The Dumbification of Gaming

[Dhatz]

games without choice, as illustrated by the famous level layout comparison image is the most pressing concern, other like autoheal, nevverending ammo crates or blody screen so real are pathetic in comparison.

Playing through DA2, I really am struck dumb by how much they hold your hand these days. They honestly don't let you figure out ANYTHING for yourself anymore, which is a shame.

Its most apparent(for me at least) with the items you give your companions. In the first, you had to guess who would like what. Or you would know what they liked, if you took the time to talk about them. You basically had to know stuff. Now its just "THIS ITEM IS FOR THIS COMPANION. GO THERE AND GIVE IT TO HIM/HER."

Just made me sad.

its ridiculous how you dont even think of asking the companions to choose from what you have.
I suppose games have a lot of stuff yet to be done properly.

 

[PurplePlatypus]

It?s also because games can be longer now so you don?t need to hold people back to stretch out the experience. Not to mention I think things are becoming slightly more intuitive or at least better explained. I think a certain amount of difficulty was created by needlessly keeping secrets from people.

Of course that isn?t all of it but the difficulty that came from these things can just keep walking as far as I?m concerned. We are better off without it. Now, as for the trend of slapping a big directional arrow on the screen for every little thing, please stop, it doesn?t need to be there all the time for all those things. I think it?s even a bit of a crutch for game developers, how about figuring out ways to direct people in the game effectively rather than just leaving it to the hud?

And I?m glad a lot of games are getting easier if it means people have an easier time getting into them. I think we are at that stages right now were the market does need to be opened up. Maybe one day enough people will be playing them and be introduced to them from early enough we won?t need to do it quite as much. Although it will never disappear entirely, not everyone is interested in stupid amounts of difficulty. However there is a market for both of them and no favors are being done by ignoring that.

 

[ItsAPaul]

I do wish more games would have a New Vegas-like hardcore mode, though in that game it just gave you more resources to watch that were generally easy to keep up with (and it didn't hurt that I made a mental note of where beds were before you got to New Vegas). However, I really don't recall Baldurs Gate 2 and some rpgs in that era being especially hard; more involved sure, and completely incapable of being put on a console, but not "harder" per say. Was Magic Carpet really that much harder than Dragon Age guys?

 

[ZephrC]

I'm sorry, but simple is not the same as dumb. That is very simply wrong. A simple set of rules can produce quite interesting and deep gameplay, and that's exactly what my personal favorite games do.

Certainly the video game industry is far more likely to err on the side of simple and dumb instead of complex and intelligent than it used to be, but I absolutely, vehemently disagree with the notion that games should be more complex. That's usually just leaving the player to sort out the designer's piss poor work anyway. It's not intelligent; it's just annoying.

Some people like complexity, and that's fine. I'm not suggesting complexity should be outlawed or anything. I'm just saying that if you're one of those people you aren't really what anybody in the industry thinks of as a core gamer, and you haven't been since at least the 90s. You're going to have to get used to the idea that the big AAA titles aren't going to be aimed at you anymore, and there's nothing you can do to change that.

 

[Megabobster]

*lols at all the noobs complaining about video games and continues to play ADOM*

Seriously though, ADOM appears to be devoid of any fault whatsoever, besides the fact that it's dead and I haven't ever been able to play it for more than 5 minutes at a time (usually have a friend over when I remember I have it on my computer). Possibly the only faults I can see is the difficulty in distinguishing different monster/item types, but that's not really much of a problem.

For those of you who have no idea what ADOM is, give it a Google! It's a fun roguelike that has gameplay similar to Oblivion or Fallout 3 (haven't really played the other Fallouts, I have the disks somewhere...), but has a rather unique (to say the least) graphics style that allows for more content without worrying about creating custom images or anything. It's a rather old game, though, and I think it's been dead for a while. Also, I probably gave it a fairly crappy review. Just give it a play. (Fun fact: ADOM was the first video game I ever played!)

 

[Canadish]

As Mr Omega mentiond above me, there is a difference between "simple" and "dumb".

Though I would like to relabel it "Accessible" and "Thick as pig ****".

It's hard to pin down with words. You know, without writing a whole essay on the subject.
So, as an example, I'll cite two games released at the same time, both sequels to very complex games.

Shogun 2.
Dragon Age 2.

