 6-10 hours of gameplay and a linear storyline? No, because there is no meaningful payout.

He also added that "And I think every game is going to be a social game...good ideas propagate."

Fuck social. If I was interested in being social I would be out at at bar rather than playing a game. I play games when I wan't to have fun on my damn own. If developers really care about my social life why did they deal it a hammer blow by cutting local co-op out of everything? I used to play co-op with my neighbour, Killzone 3, Army of Two (even if the split screen for Ao2 was retarded). But recently, even when a game has co-op play, half the time it is online only. What the hell kinda moon logic is at work where a game is designed to two friends can play together, but only if they go back to their own apartments and do it online? I get online as an option, but why the hell is it the only option?

Also, jamming something into every game you make then holding up sales as evidence of demand for that feature is a falsehood. People have *tolerated* social features being jammed into their games. We don't want them, we aren't asking for them.

 

[truckspond]

There is a rather famous game which took about two hours to learn how to play - Portal. However the tutorial is done in such a way that it is a gradual learning curve. In fact, basically the entire game except the last level is tutorial. Starting with the simple cube and button and ending with you making portal flings, bouncing rockets around, avoiding acid pools or bottomless pits and using the skills you learned to complete the boss level (It's not really a fight).

Then in the second game they expanded the formula by adding new mechanics, co-op gameplay and allowing the player to use the skills learned in the previous game to bonce bombs around, redirect deadly lasers and bounce around with either faith plates or gels or sometimes both. Despite the relatively quick tutorial the second game was NOT called too hard to learn for anyone because the previous game introduced the basic mechanics in a long tutorial that the second game expanded on.

If you think your game is too hard to learn despite holding your hand every step of the way maybe you should try this approach.

 

[Callate]

I would have liked to read the entire interview, to get a better sense what was said in context that prompted those comments.

On one hand, EA being EA, the other shoe I expect to drop off of a comment like that is "Which is why we're glad to allow people to pay for in-game resources and faster progress- we're providing a service that our customers really want."

On the other hand, there is an element of truth to what Hilleman says. I don't generally have any trouble learning games, but I do occasionally have a problem with leaving games and coming back to them, and then not being able to figure out some seemingly trivial but important piece of contextual control. The first time I played GTA:San Andreas, I could not get past the plane training segment... Because the game neglected to remind me that I had to withdraw the landing gear. I had stopped playing for a few months for some reason, and when I came back to it... well, why would I remember something that came up so rarely?

Likewise, RPG elements=deeper characters, player interactions, development of new abilities over time=good. RPG elements=we expect you to grind palate-swapped versions of the same enemies for five hours with slightly rejiggered internal numbers in order to successfully progress=bad.

As far as "social gaming" goes, in the current mileu: hell, no. When social gaming meant telling my friends about a skin-of-my-teeth victory in the original X-Com or playing C&C on a LAN, that was great. Social gaming as in "Let us hijack your social media accounts so we can advertise our games to all your friends and family" can take a long walk off a short pier. Never mind the "always online in single-player" requirements... Less said, the better.

I do have to say the closing paragraph is more than a little leading. It's tempting to fly off the handle and assume the worst about comments like these, but it isn't always our better angels that advise such a course, so to speak.

 

[Breywood]

I find Jim's old video about "the perfect spaghetti sauce" [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/7161-Perfect-Pasta-Sauce] is particularly poignant. EA is trying to create one sauce "everybody loves" when a lot of people don't want "mediocre" and relying on an arbitrary idea like "our testers didn't like garlic" as a reason to drop every other product line.

You don't need to boil everything down to Farmville to have something be successful. Try cutting back on the insane deadlines and crazy budgets. As others have stated, add better tutorials and better ways to pace the difficulty and you won't have to reduce every release to bland goo and still have more people playing your games. Emperor: Battle for Dune is one of the last games I enjoyed from EA. I can definitely state that even with default difficulty was challenging for me.

