I wonder if part of the problem is the attitude that games are there to be "beaten". That the aim is to beat it, and then you're done.
If games were seen as something to be played and explored rather than beaten, perhaps people would approach them differently and get a lot more out of them, even if they'd already completed a playthrough.
More rare, is finding folks that can honestly admit to having beaten it. I picked up the "game and watch" recently, and I can't remember crap about how to make progress in that game. It is really really hard to remember where to go next.
Granted, the first game is bad at that, too. Especially on the second play through. Really difficult to have the same map be different in that way. Still have fun playing it, years later. :D
I personally enjoy games for characters & stories. I don't need to "fight the game" for a sense of accomplishment. Not sure why that's "worse" than playing games that are hard to master. I played hard games in the past. I don't feel a sense of accomplishment. I feel like a wasted an hour learning an entirely useless skill.
It's fine to like a certain kind of game. There are plenty of games that are hard and if you want to play them - good for you! But it feels kind of weird to say that the quality of a game is relative to how frustrating it is to play. Games are a form of entertainment after all.
For me "beating" those type of games isn't the point. I've got nearly 1,500 hours on Rimworld and I've never beaten the game. It's more interesting to me to create different scenarios and see where they go and what stories come from them than to try to optimize for racing to the end.
Games aren't necessarily improved by smoothing out the frustrations. Part of the point is to be challenged, and to have sections which are difficult, and produce anxiety. The joy comes from finding out how to overcome those sections.
Additionally, because everyone will have different trouble spots, a game which has smoothed out the frustrations for the greatest number of people is really a game which doesn't provide much challenge. The worst culprits here would be the games of the mid-2000s, with their heavy cinematics, and extremely low difficulty. Conversely, these games fare worse over time than something like classic Doom: the gameplay was never there in the first place, and the graphics only wowed people 1.5 decades ago.
I really think it's best to have a good variety of easy and difficult challenges in a game (and you need challenges). People will never forgive a game for being too easy, or for being too hard. A nice middle ground needs to be found.
This reminds me of the "Iwata Asks" article recently on HN, and I think they have a better take on the issue. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=970566 A couple quotes:
Iwata: So you wanted to know what it was that made players insert another 100 yen coin once the game was over and have another go?
Miyamoto: Right. And basically, I concluded that this was born of the players being mad at themselves.
...
Miyamoto: Well, since you've purchased it, it's surely better to be able to see the ending.
Yeah. As a kid who spent a lot of time playing games but just wasn't very good at them, I'd pore manuals to look at levels that I knew I'd never reach, and not for lack of trying. I was amazed the first time I played a single player game on the PC (forgot what) and was actually able to see the end! Unless you're into speedrunning, playing the same levels over and over just isn't fun. It's frustrating
I really don't understand the drive to make everything easier. I've never beaten a *souls game because I don't have the skill or patience to do so, and I'm fine with accepting that. Why can't everyone else?
I do wonder if the trend towards casual and mobile gaming has stunted a generation of gamers into being unable to cope when a real challenge of skill or wit appears.
I think in the universe of difficult games, not all frustratingly difficult games would become successful. For example, Mensa puzzle game would not be successful. Its the seemingly simple and stupid nature of it that compels people to try again and again..
I guess there's a sense of "achievement" when you beat a game that's hard and has no difficulty settings. The idea of "beating" the game holds more weight in that case.
But when a game has so much more to offer - atmosphere, story, adventure - (like Hollow Knight) it is certainly a bit unfair to restrict those things to only the hardcore players.
I honestly had a lot of trouble getting through games like Sonic 2. If you were to play Sonic 2 end-to-end its probably 3-4 hours. But the reality is getting through it all was challenging. It wasn't 40 hours of puzzles, nono.
This is not to say that that is the right way to make a game, but it was to say that playing it was a challenge for young me. Today the only games I find challenging is PvP games, but often times I don't want the other parts of the challenge like the actual people part. This is why some games like Demon's Souls (the first time I ever saw a castle in the distance that I could literally walk up to and smash through, was an awe moment) still stick in my mind.
Sure, but the fact that you have to play through the (boring, repetitive) easy mode to get to any sort of challenge takes all the fun out of it. 'Go through the game once without any sort of difficulty before we actually give you something worth doing' doesn't fly with me. If your game isn't fun or challenging on the first play through I'm not interested. I don't want a 'practice run', I want an actual game.
For a game to be fun, it needs to give the player a sense that they are progressing ... getting a higher score, advancing to a higher level, seeing the next bit of the map, whatever. To play a game and score more than last time is success, even if your character ultimately fails by "dying". That reward is why we keep playing; if a game didn't give you the impression that you were getting further you'd feel like you're failing and soon give up. If you turned the score counter off in Tetris no one would play it for very long.
I don't think many people would enjoy that at all.
The appeal of games like Dark Souls (and Slay the Spire!) at high difficulties arises from the knowledge that you _will_ win if you are clever and observant enough.
It's the learning process that keeps players coming back to these games, not the Game Over screen.
I loved full throttle and it was a whole thing amongst me and my friends in middle school.
I couldn’t beat the biker gangs to jump over the canyon and thought it was a faulty crack of the game. But almost all games back then were impossible without walkthroughs or cheats, so the frustrating gameplay was frustrating but par for the course.
I disagree with the author saying that the inventory is too small, and puzzles not complex enough (yet still decrying the need for a walkthrough!)
Games before it had completely out there puzzles and I don’t believe anyone beat any of those games using only logic and in-game hints.
I also disagree with the statement about games being meant to be played:
> It serves as a demonstration that presentation can only get you so far in a game — that a game is meant to be played, not watched.
Some games are meant to be experienced. Old Mans Journey and Monument Valley were criticized for having too easy puzzles. Especially old mans journey is not about puzzles - puzzles are there to give players time to absorb the game world - beautiful art and music and have them soak enough of it up be primed for the emotional story progression.
I was a kid during the SNES/Megadrive era, and I didn't beat most of my games. That's fine. Since there were no saves for platformers, you would play from the start each time, and get better.
Sometimes you would get further than you usually go, so you would discover new content, and it was harder, the thrill was really nice.
Then when you finally beat a game, the feeling of accomplishment was really awesome. Something to brag with your friends during recess. Because most games weren't meant to be finished by the average player, finishing one really meant something.
When faced with a challenge, you want to figure out as much as you reasonably can, and then learn what you were missing.
Struggling at the same problem for several sessons, or god forbid years, sounds like misery to me. I'd rather use that time productively learning, rather than struggling for the sake of it, because I refuse to learn from others.
1. Old games had to be hard because if they weren't, they would be too short. People would finish them straight away and exclaim "wait... that's it?".
2. The point of playing games isn't always to "win" or "lose". Sometimes the point is just to have an experience. To roleplay, to see a story unfold, etc.. Then a ruthless difficulty can get in the way of that experience. Or it might not - but the point is that difficulty and achievement aren't always the biggest points. At least not to me.
3. A lot of hard games are hard in a lame or lazy way. Or just in a "fake" way[1]. Games should be hard in a way that forces you to be more cunning, agile, faster and smarter. Not just blindly double the HP of all enemies, or make progress depend on an obscure secret which can not be guessed from the game, forcing you to buy some gaming magazine in order to progress further in the game.
If games were seen as something to be played and explored rather than beaten, perhaps people would approach them differently and get a lot more out of them, even if they'd already completed a playthrough.
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