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Fangz posted:
I don't think it's sufficient. Above I point out different types of players looking for different experiences, which you cannot anticipate from their performance. Though I do think it's a good step. A co worker really appreciated Forza Horizon constantly telling him he was so good he should up the difficulty, and he did. I just ignored those prompts and crushed my races instead.
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Jul 30, 2022 13:25
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just use verbal shaming to encourage players to pick harder difficulties, like in doom
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Jul 30, 2022 14:38
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Triarii posted:Just having the knowledge that it's there changes the experience and cuts through the tension. Even if I never turn it on, I know I've got that option in my back pocket in case I ever really need it, so I'm never truly in danger of failing, and I'm not feeling that sense of fear. This is such an insane thing to think, and I beg you to not try to tell people how to make their design their games because of this. I can't imagine having my enjoyment of a video game be affected by the options menu existing 
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Jul 30, 2022 15:41
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gently caress SNEEP posted:This is such an insane thing to think, and I beg you to not try to tell people how to make their design their games because of this. I can't imagine having my enjoyment of a video game be affected by the options menu existing i don't think it's insane at all, and i've seen designers explicitly point out that the psychology of being challenged when an option to skip, or make the challenge easier is completely different than the psychology when that option doesn't exist. i think designers are more cognizant these days that things like save systems, difficulty options, and controls aren't just "options", they're core parts of the game design.
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Jul 30, 2022 15:44
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Feels Villeneuve posted:i don't think it's insane at all, and i've seen designers explicitly point out that the psychology of being challenged when an option to skip, or make the challenge easier is completely different than the psychology when that option doesn't exist. If your psyche is affected by the existence of optional settings then....that's not great. You have to realize you're arguing against making a game accessible for other people, which is why a even a game such as Wolfenstein 3D have difficulty settings. Having more granular difficulty (and accessibility) options is a good trend in games.
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Jul 30, 2022 16:42
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Y'all don't gotta call someone out for how their brain works, you realize that right? They're just saying "this is how I feel about this", and that's valid. They're not casting judgements on anyone else or demanding that their feelings be catered to.
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Jul 30, 2022 16:52
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Every designer I've ever worked with (which I guess is only leads and directors) would read those comments and just add it into context. Ideally people like me exist to help identify those people and how large of a player base they are, but no good designer would read that and damage their ability to balance their game. Now, folks in publishing looking for a convenient excuse to cut dev cost time? Maybe.
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Jul 30, 2022 18:27
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Best thing is probably have high level options and granular toggles behind another context menu. Putting a few dozen interactions at someone before they get into the game seems bad I'm also coming from an environment where the user funnel is the light and the truth
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Jul 30, 2022 18:29
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I think adaptive difficulty is great when it’s (1) only applied to make the game harder as a reward for the player’s skill, and (2) is completely transparent (I.e., it’s a feature players are told about). Some shmups do this and it’s really exciting when you realize you’re hitting waves that are harder than usual because you definitely kicked rear end on the previous section. This is def a different thing though.
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Jul 30, 2022 21:21
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gently caress SNEEP posted:If your psyche is affected by the existence of optional settings then....that's not great. You have to realize you're arguing against making a game accessible for other people, which is why a even a game such as Wolfenstein 3D have difficulty settings. Having more granular difficulty (and accessibility) options is a good trend in games. I wouldn't argue that games in general should be built to create that particular type of stress, just that it's a valid way for a game to be designed. I like that there's room in the medium for a game like Sekiro to come along and say "here's our bullshit, either you figure it out and deal with it or you lose." I also don't mean to overstate the effect - it's not like a game is ruined by having difficulty settings. There's just something a little extra spicy about a game that only presents one way ahead and you just gotta fight through it. From my perspective, it's a bit nuts to say that the presence of difficulty options doesn't have an effect on the experience. Like, imagine you're going alone on some long, difficult, and perilous mountain hike that you're not sure you're going to be able to complete and where your survival isn't guaranteed. Then imagine the same hike, but you have a radio in your pocket that will summon a helicopter at the push of a button to take you to the end. Even if it turns out you could make it on your own so you don't end up needing to call the helicopter, aren't those two quite different emotional experiences?
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Jul 30, 2022 21:22
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The player should be able to make any game as easy as they want because it’s Just Games, and anyone who really wants to play “slam my dick in a door simulator 2k22” for 300 hours because that’s the ‘real’ way to play it still can.