Shogun 2 trimmed the fat. Empire and Napoleon were bold ideas, but Creative Assembly bit off more then they could chew. The map was large but unpolished. It bugged out frequently. There was a crazy amount of unit types. More then anyone could really remember without knowing alot about the history of the time.
So, they went back to focusing on just Japan. The map is a stunning bit of work. The units have been trimmed down to a more balanced and manageable number of different types.
But the core of the game is still there. Its Total War. You CAN just use military. But the depth is still there for you to use your agents in a load of different ways, ambush with your navy, engage in diplomacy. It all just works and feels great (well mostly, it aint a perfect game obviously ~_~)

And then on the OTHER hand...is Dragon Age 2.
It took the large country of Fereldan and scrapped it, instead throwing us into Kirkwall.
The Box City.
Customize your companions? Gone. Bioware likes the FF style better now.
Variety of location? Nope, just Kirkwall. And the same 4 dungeons over and over.
Is it pretty?! Kirkwall is grey, empty and its all strangely box shaped.
Enemies? LITERAL faceless mooks. Hundreds of them. Hawke could charged with Genocide by the end.
Interesting quests? MMO fetch quests. And you get ambushed by 10 bandit hoards along the way. Everytime.
Polished? Battle music playing over death scenes. Falling through floors. Eyebrows eating the characters own eyes.
And etc etc...

The two games are a stark contrast. And I loved the hell out of both franchises already.
Shogun 2 streamlined the game.
Dragon Age 2 didn't just dumb it down. It rushed a lazy, half finished game out the door.

 

[Catchy Slogan]

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.

He has a point. PC games haven't been mechanicly challenging...ever...Wizardry, Might and Magic and Ultima are hard if you don't know what to do, but as long as you figure it out you are fine.

On the other hand knowledge won't get you through Contra or Ninja Guiden.

First off, you're comparing RPGs to action games, which is just dumb.

Second, I never argued anything about how easy PC games are. I argued against the apparent "pc-based casual crowd" that gets the blame for games becoming easy, which is unheard of for me.

I think he might be talking about the kind of people who play Farmville. Which I don't really think counts. Because of all the people that I know who play facebook games, I haven't known them to move onto other games.

 

[Gunner 51]

There's a number of factors at play as to whether or not games have got easier.

Firstly, we are gamers - we are used to similar games because we have played them for years and years. If I were to pick up Crysis 2 - I'll could gun down a horde of troops because of my experience with games like Halo or Doom, I could spot an ambush from experience of games like Dead Space.

Wheras, your average newb would not have this experience to back up their gameplay and would most likely 'die' very, very quickly.

Secondly, a lot of folks are confusing simplification with 'dumbing down'. (Which is a ghastly turn of phrase if I heard one, IMO...)

A game like Mass Effect was a great little game, but when it's sequel had come out - the punishing difficulty was there. I still died a lot on higher difficultie - but at least they got rid of that bulky micro-management stuff that the first game had.

They simplified ME2 and speaking for myself, I had a bit more fun as a result of it. Namely because I don't want to spend ages on inventory screens - just point me to my enemy's throat and let me at 'im.

Dragon Age 2 wasn't quite dumbed down - more badly rushed. I liked the vastly improved combat system. I even liked the fact they got rid of half the spells which were available in the first game, I never used them anyway. (Save for the odd healing and tons of offensive spells.)

Once again, even the inventory screens were trimmed down and all the extraneous and superfluous stuff from the original was excluded from the sequel. So no more Veridian, Silverite, Steel, Iron gubbins - which were nothing more than a palette swapped version of the previous incarnation of said armour. Though this came at the cost of not being able to equip different armours on one's party members.

With the exception of Aveline - because it'd be inappropriate for the Captain of the Guard to suddely wear different armours when on duty. But - I digress.

If games are getting easier, then it is nothing more than to accommodate newer players. And the root cause of this is simply money. If this upsets you this badly, the solution is simple - either stop buying games, or make your make your own.

 

[Macrobstar]

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.


Other than that, pretty solid point. No, not the "stop fighting and get along" point. The point where games becoming easier is a result of the success of the industry.

But good luck getting people to understand.

Dude have you ever heard of popcap and zynga, they are almost entirely PC based

 

[Bostur]

The biggest problem with the whole 'games are being dumbed-down' debate is that it tends to confuse difficulty with streamlining the interface and level design. Those are completely separate concepts which nevertheless feed back into the overall experience a player has with being 'challenged' by the game, but they're not usually the determining factors in how easy a game is. I've been playing games for about a decade now, and I don't think games have gotten any easier to complete.

Streamlining the interface sometimes makes games simpler. If the interface is well done in the first place, the only way to streamline it further is to take away features. By taking away features the player gets less options to achieve the task. With the lack of options difficulty can only be scaled by expecting better execution instead of a creative approach.

In a complex game the difficulty could be a choice between using fireball or ice-storm or even a third approach. In a simple game the difficulty may often be reduced to pressing fireball harder. The simple game can be hard even impossibly hard, but in my experience the complex difficulty is usually more fun.

Extra Credits had an episode about depth versus difficulty. New games often tend to skip on the depth and add cheap difficulty instead.


I agree with Shamus that bashing each other with a 'DUMB' sign isn't going to help. I really wish game designers would also stop thinking we are dumb. So Shamus how do we do that? The focus groups have spoken, they seem convinced we are all pretty dumb.

 

[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. .

Ken Levine said Bioshock would be a spiritual successor to the System Shock series. So yeah, it was the head dude(of both Bioshock and System Shock).

