"Dumbed down for console" is a statement that arose mainly out of Deus Ex: Invisible War, and "dumbing down" is certainly what occurred there. Sit back, folks, it's story time.
The first Deus Ex is a markedly complex game, but not by any means as heavy on statistics as the likes of Baldur's Gate or as unforgiving and micromanagement-heavy as the likes of X-COM: UFO Defense. The statistics are simple: you have about seven or eight skills, a slot in each part of your body for permanent cybernetic augmentations, can do a lot of different actions throughout the game, and have a lot of items you can equip and use. There's a limited inventory on a grid system, but overall the variety of weapons available isn't that overwhelming; I'd wager that the actual number of useable weapons isn't that much bigger than the array of guns in, say, Unreal Tournament or Doom. The interface for managing this was a bit clunky, with multiple options screens for picking skills and augments and managing equipment, not to mention keeping journal entries, photographs, and recordings. To this day I find it actually a little bit frustrating, but I'm able to look past it as it's not half as clunky as the likes of Metal Gear Solid and ingame action is still fairly intuitive.
When it came time to make the sequel, Invisible War, though, the devs decided to cross-platform it with the Xbox. The first Deus Ex used half the entire bloody keyboard and had lots of menus and interfaces specifically designed to be comfortable for a mouse to deal with. The devs ended up overshooting their goal of "make Deus Ex comfortable with an Xbox controller," however, and went straight into "dumb down the game" territory, not settling at interface revisions but also going straight into the mechanics and over-simplifying them to levels that I could only describe as an insult to console gamers and PC gamers alike.
This was before there was any kind of formula for how console shooters should work, so they got creative when it came to these changes. Possibly the most infamous change of all was that all weapons--rocket launchers, machineguns, you name them--had a shared "ammo pool" instead of each having their own ammunition. Additionally, the skill point system was gone, rolled into the "Biomod" system, which replaced augmentations and generally offered fewer options. Major actions from the first game were removed, such as picking up downed enemies' bodies and moving them around; a particularly frustrating omission as it seems that Invisible War's stealth system was still designed with it in mind that the player could do this, with enemies being alerted if they found a body and no way of getting rid of them.
The real Hell of it is that many of these omitted features are present in a variety of console games from that generation. The Ratchet and Clank series had an array of no less than 24 available weapons in any given iteration, each with their own ammo and a simple selection wheel. Metal Gear Solid enabled players not only to carry a veritable arsenal of gadgets and gear, but also to move bodies and even realistically stuff them in lockers. Knights of the Old Republic not only featured the choice-driven narrative elements that Invisible War had, it also featured the skill system it didn't have, for nine characters, and it certainly didn't scare off any console gamers.
Invisible War is the game that PC gamers are universally recalling when they call something out for being "dumbed down for consoles," even when they don't know it. It plays clunkily, is less engaging than the first in spite of graphical and presentational upgrades, and all in all feels like it takes too many shortcuts in all the wrong places. Given the relative complexity of the games listed above, it really feels as if the developers weren't even familiar with the console market, much less that they understood it.
Still, other games have had this accusation heaped upon them as well, with varying degrees of validity. Mass Effect 2 is one of them, and I agree with this gentleman...
The first Deus Ex is a markedly complex game, but not by any means as heavy on statistics as the likes of Baldur's Gate or as unforgiving and micromanagement-heavy as the likes of X-COM: UFO Defense. The statistics are simple: you have about seven or eight skills, a slot in each part of your body for permanent cybernetic augmentations, can do a lot of different actions throughout the game, and have a lot of items you can equip and use. There's a limited inventory on a grid system, but overall the variety of weapons available isn't that overwhelming; I'd wager that the actual number of useable weapons isn't that much bigger than the array of guns in, say, Unreal Tournament or Doom. The interface for managing this was a bit clunky, with multiple options screens for picking skills and augments and managing equipment, not to mention keeping journal entries, photographs, and recordings. To this day I find it actually a little bit frustrating, but I'm able to look past it as it's not half as clunky as the likes of Metal Gear Solid and ingame action is still fairly intuitive.
When it came time to make the sequel, Invisible War, though, the devs decided to cross-platform it with the Xbox. The first Deus Ex used half the entire bloody keyboard and had lots of menus and interfaces specifically designed to be comfortable for a mouse to deal with. The devs ended up overshooting their goal of "make Deus Ex comfortable with an Xbox controller," however, and went straight into "dumb down the game" territory, not settling at interface revisions but also going straight into the mechanics and over-simplifying them to levels that I could only describe as an insult to console gamers and PC gamers alike.
This was before there was any kind of formula for how console shooters should work, so they got creative when it came to these changes. Possibly the most infamous change of all was that all weapons--rocket launchers, machineguns, you name them--had a shared "ammo pool" instead of each having their own ammunition. Additionally, the skill point system was gone, rolled into the "Biomod" system, which replaced augmentations and generally offered fewer options. Major actions from the first game were removed, such as picking up downed enemies' bodies and moving them around; a particularly frustrating omission as it seems that Invisible War's stealth system was still designed with it in mind that the player could do this, with enemies being alerted if they found a body and no way of getting rid of them.
The real Hell of it is that many of these omitted features are present in a variety of console games from that generation. The Ratchet and Clank series had an array of no less than 24 available weapons in any given iteration, each with their own ammo and a simple selection wheel. Metal Gear Solid enabled players not only to carry a veritable arsenal of gadgets and gear, but also to move bodies and even realistically stuff them in lockers. Knights of the Old Republic not only featured the choice-driven narrative elements that Invisible War had, it also featured the skill system it didn't have, for nine characters, and it certainly didn't scare off any console gamers.
Invisible War is the game that PC gamers are universally recalling when they call something out for being "dumbed down for consoles," even when they don't know it. It plays clunkily, is less engaging than the first in spite of graphical and presentational upgrades, and all in all feels like it takes too many shortcuts in all the wrong places. Given the relative complexity of the games listed above, it really feels as if the developers weren't even familiar with the console market, much less that they understood it.
Still, other games have had this accusation heaped upon them as well, with varying degrees of validity. Mass Effect 2 is one of them, and I agree with this gentleman...
... when he says that it's not the case. The first game was simply clunky and wasteful in the way that it employed RPG mechanics, and it did well for the developers to trim the fat and narrow things down to get the most tangible, significant differences out of the player's options, which is more what I think developers want to do with their games these days.DustyDrB said:
