222 réponses à ce sujet

[The Hierophant]

It seems like EA is planning on dumbing down gameplay features for all their franchises in order to reintroduce them in future titles as if they're brand spanking new innovations.

[Vroom Vroom]

Same here, I used to start the game installation, then sit back and read through the manuals. Two hours of getting the basics? Make that half an hour reading the manual and perhaps another half of an hour getting familiar with actually pressing the buttons, for which things like tutorials are usually for, done.

 

The decision to quit giving out manuals with games a couple years back was the biggest change to videogaming in my opinion and one for the worse, not the better.

The only ones you can fid nowadays are either located as .pdf stowed away back in the game folder or hidden behind various menu selections ingame. Not the places an average gamer looks at first thing after opening his box. That's how it was just some years ago, you got your new game, you opened the box and there's two things jumping in your face, the disc and the manual.

 

The real issue here isn't that games are too hard to learn, it's that they are not documented properly to even give people the option to learn it without plunging headfirst into the water and figuring things out via trial and error.

I agree, when they stopped printing manuals it really hit me hard. I'd always read the manuals on the ride home from the store, I absolutely adored the manuals. It was also quite common for some of them to preface the situation, some of them even did it in really creative ways like how Saint Row 1's instruction manual presented the situation to you in the form of a police report to an undercover cop that had just infiltrated the 3rd Street Saints (some good foreshadowing right there)...

 

I know it wasn't the last game to come out with an instruction manual, but ironically the last instruction manual that I remember going through was Dead Space 1's. I remember sitting in the parking lot of one of the grocery stores reading it while my dad did errands XD   

 

Sadly that's the excuse they used to defend the genre shift to a cover shooter for DS3.

I'm glad I never bothered with 3. I figured that I'd miss out on content because I didn't have anyone to play it Co-Op with and I was also turned off by all the talk of microtransactions being tied to the ammo. 

[Vroom Vroom]

easy for you to say, i cant even use a smartphone, hell i have problems using a ATM...

We are in the same boat then, because I don't have and have never had a smartphone and I've never used an ATM. 

[Farangbaa]

I know it is, I'm just not convinced on the scale of difficulty being "years" for an adult versus "weeks" for a child. My mom picked up a controller for the first time and within an hour or so had a decent enough grasp of the controls to be able to play Mass Effect 2. Not like a seasoned veteran but well enough.

I was totally pulling those figures out of where my food leaves my body . I was just illustrating there's a big difference between learning to play games as a child (as presumably nearly everyone of us here has) or as an adult.

But to be fair to myself, it took my mom literally years to figure out how the VCR worked.. at which point we got a DVD player and she had to start all over again. The fact that the symbols used on both were exactly the same meant nothing to her, and this baffled me as a child. But to her the VCR was already something new and strange, while to me it was just one of the things that was always there in the world. The DVD was just from another realm completely to her.

She has mastered it by now though, for those who worry

[MrFob]

Kinda makes you wish back for the times when you had to configure an autoexec.bat and a config.sys to get a game running (without the ability to google instructions). That provided a low-end perseverance cut-off for PC gaming, something that seems to be sorely missing these days.

[FKA_Servo]

Yeesh. I feel like this is their takeaway from the (admittedly dismal looking) completion rates they see for all their games. But as Psychevore notes... most people aren't us. But of course, it's the opposite of what they should be taking away.

 

I thought that DAI was pretty easy, definitely easier than DAO and DA2, but I only played it once on normal and then once on hard. I was just hoping I was the awesome one.

[ObserverStatus]

Anyway, props to Hilleman for suggesting that games need to be even more homogeneous these days,  he's exactly right.

 

[MrFob]

Yeesh. I feel like this is their takeaway from the (admittedly dismal looking) completion rates they see for all their games. But as Psychevore notes... most people aren't us. But of course, it's the opposite of what they should be taking away.

 

I thought that DAI was pretty easy, definitely easier than DAO and DA2, but I only played it once on normal and then once on hard. I was just hoping I was the awesome one.

 

I think all the automated in-game telemetry severely hurts development of the medium (I know, Cpt. Obvious here, right?)

 

The point is, the percentage of customers who complete the game should not even matter to the companies that much because they care about sales and mainly initial release sale and pre-orders. How do you get those? Well, marketing is of course extremely important but the only ones who will be able to review a game before and right around release are the gaming journals and these guys will play through your game for a test anyway (I would hope).

Mouth to mouth is not going to matter so much at release but only for the longevity of sales and the main group that will perpetuate that is the core community and they will also play through the game.

Now, one may argue that because only 5% or whatever of customers see the later levels, they don't need as much attention but I think that those 5% play an important role in how the game is publicly perceived, even by those potential customers who will not play all the way through the game.

 

Apart from the whole economic conundrum, any self-respecting developer should care about the entirety of their creation. If there is ever going to be some acceptance for the idea that games can be art, not just sales products, developers have to be treated as artists, not as factory workers. Just like an author will not rush the last 10 pages of his book in the assumption that hardly anyone will ever red them or a director will not blow all his budget on the first half hour of a movie, expecting people will just leave the theatre, game developers should not just focus on the first 2 levels of their game.

 

It really does irritate me to see so many games in the last couple of years that start out brilliantly, only to loose their stride later on. It's questionable how much sense it makes economically and it's definitely deteriorating the medium as a whole.

[AventuroLegendary]

Unless you're Paradox Interactive, I'll take that claim with a grain of salt. In any case, a developer should make learning the game as much part of the experience as possible. It should be a joy to want to find out more about the game you're playing and to get better at it.

 

The Sims 2/3 was practically the only game from EA I needed to look up info outside of the game for.

[The Hierophant]

Mirror's Edge 2

 

"Get ready for an action-packed ride with new features such as:

 

-Running

-Combat

-Climbing

-Sliding

 

And other parkour maneuvers you've never seen before."

LOL, but don't forget that those features have to be excluded from 2 in order to be peddled as new in Mirror's Edge 3. Mirror's Edge 2 will be an on the rails point, and click QTE adventure game.

[Dutchess]

I wish all games would become like this: http://www.newground...tal/view/495903

 

Still a bit too hard, though. 

[Kaiser Arian XVII]

 I play The Sims, Dragon Age Origins, Dragon Age II and Dragon Age Inquisition from EA/Bioware.

 

*tries to decipher the similarity between these games*

*realizes they're all played for Romance*

[Kaiser Arian XVII]

An AAA adventure game? Bring it on.

 

Don't know about AAA, but the last Monkey Island and Myst games were good.

[SlottsMachine]

Mirror's Edge 2

 

"Get ready for an action-packed ride with new features such as:

 

-Running

-Combat

-Climbing

-Sliding

 

 

-And Running. 

[SlottsMachine]

I can only talk about the people that I know and myself, and a couple of things come to mind. If someone is a serious gamer and plays a wide variety of games it isn't that hard to learn new control schemes/game mechanics on the fly on account of the experiences you've already had. But if you don't have those experiences than obviously anything other than Call of Duty is going to seem completely alien. Anyone that is taking hours to learn the basics in a game other than an old school rpg (which I admit I wouldn't know up from down) probably doesn't play much. I understand from the publisher standpoint that you want to find new customers but if someone can't take the time to learn pretty basic stuff is it really worth jeopardizing the consumer base you already have. 

[Isichar]

What, we're freaking dumbasses or something?

To be honest, it's fun to learn a hard game.

One of the pleasures of gaming is overcoming the difficulties of a brand new experience.

Like if you play FF for the first time.

Nothing is more great than actually learning the ins and outs of the game to completely master it.

I feel the same way.

Like I remember playing BG1 as a kid and getting the **** kicked out of me by a wolf almost right away.. It was so much fun

I like getting thrown into the deep end of a game and having to figure it out.

[Fast Jimmy]

Games aren't too hard. And people aren't too stupid.

The attempts by game designers to TEACH their systems is what is failing here. Teaching systems and tutorials (let alone instruction manuals) have been completely left by the wayside in the past five years. People assume if you have to teach someone something, it is too complicated. That is completely bonkers.

Instead of sinking resources into how to make the controls of games more dumbed down, they SHOULD be investing money into the most effective tutorials and teaching methods for their games.



Then again, that only means games cost more to make. Better make every game on a controller with non-mappable buttons or customized controls and have mashing buttons the beeline method of leveling up.