Well then he is a fool. Still, different genres; they didn't make a stupid System Shock.

 

[Anton P. Nym]

Feel this picture is appropriate:

Not sure what's sadder, the fact that FPS's have basically become hallways, or that I can run that DOOM map with my eyes closed...

To be fair, the map on the left cost as many man-hours to create as perhaps half-way to the first cutscene on the map of the right. In this case it's not a matter of simplifying to appeal to the masses, but of how graphically-intense today's 3D games are.

-- Steve

 

[veloper]

That's a very long piece just to basicly say that the easy, stupid games are not the fault of the consoles.

Most of us still remember the Nintendo hard of old and turn-based tactical RPGs have retreated to Sony hardware.

 

[VonBrewskie]

I hear you buddy. I recently made a post on a certain website I shall not name, but is my constant companion via my new phone, that had to do with the PSN going down and why that might be. I was simply looking to start a thread where PS3 owners on the site could gather information and lament our misfortune together in a group. A lot of people showed up to talk, and there was good information to be found...if you could get past all of the Sony*ag this, and Sony*ag that. I didn't realize that my choice in consoles also denoted my sexual preference. I am really tired of idiots crapping up my forums with whatever these "console wars" are supposed to be. Jesus H people. Grow the hell up. None of these corporations give a shit about any of you past what it takes for you to buy their games. Good article.

EDIT:

I love Demons' Souls. It is the first game of the new generation of consoles that has absolutely absorbed my brain and made me lose sleep a la FFVII. There are some supremely difficult games out there. They just don't sell as well as some of the AAA shooters or adventure games that are "dumber". I think many people go to these dumber games specifically to troll the hell out of everyone. It's lame. My favorite minigame these days is the "can I mute the entire list of people in Blops before the round starts?" That's sad man.

 

[VonBrewskie]

Feel this picture is appropriate:

Not sure what's sadder, the fact that FPS's have basically become hallways, or that I can run that DOOM map with my eyes closed...

To be fair, the map on the left cost as many man-hours to create as perhaps half-way to the first cutscene on the map of the right. In this case it's not a matter of simplifying to appeal to the masses, but of how graphically-intense today's 3D games are.

-- Steve

Fair point. I think that the hallway games with epic cutscenes miss the forest for the trees. Nowadays we either get hallways shooters, or sandbox shooters. Very little left in the middle. I wonder though, about the point you made about the Doom map being less graphically intense. For the machines it ran on, wasn't it still difficult to program those kinds of games? In other words, I remember it took a good long time for Doom 2 to come out. Almost as long as it took for MW2 to come out, yeah? I don't know. I'm really asking.

 

[VonBrewskie]

Feel this picture is appropriate:

Not sure what's sadder, the fact that FPS's have basically become hallways, or that I can run that DOOM map with my eyes closed...

To be fair, the map on the left cost as many man-hours to create as perhaps half-way to the first cutscene on the map of the right. In this case it's not a matter of simplifying to appeal to the masses, but of how graphically-intense today's 3D games are.

-- Steve

Fair point. I think that the hallway games with epic cutscenes miss the forest for the trees. Nowadays we either get hallways shooters, or sandbox shooters. Very little left in the middle. I wonder though, about the point you made about the Doom map being less graphically intense. For the machines it ran on, wasn't it still difficult to program those kinds of games? In other words, I remember it took a good long time for Doom 2 to come out. Almost as long as it took for MW2 to come out, yeah? I don't know. I'm really asking.

 

[Anton P. Nym]

I wonder though, about the point you made about the Doom map being less graphically intense. For the machines it ran on, wasn't it still difficult to program those kinds of games? In other words, I remember it took a good long time for Doom 2 to come out. Almost as long as it took for MW2 to come out, yeah? I don't know. I'm really asking.

Check out Doom 2's credits. There are, what, twenty people listed? MW2 had over two hundred.

Doom's backgrounds were essentially static, but MW2's were animated. (And animated to better than 60fps.) Doom's colour palate was, what, 256 colours? MW2's was over 16 million. Objects in Doom were textured simply; MW2's were all textured to a high resolution, and were mapped for 3D and self-shadowing to boot. Doom's objects were all static, save for a few special items with pre-scripted animation; many of MW2's objects were dynamic and thus had to be statted out for Havok.

Computer power is an issue only in that increases there lead to increased expectations on behalf of players... which means more time spent creating art assets. Every animated blade of grass had to be made, and by a human being as we don't have computer systems capable of doing that yet.

The first guy who finds out a way to automate generating high-res art assets* will become fantastically rich.

-- Steve

* and if he can figure out a way to automate the animation of those assets, he'll be able to afford retiring on Mars.

 

[Polock]

Feel this picture is appropriate:

Not sure what's sadder, the fact that FPS's have basically become hallways, or that I can run that DOOM map with my eyes closed...

HOLY SHIT! I know what map that is!

...freaky.