"Game X was dumbed down for consoles"

[Candidus]

WHAT THE FUCK DO PEOPLE MEAN WHEN THEY SAY SOMETHING WAS "DUMBED DOWN"?!

Not just controls, but the games' systems are often streamlined because of controller limitations or the difficulty going through menus with a pad. In addition, as in the case of ME2 (I'm aware it started on consoles, but hear me out), you get situations where the whole layout of a game (missions can be taken in any order) is changed late in the development process, and content is lost (Legion and others' dialogue when retrieving Jack from prison for example) because the console can't manage.

Those are perfectly valid reasons for hating multiplatform releases and looking down on consoles. We'd be better off without "affordable access to gaming" consoles in my opinion, in part because of the above, and in the main because there's actually no such thing.

A PC which will last you 3 years is about £450-550 these days, which is nothing, and then your games are a *minimum* of £10(!!) cheaper a pop, so you fast make it back.

Tangent:

Spoiler

If the problem is piracy.. well, there is quite a lot of that, I grant. Personally, I'd have no problem with the government saying "Right, we've got a new department which watches all connections to the internet through all ISP's, *all* the time. We'll home in on anybody downloading copyright material, they'll be sued for more than they could ever afford to repay, their lives destroyed, and they'll likely do time as well."

Here's hoping.

 

[Ryan Minns]

I grew up on consoles, never had a PC till I was 18, didn't have a good one till I was 23 and there is a black and white difference with games made for a console and games made for a PC, nothing to do with elitism, nothing to do with one being better just differences

I do believe games are "stupified" though, not entirely due to consoles however, it just seems like it sometimes because there is one PC, many consoles so when a developer wants to reach a "Wider" audience they tend to mean dumber audience and since said audience is spread over multi consoles as opposed to a single PC some look at this as it being the consoles fault which IS true occasionally but not to the degree some claim

 

[panosbouk]

It's pretty much just a way of saying things have been made simpler.

Personally I think it's a bullshit excuse that developers use to cover for laziness.

Gearbox further gave me reason to think that when they said that Duke Nukem: Forever has been dumbed down for consoles because there isn't enough buttons on a controller to support more than 2 weapons. Bullshit, if that's the case why does Saint's Row's selection wheel that holds about 10 weapons only use one button and an analog stick? Why is Duke Nukem 3D on the Xbox 360 able to scroll through loads of weapons using only the right and left bumpers? Know why? Because it is in fact possible to have a game on a console have more than a 2 weapon limit.

Duke Nukem: Forever being "dumbed down for consoles" was nothing more than Gearbox's bullshit excuse for not considering all the possibilities to handling the weapon selection.

I'm sick of consoles being used as a scapegoat for developers laziness with all this "oh it was dumbed down for consoles" crap.

But that's just my take on it.

I have to agree with you, but you have to admit that sometimes it is true that controlling a game with mouse and keyboard instead of a gamepad is much more effective and for some games it is needed. Strategy games are out of the picture without a mouse. Games like DA:Origins it was so hard to control it and we saw drastic changes on that design with DA2, control wise, other bad choices made for the game goes to developer laziness for sure.

 

[GeneticallyModifiedDucks]

In most cases it's just exaggeration on some people's part, but if you tell me that Invisible War has the same ammount of depth and complexity as Deus Ex, then I'm gonna have to ask you to step outside.

"Dumbing down" is rarely a case of platform transition. It's more of a market transition. It's usually correlated with PC's and consoles, because a lot of PC gamers like their games complicated and full of numbers while in general console gamers don't, and that's why the "dumbing down" of a particular game is attributed to it being brought to a console. Example: The one I mentioned earlier. Many think that Invisible War was dumbed down so that they could bring the game to Xbox, but they usually forget 1 important detail. Deus Ex was on PS2. Unaltered, the same game that appeared on PC. How do you explain that? I can help you with that. They wanted to reach a larger market by making the game simpler. They just chose the wrong aspects of a game to simplify.

Good example of simplifying a game without "dumbing it down"? The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.

 

[BlumiereBleck]

I don't see it as dumbing down, but giving more ways to access a game for the players.

 

[Adzma]

snip

Compare Crysis 1 to Crysis 2, or Dragon Age Origins to Dragon Age 2.

Those games are pretty much the best example of "dumbing down for the console crowd."

 

[Kungfu_Teddybear]

It's pretty much just a way of saying things have been made simpler.

Personally I think it's a bullshit excuse that developers use to cover for laziness.

