222 réponses à ce sujet

[Fast Jimmy]

Anyone else get the feeling that this EA Executive is just really bad at playing video games and doesn't want to admit it? I'd wager money that they're still probably stuck trying to get through Ultima VIII: Pagan and failing badly at it?

 

Ah, Pagan... the Ultima game that makes EA's treatment of DA2 twenty years later seem like no-one in charge learned any lessons about letting a studio have time to actually finish making the game they want to, before they force them to rush it out the door?

 

You misspelled the name of that game. It is spelled "Ultima 9: Ascension."

[Gravisanimi]

Before mobile games gained their popularity, I would have been considered a casual.

 

I know that those don't exactly line up time wise, but I've never been one with the times when it comes to mobile devices, I got a phone with a camera on it last year.

[Sifr]

You misspelled the name of that game. It is spelled "Ultima 9: Ascension."

 

No game that has the Avatar ask "What's a Paladin?" should count as an Ultima game... at least Ultima 8 tried to be lore-faithful, as screwed as it was.

[LipsterLinley]

My friend in RL is having the exact same problem with Dragon Age Origins

[Chris]

And here i wondered why most  games today becomes more and more simplified and mostly fun in short sittings on a casual level, if you try to really dig into them and learn everything then you can chew through the content in a day or few depending on the size.

 

But i need to worry no more ! apparenty we're all idiots, thx EA ! but i think everyone already knew that.

[Gravisanimi]

I always thought that was a misnomer. Casual as I've learned through studying Game Design, means something that's accessible to everyone. And not just in regards to skill. Halo, Fallout, or Assassin's Creed is not accessible to a wide majority, for many reasons.

Yeah, I do agree with that.

[DanteYoda]

They're too hard to learn because they don't bother documenting them at all.

Well said, i wonder what the new Generation would think when they see Manuals we used back in the day..

 

[Frenrihr]

You guys and gals need to stop thinking about yourself when he says 'gamers'. He's not talking about you and me, he's talking about the average Joe/Jane who plays a game every now and then. Someone to who a controller or mouse/keyboard isn't completely natural. You know, by far the largest portion of people who buy and play games.

We, hardcore gamers, are a very small portion of the gaming community.

 

This guy is so sad.

[Frenrihr]

as someone who is hopelessly technologically inept i wholeheartedly agree with whoever said that

 

Myabe you should stick to bouncing a ball or something and not trying something that exceeds your capacity.

[Frenrihr]

Lolwut?

 

I guess I now know why Dead Space 2 was a snooze fest compared to 1. 

 

Edit: Huh, yep. They totally said that: http://www.giantbomb...y-ds3-h-554640/

 

 

EA is truly the representation of all that is wrong in the world.

[DanteYoda]

Its not that games are too hard.. Its that people aren't willing to learn..

[Sylvius the Mad]

Well said, i wonder what the new Generation would think when they see Manuals we used back in the day..

Even BG2 offered some in-game narrative guidance. CRPGs from the 1980s tended to drop you in the world right after character creation and tell you nothing at all. If you wanted to know any amount of backstory or have the vaguest hint about what to do, you had to read the manual.

I remember my first CRPG, Questron, wherein the first time the game gave me direction is was when I was told by an NPC, "Mesron wants to see you." And I knew from the manual that Mesron was the King's wizard and lived in the castle. But I had no idea where the castle was.

So I found a place that would sell me a map of the world. I saved up to get the map, bought it, and headed off toward the castle.

The map was wrong. Medieval cartography is imperfect.

When I finally got to the castle, it was huge, and I didn't know my way around. I starved to death looking for Mesron.

I will always remember that game fondly.

[Isichar]

Well said, i wonder what the new Generation would think when they see Manuals we used back in the day..

 

 

 

Gawd I miss the old days of gaming.

[Isichar]

This guy is so sad.

 

I think it's kind of funny. Basically: "EA isn't making games for gamers, they're making it for people who don't play games but might buy them anyways"

[Seraphim24]

 

Gawd I miss the old days of gaming.

 

You can still get manuals in games at times, decked out with story/characters and such. Nier was one recent example.

[Isichar]

You can still get manuals in games at times, decked out with story/characters and such. Nier was one recent example.

 

It's rare to find manuals like we use to. I remember sitting down with the original Starcraft or WarCraft 3 manuals and being up until 2-3 in the morning transfixed by those things...

[Fidite Nemini]

It's rare to find manuals like we use to. I remember sitting down with the original Starcraft or WarCraft 3 manuals and being up until 2-3 in the morning transfixed by those things...

 

I still fondly remember Wing Commander 3 for the extra work put into the manuals. They were even part of the game story, expanded the game's universe and all: Victory Streak.

[Kaiser Arian XVII]

GOG has the pdf version of manuals in most of the games it provides.

[Fidite Nemini]

GOG has the pdf version of manuals in most of the games it provides.

 

More or less every game has some documentation somewhere. The issue is that when we're talking about people that have problems learning the controls, those won't be the people to come searching through their game folders of wherever to look for manuals, when it's precisely those people that would benefit from just reading that the most.

 

The big point in having physical manuals in the game box wasn't just that they were there. Like I said, you'd be hard pressed to find a game that doesn't come with some sort of documentation. The biggest point there was to it was the manual was THERE. As in: right there, next to the game disc, jumping in your face with a big, bolded READ ME screaming at the dude that just opened the box.

 

It's surprisingly easy to get into controls, even completely unfamiliar ones, when you just read the goddamn manual. And I'm pretty sure that if I were having problems with a game for as long as two hours ... I'd be thanking the heavens for a manual that just tells me how to do it. The problem is that people have to go out of their way to search for it.

[Kaiser Arian XVII]

For some games manuals aren't enough to solve your problems. There is a code on a door and to find out you should search a vast area on the other side of the continent/map/etc. or it's just plain test of knowledge that's when you're totally screwed (should read hundreds page of codex or else)!

 

Internet Walkthroughs exist to assist us in this. And that's different from cheating.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Part of the problem with a game telling you nothing at all is that this is designed around intuitiveness--around what is "expected." And rarely, if ever, is the entire game designed around it.

Do you recall the demo of Crestwood from 2013? The one where the Inquisitor burned Red Templar boats with a fire grenade (and, the key part, this was optional and not defined by a quest point)? In Merin's group I pointed out that this made me slightly apprehensive because it's moving in a direction that asks the player to approach the world around them as real--which sounds great (though as I mentioned before it makes assumptions), but poses huge problems for the 99% of other encounters where this is not the case, where approaching the world as real breaks the game illusion.

Another example is the wooden bridge from the Keep. That's literally the only destructible element in the game, but it creates an expectation for this to work in all similar situations (maybe not all bridges, but all wooden ones). And when this doesn't work it breaks the illusion.

The entire game needs to be designed around the gameplay expectations the game builds, or it (that expectiation) can fall apart easily, leaving the player out of the experience and unsure if something works like it "should."

All of the mechanics should be documented.  If it's possible to destroy wooden structures with fire grenades, that neds to be in the rules somewhere, and every detail of the rules should be available to the player.

 

I like when the game hides from us what we're intended to do, or what we're expected to do.  But what we're able to do should be entirely transparent.

[Frenrihr]

I would have been more bothered by the streamlining if the actual game part of ME1 hadn't ranged from **** to downright monstrous.

 

This is monstrous.