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Jul 30, 2022 21:26
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:On a different note, I am extremely suspicious of anyone making a game who says "well, that game's just not for you then". Most games are not for most people. It is common for a lot of games to cast a wide net, but even then, there are a lot of assumptions being made about what affordances are available. Generally speaking, games that cast a super wide net tend to be forgettable, and games that really focus on what they want to be tend to be the ones that their audience talks about and plays forever. The vast majority of games of course lie between 'Razer Focus' and 'Ultra Wide'. It's very challenging balance to strike - I think smarxist is generally on point here, but generally the games that really stick are the ones that get highly opinionated about what kind of experience they want to deliver. If you go to wide, and your designs start to serve 'accessibility' more then 'experience', then you end up with Knack. e: Just for clarification - when I say 'Highly Opinionated', that doesn't mean 'Mechanically Hard'. It could mean that, but it's more that you are executing on an abstract vision without compromise. I'd call Obra Dinn a Highly Opinionated game. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 22:22
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For a game like Dark Souls and its ilk, the question is how much of a game there is left once you've made it easy to beat. If you've designed a game whose whole point is to be extremely difficult to beat and that's what the whole game design revolves around, is there really anything left once you take the difficulty out? I mean, I don't think anyone would say that Dark Souls has a gripping story that has to be experienced or anything. I played Dark Souls a bit. I didn't like the open-endedness and lack of narrative storytelling, and it was way too difficult for me. It just wasn't for me, and that's fine. If I felt the game would have been worth playing through by any means I could've just cheated through it, but I didn't get the feeling that there was anything worth experiencing for me once combat was removed so I didn't bother. I guess some people would enjoy the impressive set pieces and huge bosses regardless of difficulty, but I'm not sure most of them would find it worth the full price of a new game just for that. I dunno, I just feel like... when you make a game like Dark Souls and you charge $60 for it, I think it's more honest to say "the difficulty is the point of the experience, there isn't $60 worth of fun here if you don't like that sort of thing" rather than shoehorning in a super easy mode so that anyone can beat it while not actually delivering much in the way of interesting things for those who more or less skip the intended combat experience.
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Jul 30, 2022 22:25
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There are people who are very good at Dark Souls, for whom Dark Souls is indeed pretty easy to beat. They still play Dark Souls. They play Dark Souls a lot. In fact, instead of being the people who are least interested in Dark Souls, they play and enjoy Dark Souls the most of all! The design with the multiplayer aspects is designed around retaining those players. Asking for the game to be optionally more accessible is not asking for the removal of all challenge. It's based on the idea that challenge can only be a subjective notion based on the capabilities and experience of each player. Equivalently, the minority of players who have played every Soulslike would also benefit from higher difficulty options to give them back the failure/success cycle they no longer get. I don't want a super-easy story mode. I want a challenge that feels fair *to me*. Why do we keep circling around this point of removing all challenge? It's infuriating and feels in bad faith. Also I'm annoyed by the "not all games have to" blah blah framing. The status quo is that games like Celeste are in the absolute minority! For wide range of genres, there are very few, or even no equivalent to these games that offer more accessibility.
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Jul 30, 2022 22:50
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I didn't phrase the "game isn't for you" argument very well. What I meant was: a gamer in good faith attempts to engage with the game, because they reasonably believe it to be something they'd enjoy. They aren't able to engage because of difficulty, and the dev's response is "this game isn't for you". I am perfectly willing to accept that e.g. someone who only plays racing games is probably not going to be interested in a walking simulator, and the devs of the walking simulator probably shouldn't be trying to structure their game to appeal to fans of racing games. And AAA games do often end up feeling super unfocused due to the attempt to rope in as many players as possible. But when you have, say, someone who loves Metroidvanias, and you've made a cool but also turbo-hard Metroidvania game, you can expect people to show up saying things like "this game looks like it's a perfect match for my interests, but I'm simply not good enough at it, can I please have an easier play mode."