Gearbox further gave me reason to think that when they said that Duke Nukem: Forever has been dumbed down for consoles because there isn't enough buttons on a controller to support more than 2 weapons. Bullshit, if that's the case why does Saint's Row's selection wheel that holds about 10 weapons only use one button and an analog stick? Why is Duke Nukem 3D on the Xbox 360 able to scroll through loads of weapons using only the right and left bumpers? Know why? Because it is in fact possible to have a game on a console have more than a 2 weapon limit.

Duke Nukem: Forever being "dumbed down for consoles" was nothing more than Gearbox's bullshit excuse for not considering all the possibilities to handling the weapon selection.

I'm sick of consoles being used as a scapegoat for developers laziness with all this "oh it was dumbed down for consoles" crap.

But that's just my take on it.

I have to agree with you, but you have to admit that sometimes it is true that controlling a game with mouse and keyboard instead of a gamepad is much more effective and for some games it is needed. Strategy games are out of the picture without a mouse. Games like DA:Origins it was so hard to control it and we saw drastic changes on that design with DA2, control wise, other bad choices made for the game goes to developer laziness for sure.

I can agree that RTS games are definitely better with a mouse and keyboard. RTS controls really are quite fiddly on a controller but I still do believe that, if developers put some thought into it they could work around that and get an RTS to play really well with a controller although still maybe not as well as a mouse an keyboard could.

 

[suitepee7]

i would only use it when i feel features have been removed from the first game, due to consoles not being able to smoothly control these feautures. controllers are limited by the number of buttons they have, but keyboard have a lot more. also, complex inventory screens are easier to manage with a mouse, so thats why i'd use the arguement.

 

[Delusibeta]

Next week's example of "Dumbed down for the consoles"? Duke Nukum Forever. This post by one of the designers [http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=26031903#itemanchor_26031903] exhibits why that it's not the gamers that's dumb, it's the developers.

 

[OtherSideofSky]

Well, to be fair, some games do actually get simplified in order to accommodate the console control scheme and perceived (I said perceived, don't kill me) tastes of console owners.

A prime example would be Deus Ex: Invisible War.

However, for the most part it's just a case of people bitching. Any time something, anything, changes, someone somewhere will be pissed off about it. And some of those someones will post about it on the internet.

Actually, the primary "dumbing down" that happened in that game was the mind-bogglingly retarded script, which managed to be bad enough to completely eclipse just about every other part of the game. The infamous sentry persuasion scene is a prime example of this.

 

[The Random One]

It means that the game has different controls so it can be more easily played on a controller, and lacks easy access to certain actions that could be easily mapped to a keyboard.

It may also mean that the gameplay has been made with the previous limitation in mind, i.e. even though on the PC you can quickly switch between several weapons the game doesn't force you to do that because it's also made for consoles and on the console you can't switch quickly.

Furthermore, it may mean that some great gameplay element has been simplified to a large extent because it required usage of menus or other UI element that was better fitted to a mouse and/or keyboard than to a controller, that is, an entire dimension of the game or one of the game's element is removed so it works better on consoles.

Lastly, it may mean the game has features designed to fix problems with gameplay on consoles that are not necessary on PC, such as auto-aiming.

There, I answered. The rest of you can go home now.

 

[valleyshrew]

The annoying thing is there's no reason for most games being dumbed down due to the hardware. It's just they think the audience prefers more hand holding on console. Not the case. The new deus ex is an example. The original would work fine ported to modern consoles. The new one has added "click x to takedown", regenerative health, highlighted interactive objects, a cover system and more that are nothing to do with being on console. These things are examples of dumbing down, though they can be good if used sparingly, they are becoming pervasive such that the more engaging or immersive alternatives are lost. Another example is the loss of dedicated servers, and the loss of both text chat and radio commands such that console multiplayer becomes a lot less communicative, even though there is voice chat most only use it with their own friends. Console is capable of having everything PC has, they can even plug in a keyboard and mouse and put in mod support if they choose to do so. All that's different is lower quality graphics.

 

[EvilPicnic]

The problem is not 'dumbing down'. The problem is poor quality control in porting and multi-platform releasing, and that cuts both ways.

Companies care so much about launch-day sales that when a game is ported to another platform (often months later) it isn't optimised for that system. That includes redesigning controls for consoles (menus! So many fucking menus!) as much as it does keyboard shortcuts for PC games.

Are consoles where the money is at the moment? Of course, and that hits PC players hard. But that doesn't mean there aren't some brilliant PC games out there that console players are missing out on because the devs don't have the designing talent to streamline their convoluted and messy control systems.

 

[Blaster395]

There is a difference between simplicity and depth that most people do not recognize.

Many PC gamers seem to believe that simplicity lacks depth. However, many simple games are also difficult to master (such as chess, easy rules, insane strategic depth)

 

[Scars Unseen]

"Dumbed down" is a catch phrase used to describe changes to interfaces, technical specs and gameplay elements. It rarely has anything to do with anyone being dumb(other than occasionally the developer/publisher), so I laugh when people take offense to the term. In the case of PC to console changes. the most common "dumbed down" complaints boil down to the following:

1) An interface is optimized for consoles, thus making UI navigation pointlessly tedious for PC users who are accustomed to being able to assign actions, menus, etc to hotkeys of their choosing. Especially annoying due to the relative ease with which this could be optimized for each platform differently.

2) Graphics and/or AI are designed for the lowest spec device, which is almost always a console. This makes games look somewhat bad in comparison games that are designed with PCs in mind, though of course good art direction trumps technical advancement.

3) Gameplay elements are changed for reasons related to the console platform, either real or perceived by the developer/publisher. Auto-aim is an example of a change due to real limitations, as controller sticks are not as precise as a mouse. Making challenges easier, reducing data available to the player, and removing non-core gameplay elements are changes made because the developer feels that it will appeal to a larger audience, rightly or not. Since that larger audience is perceived to be on consoles, the blame is often placed on that audience, again, rightly or not.

 

[C95J]

I have always thought about this as well. I know for a fact that I have more fun on consoles than playing on my PC (for various reasons), and sometimes I just can't help but think: "Why do some PC gamers have to sit and complain about this kind of stuff, just have fun with the damn game!!". The "High and mighty" attitude that you were talking about is the problem with this I guess. Just because the game isn't as complex as it should be doesn't mean it suddenly becomes boring, or less fun.

Note here that I am not taking stab at PC gamers in general, I don't care if you prefer a PC or console for gaming, hell I love them both anyway, this is just towards the gamers that constantly complain, make threads etc...

 

[Amondren]

Its like this. Play the Sims 1 on console for the gamecube now play it on the PC which was more fun?

 

[player3141]

When I say "dumbed down for consoles" I mean that is has simplier controls and lesser graphics. I don't mean it as an insult to the console gamer's intelligence, but as an insult to the hardware that is used to game.
There are a lot more buttons on a keyboard than a controller, a game like Crysis wouldn't work on the console, not to mention, it wouldn't be able to run it anyway because of the hardware, consoles have little ram, weak processors and average graphics cards. Also, for whatever reason, console developers think that you can't hold more than two weapons because it would be too hard to switch between. B.S., Valve made it work, and they hate consoles.

 

[Riddle78]

Made far simpler for the sake of the more limited console platform. My prime example would be Supreme Commander 2 compared to Supreme Commander 1.

SupCom 1 had a linear tech level system,though T2 units never went obsolete. SupCom 2 has a research tree that simply applies global upgrades. That's one major difference. Don't get me into construction and economy.

It could also mean that the game was simplified in some aspects in order to meet a certain demographic.

Mass Effect 1 gave you infinite ammo and tons of skills. It's clearly intended to be primarily an RPG of the classic variety,with some shooter action. Wheras Mass Effect 2 featured (very) limited ammo,and few skills. It was primarily a Third Person Shooter with light RPG elements. Two entirely different demographics.

 

[Manoose47]

Console limitations aside, Dumbing down certainly occurs in modern games, Mainly due to the fact that Gaming has become so popular and so big that its not just immersion loving nerds playing games anymore, its joe soap and the other guy... you know the one.

Anyways my point is that Modern games demand less of you; and do more for you because thats what suits the larger market, an obvious example would be re generating health in shooters, GPS and fast travel in rpg's as a aforementioned immersion nerd, these things bother me severely.

So in a horrible way games have become much easier, but also much less timeless and much less replayable. Its sad because modern games now have to do everything for the player, because some gamers don't have an imagination, i mean floating head speech is virtually gone!

Because games studios put more effort into scripting every scene or voicing every line of dialogue they actually spend less time developing the other aspects of the game, and end up having to restrict the size of the gameworld, or what you're able to do in it.

So i wouldn't say its that games are dumbed down for consoles, i'd say games are built with consoles in mind for the larger market, and as a result the PC releases of modern games are an afterthought...

If games were designed exclusively for formats we'd all be much happier, and that's a fact.