 

[Little Gray]

There is a rather famous game which took about two hours to learn how to play - Portal. However the tutorial is done in such a way that it is a gradual learning curve. In fact, basically the entire game except the last level is tutorial. Starting with the simple cube and button and ending with you making portal flings, bouncing rockets around, avoiding acid pools or bottomless pits and using the skills you learned to complete the boss level (It's not really a fight).

Then in the second game they expanded the formula by adding new mechanics, co-op gameplay and allowing the player to use the skills learned in the previous game to bonce bombs around, redirect deadly lasers and bounce around with either faith plates or gels or sometimes both. Despite the relatively quick tutorial the second game was NOT called too hard to learn for anyone because the previous game introduced the basic mechanics in a long tutorial that the second game expanded on.

If you think your game is too hard to learn despite holding your hand every step of the way maybe you should try this approach.

Relying on your players having played the first game to learn the basics is a horrible horrible approach.

 

[truckspond]

There is a rather famous game which took about two hours to learn how to play - Portal. However the tutorial is done in such a way that it is a gradual learning curve. In fact, basically the entire game except the last level is tutorial. Starting with the simple cube and button and ending with you making portal flings, bouncing rockets around, avoiding acid pools or bottomless pits and using the skills you learned to complete the boss level (It's not really a fight).

Then in the second game they expanded the formula by adding new mechanics, co-op gameplay and allowing the player to use the skills learned in the previous game to bonce bombs around, redirect deadly lasers and bounce around with either faith plates or gels or sometimes both. Despite the relatively quick tutorial the second game was NOT called too hard to learn for anyone because the previous game introduced the basic mechanics in a long tutorial that the second game expanded on.

If you think your game is too hard to learn despite holding your hand every step of the way maybe you should try this approach.

Relying on your players having played the first game to learn the basics is a horrible horrible approach.

And yet the games still sold well above expectations (At one point the first one was bigger than Frozen is now!)

 

[Kathinka]

Translation: We are going to dumb down the games even more, simplify them even beyond the current point where they are a corridor with everything in it exploding.

 

[tzimize]

Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy does EA execs insist on commenting about anything game related?! They cant help but saying stupid and irritating stuff! Be quiet EA! And if you had any decency, you'd not only be quiet but you'd also go die in a corner.

There is a rather famous game which took about two hours to learn how to play - Portal. However the tutorial is done in such a way that it is a gradual learning curve. In fact, basically the entire game except the last level is tutorial. Starting with the simple cube and button and ending with you making portal flings, bouncing rockets around, avoiding acid pools or bottomless pits and using the skills you learned to complete the boss level (It's not really a fight).

Then in the second game they expanded the formula by adding new mechanics, co-op gameplay and allowing the player to use the skills learned in the previous game to bonce bombs around, redirect deadly lasers and bounce around with either faith plates or gels or sometimes both. Despite the relatively quick tutorial the second game was NOT called too hard to learn for anyone because the previous game introduced the basic mechanics in a long tutorial that the second game expanded on.

If you think your game is too hard to learn despite holding your hand every step of the way maybe you should try this approach.

Its not like it needs to be said...but man was Portal 1 and 2 good. And 2 was EVERYTHING a decent sequel should be. Man. What if every developer was like Valve.

...

Wait, scratch that. We'd only get a new game every 5 years or so. Still...it wouldnt hurt for a lot of developers to be a BIT more like Valve :|

 

[chiefohara]

This is true up to a point.


If you think otherwise, how long have you been a gamer? Do you remember what the first game you played was like?

For that matter, if you're old enough, you probably remember stuff like the NES controller. 4 buttons, and a directional control... And often you didn't even use all the buttons that much.

Contrast this to modern games with effectively 12 buttons and 4 analog axes of control and you can see the complexity has gone through the roof. (Especially with some games needing to resort to context sensitive actions, or multi-button combos to even map everything down to just 12 buttons)

If you cannot see how it may be difficult for new gamers to understand, then you've probably been blinded by your own level of experience, and cannot actually truly see things from the perspective of a new player.