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Jul 30, 2022 22:52
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the best bad adaptive difficulty was Max Payne where it couldn't tell if you died if you reloaded the game which made it get absurdly difficult by the end if you manually quickloaded every time you died
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Jul 30, 2022 22:53
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Triarii posted:I also don't mean to overstate the effect - it's not like a game is ruined by having difficulty settings. There's just something a little extra spicy about a game that only presents one way ahead and you just gotta fight through it. this is entirely a personal preference but ive really, really have developed a liking for highly confident, focused art. stuff that knows exactly what it wants to be, and hopes you'll meet it on its level, or not at all. *even if* it's not something I particularly enjoy I tend to respect stuff that has that level of self-confidence (this can include things like a lack of customization but absolutely isn't limited to it, nor does it have to include that at all)
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Jul 30, 2022 22:58
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Fangz posted:There are people who are very good at Dark Souls, for whom Dark Souls is indeed pretty easy to beat. They still play Dark Souls. They play Dark Souls a lot. In fact, instead of being the people who are least interested in Dark Souls, they play and enjoy Dark Souls the most of all! The design with the multiplayer aspects is designed around retaining those players. I can speak a bit to why Dark Souls 'works' here - or more broadly, why games with structured challenges can retain players. A game that allows you to *be* good at it can be very fun even after you mastered it's systems. It's from that mastery of systems that the fun is derived. Dark Souls is an example of this in action, but I think games like Devil May Cry 3/4/5 are stronger examples, where styling on the game is a literal system built into it. Games like WoW scratch that same itch while also providing constant new challenges (and optional difficulties!). It's very fun to be good at DMC / WoW / etc. Necessarily though, games where you are allowed to be 'good', you are also allowed to be 'bad'. If a game doesn't allow you to flex on it's systems enough - if the game doesn't have enough depth, then it's not fun to be good at it -- It's forgone conclusion, and that's not really fun to put a lot of time into. Specifically to this point: quote:Why do we keep circling around this point of removing all challenge? It's infuriating and feels in bad faith. I mean, the AAA space is constantly trending on that direction. The mobile space also does this as well in a much more insidious ways, but that's a whole other can of worms. Focusing on the AAA space, while it's certainly not universal, the trend is to cast as wide of a net as possible. Part of that means sanding down systems, which means less room for expression of skill, which necessarily means a reduction in difficulty. Difficulty is highly subjective of course, but I think the conversation about "when is 'accessible' too much, and how do you identify that?' is worthwhile. I don't really have answers here, but I'm always interested in the conversation. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 23:05
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So just don’t turn on the hypothetical easy mode options and continue feeling like a cool dude for being really good at whatever the game is.
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Jul 30, 2022 23:07
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History Comes Inside! posted:So just don’t turn on the hypothetical easy mode options and continue feeling like a cool dude for being really good at whatever the game is. I prefer to flip it around: "allow the player to feel like a badass by opting into hard mode." A lot of players feel super self-conscious about enabling easy mode. But either way you approach it, it has to be done with care. One thing that I think Rogue Legacy 2 did that's really neat is that after you beat the game, when you go into New Game+, you are presented with an array of extra difficulty modifiers you can opt into. Some of them don't change things much (e.g. "enemies move 8% faster"), some of them are much more significant ("every enemy has a substantial chance to be a miniboss", or "this zone's characteristic hazard has been enhanced"). The game scores your "burden", i.e. how much harder you've made things on yourself, and you're required to increase your burden by a certain amount if you want to get access to certain postgame content. So there's a certain incentive to figure out how high of a burden you can handle, if you're the type that tries to reach the limits of their skill. Or you can just leave things as-is and replay the game at its base difficulty!
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Jul 30, 2022 23:22
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:e: Just for clarification - when I say 'Highly Opinionated', that doesn't mean 'Mechanically Hard'. It could mean that, but it's more that you are executing on an abstract vision without compromise. I'd call Obra Dinn a Highly Opinionated game. yeah it tends to be a source of self-confidence and focus. It doesn't even have to be some sort of extreme auteurist statement or something, Dragon Quest games are incredibly accessible (despite not actually having difficulty settings) but they are singularly focused on being Dragon Quest games, versus say, a generic Ubisoft open-worlder.
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Jul 30, 2022 23:31
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:
That's irrelevant to my point. My point is that posters like you keep making points like quote:Necessarily though, games where you are allowed to be 'good', you are also allowed to be 'bad'. ... when no one is asking that games stop allowing you to be bad! I want games to stop forcing me to be bad with no option to be good. quote:Focusing on the AAA space, while it's certainly not universal, the trend is to cast as wide of a net as possible. Part of that means sanding down systems, which means less room for expression of skill, which necessarily means a reduction in difficulty. Difficulty is highly subjective of course, but I think the conversation about "when is 'accessible' too much, and how do you identify that?' is worthwhile. I don't really have answers here, but I'm always interested in the conversation. This is a completely tangential point to whether games should offer you options. Indeed it's the *lack* of options, the lack of trust for players, the removal of stuff like mod support, that makes "casting as wide of a net as possible" problematic, because once you combine "there should be only one way to play" with casting a wide net, that's when systems get sanded down and skill gets removed. Once you get only one way to play, you will inevitably end up with players who find the game too hard and players who find the game too easy. You keep making this argument be about your desire for challenge, but I'm saying the point is designers should ensure your access to that challenge be not a matter of being luckily in the middle part of the bell curve that happens to match the type of people the devs designed for. You've also skipped my point about lack of alternatives. Oh sure, there's various generic ubisoft games, but Assassin's Creed isn't really Dark Souls except with more forgiving timing, is it? There might be lots of easy AAA games in some genres, but other genres are extremely under-served. Prior to Celeste, basically there *weren't* any possibly-easy platformer games. As AAA continues to get eaten by F2P, there actually isn't that many options at all. Fangz fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 23:35
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I think part of the disagreement might be coming from the word "should." I don't think I'd disagree with any of the arguments in particular about giving games ways of changing how difficult they are in terms of the impacts they would have (they'd allow more people to play the game, some of whom couldn't otherwise progress at all, people want to play in different ways, sometimes people just want to chill out, playing in one way doesn't impact people who play in a different way, etc), and I wouldn't disagree that there are a lot of benefits to these aspects, and I could even agree that as a whole, this is something games should generally do better (especially given that AAA games have the time and resources to do it well), but I would definitely disagree with blanket statements like "players should be able to make all games as easy as they want." I definitely don't think it's wrong for any particular game to make a decision to make something in a certain way, in the sense that they "should" do something else. You can definitely argue about the merits of decisions, whether they think they're good decisions or not, and what differences you'd personally like to see, but if we're going to consider games as being some form of creative expression, I really don't like the attitude of there being some kind of objectively correct/incorrect ways to make them That said, I also think there's a difference between accessibility in terms of like, game difficulty, and stuff like colorblind mode, ability to remap controls, change the font size, subtitles for audio, etc. For the most part I think those kinds of accessibility things are less likely to conflict with the core game, and if there's not a particular impact on the game itself, it's probably better for this kind of thing to be accommodated
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Jul 30, 2022 23:58
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yeah "should" is the thing. if we accept that mechanical aspects including mechanical difficulty are part of the game's design and aesthetics, then it's hard for me to come down any side other than "the designers should do what they want". this doesn't preclude anyone from having their own preferences on what they like in games, and like many things it'll end up being a question of personal taste whether or not you like the game design. the question of it being an obligation is where most of the hostility comes from, i think
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Jul 31, 2022 00:02
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Feels Villeneuve posted:this is entirely a personal preference but ive really, really have developed a liking for highly confident, focused art. stuff that knows exactly what it wants to be, and hopes you'll meet it on its level, or not at all. *even if* it's not something I particularly enjoy I tend to respect stuff that has that level of self-confidence (this can include things like a lack of customization but absolutely isn't limited to it, nor does it have to include that at all) My personal opinion is that high confidence is the secret sauce of the (AAA but probably indie?) industry right now, at least in press and reviews. If you're tepid about any of your systems or presentation, you'll be lambasted for it. If you refuse to back down, you'll run a high 80s MC if your title is solid. I like Ubisoft games. I think they're like watching a developer try to iterate out of a panel comic, where a broad number of people look at it and go "it's a four panel comic I've seen this" and some of their games are trying to do something unique in that structure, and some are trying to feel different without doing unique things. I enjoy most of them, but I don't think they present any of them with confidence. It always feels like their marketing is asking "is this what you wanted?" And I think press dogs on them a bit as a result. The real oil and water is when your crazy confidence produces the correct hype cycle and the game doesn't land well. I think that's a fairly catastrophic side of the risk/reward of pure confidence but up until like...no man's sky? There was zero reason to ever not present that level of confidence. It didn't even really hurt sales there or times before, unless you were showing up with a "WoW Killer". E: another quick point : accessibility costs. It takes time, difficult testing, actual care in implementation, and money. To say any game should or could meet a standard or just have a feature to X is like asking folks to just turn the multiplayer switch on. I know y'all aren't naive to that but reminding the discussion if that helps ground it in "how much accessibility is appropriate?". I'm very happy that we are adding a ton in as a policy with no regard to short term profitability, but most of what goes in will not be positive ROI, which means you're putting design under the gun immediately. Elden Ring as a topic is usually focused on because it actually WOULD sell more copies (and ER is probably the most roundabout accessible of their library). MJBuddy fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 00:13
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If you can accept that games should make allowance for colour blindness, why is it different to say that games should make allowance for the fact that human reaction times vary by a factor of two or more, so for significant numbers of players the game is effectively running at twice the speed and there's nothing they can do about it? (If I may be snippy, I would suggest that the difference is that the gaming community is more used to the idea that having faster reaction times makes you a better person and people with slow reaction times deserve to suffer, when it's socially unacceptable to think that of colour perception.) Lemming posted:but if we're going to consider games as being some form of creative expression, I really don't like the attitude of there being some kind of objectively correct/incorrect ways to make them I don't think criticising an artwork is implicitly saying there's objective correctness in art. If someone says "no artwork should shoot spikes into viewers eyeballs/be made of the skin of endangered animals/display child pornography", it would be extremely anal to protest that as an objective constraint on creative expression and too much of a blanket statement. If people can come up with a persuasive reason for a game to not grant difficulty options, then fine. But "some games are about the challenge" isn't one, because it fails to engage with my point that I *want those difficulty options so I can engage with that challenge*. Fangz fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 00:14
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MJBuddy posted:I like Ubisoft games. I think they're like watching a developer try to iterate out of a panel comic, where a broad number of people look at it and go "it's a four panel comic I've seen this" and some of their games are trying to do something unique in that structure, and some are trying to feel different without doing unique things. I enjoy most of them, but I don't think they present any of them with confidence. It always feels like their marketing is asking "is this what you wanted?" And I think press dogs on them a bit as a result. to be honest the last ubisoft game i played that felt like it had that almost player-hostile attitude of "this is the poo poo we wanted to make, if you don't like that, too bad" was Far Cry 2, which is also probably the best open-world game they ever made. it's certainly the most interesting. everything in that game feels like it was part of a single conception of what they wanted, down to the gross injury animations, to the uh "diegetic" UI of stuff like the map screen being a paper map that you pull up in front of you in first person i'd kill for another Ubisoft game where the world felt like it was out to kill you, rather than like a big playmat of activities to do Feels Villeneuve fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 00:27
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Fangz posted:[...] If someone says "no artwork should shoot spikes into viewers eyeballs/be made of the skin of endangered animals/display child pornography" [...] the reason these things would be considered bad are because of our senses of ethics, not due to any question of aesthetics. the reason discussions on this become heated and toxic is because there's disagreement on whether this is an ethical or an aesthetic question, and this is a recipe for really contentious arguments (in other words i don't think gamers are uniquely toxic or anything, this is specifically the type of discussion in art that tends to be extremely combative)
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Jul 31, 2022 00:38
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Fangz posted:If you can accept that games should make allowance for colour blindness, why is it different to say that games should make allowance for the fact that human reaction times vary by a factor of two or more, so for significant numbers of players the game is effectively running at twice the speed and there's nothing they can do about it? This is part of why I was trying to be careful with my language; I think if something is going to impact the core of your game, like the main thing you're trying to do with the game, then that's a reasonable choice to do something that would end up making the game less accessible for some people. Admittedly I can't think of an example offhand, but I can imagine that if someone made a game that was really focused on the use of color, it might be difficult or impossible to make a version that's accessible for people who are color blind. Like there are plenty of paintings that would lose a lot of their nuance and impact if you saw them and you were colorblind, I don't think it means that the artist "should" have painted it differently I think for things like colorblindness, remapping controls, better subtitles, ability to resize fonts, etc, I think those are all things that are significantly less likely to impact the core of the game, which is why I said generally, those are probably good things to do, given time and resource constraints. I think the core mechanics of a game are much, much more likely to be intimately related to how "difficult" the game is, and it's going to be much more likely that changing the difficultly will have a bigger impact on how the game is played, which is why I think it's much more often going to be in that area where it's much more difficult to be able to reasonably say that one choice is the "wrong" one vs another choice Fangz posted:I don't think criticising an artwork is implicitly saying there's objective correctness in art. If someone says "no artwork should shoot spikes into viewers eyeballs/be made of the skin of endangered animals/display child pornography", it would be extremely anal to protest that as an objective constraint on creative expression. Alright, I think this is a little bit unfair. We're talking about video games, not insanely hosed up crimes. I think you can reasonably intuit that nobody here is saying morality doesn't exist but in the eye of the beholder. I tried to be reasonable in pointing out the particular use of the word "should" and that it has a lot of heavy implications behind it, and that was likely a big piece of the disagreement, because people here on both sides are pretty clearly passionate about the topic Fangz posted:If people can come up with a persuasive reason for a game to not grant difficulty options, then fine. But "some games are about the challenge" isn't one, because it fails to engage with my point that I *want those difficulty options so I can engage with that challenge*. A strong, reasonable reason is "the creator of the game didn't want to make that game." It's not like it's trivial to make a game fun and engaging in the first place, let alone also with a bunch of different difficulties, regardless of whether that's even the kind of game the developers wanted to make. Like yeah, I also think it's totally reasonable to be frustrated if a game you would otherwise want to play doesn't have those options, and I think it's reasonable and valid to be annoyed with them and say you think it's lovely. But I also think it's valid for developers to make something in the way they want to make it I think Getting Over It is a great example of this - it's literally a game specifically made to gently caress you over and be unreasonably frustrating and piss you off. The fucker even makes fun of you for it while you're playing it. But man, it really would have been a completely different game with a bunch of difficultly settings, and I really don't think it would have been better for it. I get that it's an extreme example and *most* games aren't specifically trying to make you pissed off, so I'm not trying to argue that it somehow invalidates the idea that it's good for games to have more difficulty options, but I think it's a good example of something that I don't think someone could make a really convincing case that it "should" have difficultly settings
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Jul 31, 2022 00:40
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Fangz posted:If people can come up with a persuasive reason for a game to not grant difficulty options, then fine. But "some games are about the challenge" isn't one, because it fails to engage with my point that I *want those difficulty options so I can engage with that challenge*. I mean, that is definitely the desired experience some developers want to deliver. There are a lot of games where the structured content is designed to be something you have work at to overcome. Depending on how familiar with genre conventions, that may take a longer or shorter time, but if the goal is to deliver this consistent experience, then that's that. Even if they wanted to, it's a lot of work to go back and add simpler modes. A Technical Platformer like Meatboy would require a lot of time to build an 'easy mode' into it. Some games are about the challenge. Most of the those games are not designed to be an on-boarding experience for the genre. E: Getting Over It is great. It's super opinionated. It delivers a very specific experience. It's a hard game, and it has managed to deliver this all in a way where basically no one has any affordance, so the experience is remarkably consistent across players. It's a very cool, well executed idea. Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 01:02
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Lemming posted:This is part of why I was trying to be careful with my language; I think if something is going to impact the core of your game, like the main thing you're trying to do with the game, then that's a reasonable choice to do something that would end up making the game less accessible for some people. Admittedly I can't think of an example offhand, but I can imagine that if someone made a game that was really focused on the use of color, it might be difficult or impossible to make a version that's accessible for people who are color blind. Like there are plenty of paintings that would lose a lot of their nuance and impact if you saw them and you were colorblind, I don't think it means that the artist "should" have painted it differently Most difficulty options are not that hard to implement. Letting people slow down the game speed by a few percent is not massively more challenging than rejigging the UI to accomodate font rescaling, or designing for colour blindness. quote:Alright, I think this is a little bit unfair. We're talking about video games, not insanely hosed up crimes. I think you can reasonably intuit that nobody here is saying morality doesn't exist but in the eye of the beholder. I tried to be reasonable in pointing out the particular use of the word "should" and that it has a lot of heavy implications behind it, and that was likely a big piece of the disagreement, because people here on both sides are pretty clearly passionate about the topic Where do you draw the line here? Because the line seems to be drawn at: "any criticism of games is impossible outside of pointing out outright criminality." Like, what do you get out of: quote:A strong, reasonable reason is "the creator of the game didn't want to make that game." What critique is actually allowed by this? The reality here is that you're supposed to take the subjectivity as implicit. When I say "all games should have difficulty options", that's me saying "I want all games to have difficulty options, it sucks, for me, that I can't play the majority of games I want to play". The creator may have chosen to do this thing, but I choose to say that by doing this thing, the creator is being cruel to me just so some assholes can feel they are better than me. It's an unnecessary bit of pedantry to raise this whole creator choice/objective correctness/is it valid to do X stuff. I mean I don't jump on people who critique AAA games as being too dumbed down with "the creator choose this, are your saying their choice isn't valid!!!?" quote:I think Getting Over It is a great example of this - it's literally a game specifically made to gently caress you over and be unreasonably frustrating and piss you off. The fucker even makes fun of you for it while you're playing it. But man, it really would have been a completely different game with a bunch of difficultly settings, and I really don't think it would have been better for it. I get that it's an extreme example and *most* games aren't specifically trying to make you pissed off, so I'm not trying to argue that it somehow invalidates the idea that it's good for games to have more difficulty options, but I think it's a good example of something that I don't think someone could make a really convincing case that it "should" have difficultly settings Sure I can. There's frustrating and then there's "this game is impossible". The game is designed around you getting over a series of challenges and then being faced with a new challenge that fucks you over in a new way, with narration triggered as a result of that. The player is meant to engage with each of the new and different ways the game fucks you over. The game fails as a design if the player never gets over the first obstacle after 2000 hours of play and thus never encounters any of the cleverness the designer puts into it. Adding in options to alter the game's speed would probably be fairly simple addition. Canine Blues Arooo posted:I mean, that is definitely the desired experience some developers want to deliver. There are a lot of games where the structured content is designed to be something you have work at to overcome. Depending on how familiar with genre conventions, that may take a longer or shorter time, but if the goal is to deliver this consistent experience, then that's that. Even if they wanted to, it's a lot of work to go back and add simpler modes. A Technical Platformer like Meatboy would require a lot of time to build an 'easy mode' into it. Again. I want difficulty options so I CAN RECEIVE THAT DESIRED EXPERIENCE. This is why I am getting pissed off. I keep making this point but it seems to just slide off. It is impossible for a game to structure content to deliver a consistent experience unless it recognises that players are different. Fangz fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 01:06
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Fangz posted:Most difficulty options are not that hard to implement. Letting people slow down the game speed by a few percent is not massively more challenging than rejigging the UI to accomodate font rescaling, or designing for colour blindness. I mean, maybe it's not massively more challenging in that both things are actually very hard to do. Though they require different specialties to do each. Just run the engine at a different speed is an entire category of funny YouTube videos. For language, you have to retest virtually the entire game UI in every localization (there's certainly ways to streamline, but man some languages are character heavy!). I'm of split minds as to whether a game should be designed with accessibility at it's core or if it should be added in once the product is through Alpha. Probably for some features it should be early and some later if it works.
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Jul 31, 2022 01:18
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Fangz posted:Again. I want difficulty options so I CAN RECEIVE THAT DESIRED EXPERIENCE. This is why I am getting pissed off. I keep making this point but it seems to just slide off. For games with challenging structured content where that content is the point, you just have to put in the time and effort. The desired experience is 'you must perform this well to accomplish this goal', and a difficulty slider compromises that. A personal example for me is that I'm working on grinding out Master Mode in Tetris Effect where you have to clear 300 lines at G20 with increasingly strict rules. It's really hard. If there was an option to relax the rules, or to make it so I only had to clear 200 lines, or whatever slider one could imagine here, it's no longer delivering the intended experience. The intended experience IS this enormously difficult gauntlet - that is the design, so much so that little micro adjustments to rules around repeat rate have been made to further fine tune it over the years. I might not ever finish it, but it'll be a hell of a day if/when I do. No one is wrong for not wanting to engage with that kind of stuff. Do what is most fun for you, but some games are designed such that the expectation is that player has to meet the challenge as presented.
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Jul 31, 2022 01:20
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Fangz posted:Most difficulty options are not that hard to implement. If trying to learn about gamedev has taught me anything, it’s that nothing is easy to implement. 
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Jul 31, 2022 01:21
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:For games with challenging structured content where that content is the point, you just have to put in the time and effort. The desired experience is 'you must perform this well to accomplish this goal', and a difficulty slider compromises that. A personal example for me is that I'm working on grinding out Master Mode in Tetris Effect where you have to clear 300 lines at G20 with increasingly strict rules. It's really hard. If there was an option to relax the rules, or to make it so I only had to clear 200 lines, or whatever slider one could imagine here, it's no longer delivering the intended experience. The intended experience IS this enormously difficult gauntlet - that is the design, so much so that little micro adjustments to rules around repeat rate have been made to further fine tune it over the years. I might not ever finish it, but it'll be a hell of a day if/when I do. Imagine playing Master Mode at 2x the normal speed. Or 4x. Or 10x. Can you still beat it with time and effort? There is a point at which the game becomes so hard that you can't just put in the time and effort. It is physically impossible for you as a player. The purpose of the difficulty setting is to get the game to a state where your time and effort actually matters and you obtain this difficult gauntlet - and not an experience where you are basically just pressing random buttons because it makes no difference. Even speedrunners hate crap that requires sub-frame-level precision. There's a threshold, which varies from person to person, where a game crosses from a matter of skill to a matter of pure luck. A game being "about challenge" ceases to be about challenge when it breaches that threshold. Fangz fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 01:27
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:For games with challenging structured content where that content is the point, you just have to put in the time and effort. The desired experience is 'you must perform this well to accomplish this goal', and a difficulty slider compromises that. A personal example for me is that I'm working on grinding out Master Mode in Tetris Effect where you have to clear 300 lines at G20 with increasingly strict rules. It's really hard. If there was an option to relax the rules, or to make it so I only had to clear 200 lines, or whatever slider one could imagine here, it's no longer delivering the intended experience. The intended experience IS this enormously difficult gauntlet - that is the design, so much so that little micro adjustments to rules around repeat rate have been made to further fine tune it over the years. I might not ever finish it, but it'll be a hell of a day if/when I do. You don't seem to understand that for some people, they are literally physically incapable of performing to the same standard that the "statistically average human gamer" meets that the designer has been designing around. A flat difficulty level for everyone does not produce a consistent experience! For much the same reason that a flat $100 tax on everyone does not produce the same level of hardship.
