The Dumbification of Gaming

[Booze Zombie]

Things are being simplified so more money is made... but there will be a point at which it's so simple that even someone new to the experience is like "wait, that was it" and then's when the developers start backing up, going "wow, even newbies are complaining about this game being easy".

 

[Irridium]

Eventually they will lay the blame at the feet of the (mostly PC based) casual crowd and their sense of entitlement.

What? That doesn't make sense. The casual crowd isn't mostly PC based, and there is no PC based casual crowd that gets the blame for games becoming easier. What are you on about.

Where do you see the casual crowd coming from then if not the PC?

I see the casual crowd on the PC as a side-effect of casual games becoming widespread. On consoles, that is.

I have yet to see anyone blaming PC gamers for AAA console games becoming easy and simple.

Well there's the thing Zynga is doing on Facebook. Thats all I can think of though. I hear complaints like "companies are trying to catch the farmville-tards" every now and then.

 

[Dorkmaster Flek]

Amen to the sliding difficulty mention! Very interesting approach from Fallout: New Vegas. Even though the game was a buggy pile of turds, that's a great idea. That's exactly what we need more of in games. Let you be just as "hardcore" as you want with it.

 

[Slycne]

I see the casual crowd on the PC as a side-effect of casual games becoming widespread. On consoles, that is.

I don't think that's the case. The casual console games market really haven't caught on until recently(you could point to it really taking off in 2006 with the Wii), where as PC casual gamers can trace back to Minesweeper and Solitaire(early 90s), started rising in scope with the advent of Flash(mid to late 90s) and has really started expanded as they have begun plugging into social networking, see Farmville's apparently 62 million active users.

I have yet to see anyone blaming PC gamers for AAA console games becoming easy and simple.

Mention Farmville and you'll get PC and console gamers alike complaining about how games are becoming easier to cater to a wider crowd.

 

[Waaghpowa]

world of warcraft is a great example of developers designing games to attract as many people as possible. Back when it came out, it was very difficult, they slowly turned down the overall difficulty in the Burning Crusade. Wrath of the Lich came along and it was so easy you needed very little as far as strategy to complete and encounter, by comparison. A lot of people blamed the casuals for it because Blizzard wanted to appease the people who still paid to play, but played the least. At least with Cataclysm, Blizz has admitted that their changes in Wotlk were a mistake and have currently changed the game appropriately to a happy medium of difficulty.

I would also like to note, the new "Deus Ex: Human Revolution" will feature a difficulty known as "Deus Ex", fun

 

[ReiverCorrupter]

You are correct(ahh...the level design of Heretic,Hexen...Dark Force), however I disagree on one of your points. I believe that the niche market is big enough to support developers, yes they aren't going to sell 10 million copies, but they can sell enough to be comfortable.
Example being Team ICO and CDProject Red - they are selling games for (relatively) small audience and they've been successful, same as the guys with Amnesia. There is a market for everyone, and I believe that sooner or later we will realize that. The market for games with "wide appeal" is over saturated, it's just a matter of time before publishers decide to be more flexible with their money.

It all comes down to development costs. I'd love to see Halo Wars 2, because I like the cut down fast paced RTS gameplay, but that's an extreme niche market so it probably won't happen. But if they make it easier for developers to produce games, I think you'll see a lot more niche games.

When we reach photo-realism development will shift back into gameplay and we'll see a lot more experimentation and a lot more niche games. Development costs will go way down too, and games will start to get cheaper.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

I dunno if it's really about gaming anymore. It's about our core shifting from people willing to work at things to people demanding to be spoonfed things.

What are the games we enjoy the most? Minecraft, HALO, Half-Life... Are any of them "easy"? Nope
Is Peggle "easy"? Well...it's simple, but it's not easy.

But some of the more recent games? Try failing on them. Try really hard not to win, while still learning.

It's really tough not to win. Even on Street Fighter IV, with my first character, I leapt through the first eight characters with a simple series of commands.

Then up pops Seth. SLAM SLAM SLAM. Dead.

Ok...new tactic. SLAM SLAM SLAM. Dead.

Ok, redo the tutorial. SLAM SLAM SLAM. Dead.

So, most of this game it walks me through, and then to artificially inflate it, it sets me up against a baddie that can only be beaten by grinding skills?

Isn't that just like Civilization, Diablo, World of Warcraft, Modern Warfare, Bioshock and all the other recent games?

I think that's where the accusation of dumbing down comes from. Triple A titles have used Gamification to realise that you have to make the start of the game stupid and then stick an insurmountable wall in the way to lengthen playtime. Whether that wall is 1337 multiplayers, level relative bosses or simply collecting rings.

And this whole thing started very early on. But on those games were we climbed the insurmountable wall, we love them - because we spent time on it, beating them.

So we've been the ones asking for the dumbing down, but who "we" are has been changing since the hobby went mainstream. And it's only because it's mainstream that we have all the games to choose from.

But I will agree with Shamus, no blaming each other over it. This is a far more prevalent attitude than just gaming.

 

[Woodsey]

Agreed for the most part, although I'd argue the relevance of the BioShock and System Shock comparison, considering they're in different genres almost. I'm not sure who the first group was to coin the whole 'spiritual successor' thing when it came to BioShock, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't the developers. BioShock's a shooter, System Shock is much more of a mix.

For some games, the supposed "dumbing down" that they've endured is really just the result of a clearer vision, Mass Effect 2 being the prime example.

As for the console wars, I would hope that when we PC gamers talk about games being dumbed down for consoles, we mean the consoles themselves, and not the people who play them.

What's most important with this whole thing is that developers establish a proper difficutly curve, and decent (and short) tutorials. As long as its accessible to begin with you can progressively get more and more complicated.

 

[Slycne]

Farmville, however, became popular only after such a term as the "casual crowd" was solidified. There was the huge advent of the Wii before that. You can't really attach Solitaire and Minesweeper to any type of demographic. Every PC gamer has played those.

Still like I said, the casual market was already strong on the PC before Farmville or the Wii. It really emerged in the mid 90s on the PC with the advent of Flash(the widely popular Bejeweled started in 2001 as a Flash web game) and all various internet gaming portals. Pretty much every major provider or brand had their own - AOL, MSN, Yahoo, etc, and that in addition to all the other sites that existed, like BigFishGames and Pogo.com.

These all came to fruition long before the Wii and I don't see much of a case being made for a strong console casual gaming crowd before that system.

 

[Mr. Omega]

There is a line between making a game "simple" and making a game "dumb".

Making it so that you don't need to memorize what EVERY SINGLE KEY on your keyboard does and limiting it so that you can just use a few keys and still do just about everything without having to go through a sea of menus? That's "simple".

Making it so that there area few keys that do everything and then every few minutes going "HEY! REMEMBER THAT KEY? IT DOES THIS! IT DOES THIS! REMEMBER? YOU PROBABLY DON'T REMEMBER, BUT THAT KEY DOES THIS, AND THIS'D PROBABLY HELP RIGHT ABOUT HERE! REMEMBER?", thinking the player is too stupid to figure out what action would help. That's "dumb".

Making it so that if you die 8 times, you can skip the level, if so you chose, or maybe ramp the difficulty down? That's "simple".

Offering it the first time you die? That's "dumb".

Not having over 100 troops that really only have 10 functions, with some that are so situational that most end up useless, but make navigating menus hard? That's "simple".

Making something where the best strategy in ANY situation is "run first, shoot gun, die, respawn, repeat until enemy is dead"? That's dumb.

Remembering gamers only have 10 fingers? That's "simple".

Assuming gamers only have 10 IQ points? That's "dumb".

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

I don't blame consoles at all, or console-lovers, or PC lovers either. I blame the infatuation with "best graphics evar". The race to have the best looking game seems to be more important than the content for the most part. And the high end graphics needed to play tends to limit the actual gameplay by either console or the PC owner's wallet (I don't know about the rest of the world but I can't afford a $300 video card every 4 months just to play at the max settings of whatever game came out yesterday).
Ok I might be making grandiose statements but its a problem.
Minecraft is an example of a decent game (I'm not going to go into detail, its STILL IN BETA PEOPLE) with minimal graphics. Seems more like the content is the most important feature rather than the look of the game.
RDR and GTA 4 are also good examples of trading off graphics for gameplay though there are parts of those games I'd give up for some tweaks to the engine so world objects don't randomly appear because I drove/rode my horse a bit too fast for the engine to keep up...
Blame developers in the end, or marketers... whoever's call it is to sacrifice content for look. And maybe blame NVIDIA/AMD for making graphics cards every 2 weeks (lol).

 

[NickCooley]

The blame (for lack of a better word) lies solely at the feet of developers, not consoles, PC's, Casual or "Hardcore" or any other stupid group the mouth breathers care to think up. Anyone telling you otherwise is stirring shit. (It's a box of wires and circuits ffs not a religion, how petty can you get?)

But I'd happily stick with FPS's as they are now instead of the old "find the key, kill the doods, find the key, kill the doods, find the key, kill the boss, repeat" How I played Doom and the like when I was a nipper I don't know, going back now it's just tediousness in pixel form. And for all the complaints about modern day shooters, of which there are many and a lot of them justified I'd rather dangle my Jacobs in a vice and spin the handle till I pass out than go back to the endless slew of WW2 shooters.

Mind you, what they did to C&C was criminal, oh Kaine, how I miss thee.

So the point I'm trying to get at here, in my own convoluted, round about way is that while games may be getting easier difficulty isn't the only measuring stick of quality. Sure games in the past were more of a challenge and that brought out some true classics there were still about an equal amount of shitty games as there are today. Oh yeah and the whole fanboys are tards thing, can't forget that.