That's not to say dumbing down games will help any, but it does show you need some less complex games to ease the barrier to entry.

If you start with something simple, and get the hang of that, you can probably cope with something more demanding later on.
But if you are expected to jump in the deep end right from the start, you may look at it and end up going "This is too hard, I give up" And go do something else instead...

Quoted for Truth.

Girlfriends have often wanted to game with me but they find the controls far too difficult. For someone who hasn't played before picking up a modern console controller for the first time can be overwhelming. Ironically i tend to pull out my old Nintendo and start them off with Ice Climber, arkanoid or Tetris, then move onwards.

The Nintendo Wii was massive because it appealed to people who never played games, EA want to do the same thing. Makes perfect business sense to me.

 

[StriderShinryu]

I actually think he's largely right. While the 2 hour number is likely a bit of an exaggeration, if someone is not well versed in videogames then there is a pretty large lag in the learning experience. This is even more noticeable if the game is online focused like in the Battlefield series. A proper tutorial can certainly help but many tutorials are created in such a middle ground way because they have to take both totally new players and players just new to that particular game into account. The key that many in this thread don't seem to be taking into account is simply that they aren't the audience that EA is talking about here. You wouldn't be on a gaming enthusiast website reading news stories and posting comments if you were. The audience who plays and buys many of EAs titles (aka the audience explicitly called out in this article) aren't the same people who have already been playing games regularly for 5, 10, 15, etc. years.

(Of course, it's also worthwhile to recognize that you do see a it of this "it's too hard to play" belief in more experienced gamers as well when things like the Souls games or fighting games are discussed as well)

As for social linking, it's easy to rail against it and in most cases I agree it doesn't add a lot to games, but it's also an inevitable inclusion. There's no point in whining about it now. The stance that we need to take is to laud the times it's done well and call out the times where it's done poorly. At best we can just lobby for an option to turn social linking off whenever possible, but it's not going away.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

utterly laughable

these people dont even know what a hard game is

 

[Dalisclock]

There is a rather famous game which took about two hours to learn how to play - Portal. However the tutorial is done in such a way that it is a gradual learning curve. In fact, basically the entire game except the last level is tutorial. Starting with the simple cube and button and ending with you making portal flings, bouncing rockets around, avoiding acid pools or bottomless pits and using the skills you learned to complete the boss level (It's not really a fight).

Then in the second game they expanded the formula by adding new mechanics, co-op gameplay and allowing the player to use the skills learned in the previous game to bonce bombs around, redirect deadly lasers and bounce around with either faith plates or gels or sometimes both. Despite the relatively quick tutorial the second game was NOT called too hard to learn for anyone because the previous game introduced the basic mechanics in a long tutorial that the second game expanded on.

If you think your game is too hard to learn despite holding your hand every step of the way maybe you should try this approach.

Relying on your players having played the first game to learn the basics is a horrible horrible approach.

I'm not sure that's what he was advocating. I saw it more as. The first game had these features and this gamestyle. The sequel kept all the good things from the first game and added more on top of that. Since the first game worked very well and they're building the sequel off the first game(AKA Evolution not Revolution), it's easy enough to learn, and easier still if you already played the first game.

Not to mention that Portal 2 did ease the player into the mechanics the same way the first one did. There was just a lot more game to do it in.

Granted, there are other games which do this as well, such as the Assassins creed series which started out with an idea and has been building off that idea since the original. However, as AC shows, do it too much and it gets stale, not to mention that it has a tendency to suffer from feature creep(The villa in AC2 was nice, but from then on, you were pretty much tasked with unlocking areas and buying shops for the next few games, making you feel more like a real estate mogul then an assassin).