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Jul 31, 2022 01:32
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MJBuddy posted:I mean, maybe it's not massively more challenging in that both things are actually very hard to do. Though they require different specialties to do each. There's a programming challenge, but I would argue that if anything, games with reaction time difficulty have an easier time of things. It's much harder to add difficulty options to the likes of XCOM, where giving enemies one fewer points of HP so they can be one-shot by a grenade dramatically changes the encounter design. The space between "boringly trivial" and "mathematically impossible" could be tiny. So yes, that's one situation where I can accept difficulty settings might not be suitable. But these "challenge based games" people mention are not those. I will also point out that allowing programmatic tuning of the speed of game events is good for your development process beyond difficulty settings. It's an essential element of allowing you to tune the gamefeel. So in this case you should absolutely implement this early so you can respond to playtester feedback. The case with Celeste was that their assist settings were also their debug settings. Perhaps this is not always the case, but often it could be. Fangz fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 01:51
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Fangz posted:Most difficulty options are not that hard to implement. Letting people slow down the game speed by a few percent is not massively more challenging than rejigging the UI to accomodate font rescaling, or designing for colour blindness. Difficultly options need to be designed, and game design is really hard. Like, sure, in some games, slowing down the speed might be appropriate, but that's not always going to be reasonable, valid, or fun. If it's a strategy game, how do you balance it, so it's easier but the gameplay is still focused on being strategic? It'd be straightforward to make every game trivial, but if you're arguing you want degrees of difficultly, then that's a whole new design space that needs to be accommodated for. I'm not saying it's necessarily difficult in many situations, but there are absolutely games where it's not straightforward. And yeah, for game criticism, I explicitly already said that I think there are plenty of reasonable criticisms to make (I even pointed out some: "You can definitely argue about the merits of decisions, whether they think they're good decisions or not, and what differences you'd personally like to see"). I'm trying to be specific around terminology because again, "should" has a lot of weight behind it that if you use that word, you're communicating even if you don't necessarily mean to. My bet is that if you had said "I want all games to have difficulty options, it sucks, for me, that I can't play the majority of games I want to play" to begin with, you wouldn't have gotten the same kind of pushback on this topic. I absolutely agree that it's good and healthy to criticize games! I think people who make games have latitude to make games in the way they want to make them, and we as players have the same latitude to criticize and talk about what we think rules and what we think sucks. I think the core of the disagreement is here - "The game fails as a design if the player never gets over the first obstacle" - I absolutely disagree with this. I can't really think of any kind of art where it would be reasonable or expected for everyone to fully "get it," regardless of what that means (not everyone is going to follow what happened in a book, or get the themes of a movie, or be moved by a painting in the way the artist intended). I think it's a reasonable goal for a game to have to be broadly accessible in that way, but I don't think that kind of thing determines if a specific game is a success or a failure
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Jul 31, 2022 02:01
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Fangz posted:The case with Celeste was that their assist settings were also their debug settings. Perhaps this is not always the case, but often it could be. It sure was for my game. Invincibility, super speed, enemies dying in one hit, enemies not being able to target the player, spawning in healing/ammo; hell, even photo mode was originally made so I could get a better look at certain complicated effects that weren't behaving properly.
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Jul 31, 2022 02:03
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Jabor posted:You don't seem to understand that for some people, they are literally physically incapable of performing to the same standard that the "statistically average human gamer" meets that the designer has been designing around. I don't buy this generally speaking. Yeah, there are some real extreme cases where *a lot* is being asked, but very frequently it's just a function of effort in. Again, I really want to stress that I don't fault anyone for not wanting to engage with that kind of stuff - no one is lesser because they look at something super hard and say, 'na fam'. In the same way, I think that most people can learn an instrument to high competency on average. In both cases, that might mean thousands of hours of investment and that's a really tough mountain to climb. Unless you are missing digits or have major eyesight issues, there are very few challenges in even the most difficult games that require even 'below average' reaction times. In nearly all cases, it's just a skill that needs to be practiced and trained. quote:Imagine playing Master Mode at 2x the normal speed. Or 4x. Or 10x. Can you still beat it with time and effort? If it's physically possible, probably? It would just mean a steeper climb, and honestly, one that I probably *wouldn't* do - I'd tap out at some point. For example, the current world record for 40 line clears in Tetris is 14.825. I'm a pretty competent Tetris player and I even know what steps I'd have to take to think about getting a time sub 15.00, but I also know it's an enormous investment. Do I want to climb the 40 line time trial leaderboard at the expense of every other game right now? Not really... Canine Blues Arooo fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 02:10
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