 

[Dying_Jester]

If by social he means bringing back couch co-op on consoles then fuck yeah that sounds like a great future...but we know the truth. Y'know, my opinion of EA was just starting to make its way upwards in my book, again, but then they just had to let the execs think they new anything about anything that isn't strictly keeping a business running. Fucking idiot suits.

 

[VanTesla]

Sigh... FPS are not hard to learn and only require decent hand eye coordination with good response time to a given situation. If you have bad hand eye coordination nothing is going to help you get better at those types of games if you are trying to play serious against other people. RTS requires a decent level of management skills that you can develop with or without a tutorial through trial and error if you start low and build yourself up. RPGs in general you need to just pay attention to everything and you should be fine unless said RPG was designed by idiots. Older people trying games for the first time may have more issues than say a person born into gaming for depending on said game you will have a harder time adapting and that is normal. You just need to know if you don't get something or are discouraged because X is to hard, then take a breather and try something else or try the same game later and approach it with a different mind set.

There are going to be many people that will have difficulty playing certain types of games no matter what the game company and it's developers try to do to make it more simplified for a wider audience... Worse case is you try to change it so much to gain a bigger audience and in the end you have less for you neglected your core audience to such a point they fled ship... If EA went about it the way this guy thinks it should be, then they would be bankrupt down the road or at the very least they would be a smaller company that just lives on selling it's old franchises with social and mobile games...

 

[Gluzzbung]

If Valve said this about something like Portal or Dota 2, or, as mentioned, Paradox said it about almost any of their games, or even Blizzard, arguably, then I might be inclined to agree, but when you think of EA you think Battlefield, Titanfall or the trashy sports games they make. Honestly, if any other company had said that their audience spend a long time learning how to play their games I might have been in support but, no, not EA.

EA Worst Company in America 2015.

 

[Dalisclock]

Wait, scratch that. We'd only get a new game every 5 years or so. Still...it wouldnt hurt for a lot of developers to be a BIT more like Valve :|

That goes back to that famous meme.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comicsandcosplay/comics/stolen-pixels/8286-Stolen-Pixels-241-The-Gaming-Afterlife

 

[Ratty]

The thinking is obviously "Hey, the more people can easily play our games = more money" but the flaw is that these games cost $60 plus another $30 in DLC.

If the gameplay isn't rewarding (i.e. you feel like you've been challenged and accomplished something) you're going to lose the hardcore audience in pursuit of a casual audience that will say "$60, for a video game? HA!" before going back to playing $1 games on their phones.

The place for easy games with no learning curve and little to no player investment already exists, it's called the iphone marketplace.
I guess EA was out to lunch when the casual market support Nintendo had enjoyed with the Wii evaporated with the rise of mobile and they had to come crawling back to their most devoted fans.

 

[Groenteman]

I couldn't make this shit up if I tried...

Defecating from the wrong end as a job shows it results I guess.

And I wonder if this lot have played anything other than facebook games in their whole career? Really, without joking, I don't think they have.

Anyhow just one more reason to pass on the next flood of prolefeed. Like I needed more.

 

[Olrod]

I'd be surprised if the executives of EA have ever played a video game in their lives.

Half the time they don't seem to know what the hell they're doing, other than actively trying to screw over their customer base.

 

[maninahat]

It's quite a good point, actually. I don't think they are talking about seasoned gamers who already know the standard conventions and typical control schemes as a second nature. I think they are talking more about people who have never, for instance, played a first person shooter before. For these people, it is a seemingly mammoth task of byzantine coordination to move, look, shoot and think at the same time. I made the mistake of handing my wife the controls to Portal, thinking this would be an easy gateway drug to gaming. Three hours later, she still hadn't worked out how to walk and move the mouse at the same time.

Maybe there should be tutorials aimed not just at the basics for that particular game, but general advice on how to get into any game. I remember the revolution that went on inside my head the day I learned to strafe around a corner, rather than walk into it and turn 90 degrees (as one would intuitively do in real life).