Tonight's post is sponsored by Jagermeister, not because they're paying me, but because I needed to get faded enough to set free my actual anger on this subject.
These days, games are praised for being "accessible", which really just means "really fucking easy". It's an awful thing, and it is the biggest chink in the armor of the otherwise impenetrable games industry. With developers chasing the next Call of Duty in terms of sales, and publishers chasing the next Angry Birds in terms of install base, games are getting easier and easier.
This is complete bullshit. Why should those of us who have been gaming for years receive a watered-down version of a game meant to cater to the casual market? It's like suddenly making people play chess on a 4x4 grid with only two pieces.
Games used to be challenging. Not necessarily outright difficult, but challenging, and, to a lot of the old guard, that was what made them enjoyable. Modern conventions in games, however, would make you think that being coddled along a barely passable story is more than adequate. Checkpoints every 5 minutes, or even more often, linear level design, and, increasingly more often, the ability to skip entire sections of a level after 3 or so failures.
These are the reasons modern games have issues keeping the attention of their player base. Long gone is the thrill of a grueling victory after 30 attempts, and the hopelessness of failure, having to restart an entire mission after a simple mistake, or load your previous save(possibly from hours ago). Now, the victories are expected(and practically handed to you), and the defeats are even more frustrating, because you replay the same 30 seconds of the game over and over until you get it right, with no way to improve your position by doing better earlier. This is compounded because you know somewhere deep inside you that you were meant to stroll through this segment just like the rest of the game. You no longer feel your skill as a player increasing over the course of a game, and many of them have flat, stagnant difficulty curves, with the occasional spike at a boss encounter.
What complicates the matter further is the advent of the digital age at-large, with broadband access being much more commonplace, and entire maps and walkthroughs for games being posted, often in advance of release. Long gone are the days where you would have to call a tip line, purchase a strategy guide, or ask a friend when stuck, yet, with the increasing availability of resources to assist you through a game, the developers continue to dumb it down, and make it easier to navigate without assistance, which also takes away the fun of exploration.
There are some shining examples of games and developers that do it close to right, however, they're not entirely there yet, and even some of those are locked difficulties upon first load. Locked difficulties are frustrating enough in general, but are beyond the scope of tonight's discussion.
Dead Space 2 and 3 have Hardcore mode available, with extremely limited supplies, no checkpoints, and tough enemies. Dead Space 2 limits you to 3 saves over the course of an entire playthrough, while Dead Space 3 allows unlimited saves, but resets your file if you die. However, there is a workaround for that drawback in Dead Space 3, because if you pause and quit before you die, you can reload your save, making it easier overall.
Naughty Dog has probably one of the best(and worst) track records when it comes to difficulties in their more recent titles, with The Last of Us, and the first two Uncharted titles(I have yet to play the third) offering challenging, but fair experiences on the already available hard difficulty, with a much more punishing mode available after your first playthrough(Survivor/Crushing). They also do a very good job with overall encounter design, and they space their checkpoints and chapters in a way that a death can set you back a fair bit, but not so much that it ever feels unforgiving or too "old school". However, these games do autosave every time you pause, which leans back towards being too forgiving.
Batman: Arkham Origins has a mode coming called "I Am The Night", which while similar to Dead Space's Hardcore mode, doesn't allow for saves. It's also been mentioned that the campaign is roughly 12 hours long, which is troublesome, because it's not often that I(or many others) have the time to marathon a game for that length. Also of note is that the game has received generally low review scores for being a buggy, unstable, crash-laden mess, which makes I Am The Night mode all the less appealing to me, and all the more frustrating for the end-user.
Finally, we have the Souls franchise, with the PS3 exclusive Demon's Souls, and the multiplatform Dark Souls. These games are fair, yet brutal, and to them, death is just another mechanic to play with. With each death, you drop all of your currently collected souls(which do double-duty here, both as experience points and currency), and all enemies respawn. If you can reach the spot of your death, you can reclaim your lost souls, but if you die again, they are lost forever. They also are fairly non-linear, with Demon's Souls having 5 worlds, each having 5 segments that can be completed in nearly any order, including optional boss encounters, and Dark Souls having more of an open-world style. The Souls series is notorious for its high character mortality rate, and there is no easy mode, instead opting to throw you into the pool to see if you can swim.
All that having been said, I do understand the "need" for gaming to become more accessible, at least as the publishers and developers see it, but catering to that audience and alienating the veteran or hardcore gamers will in turn cripple their install base, as more and more people get sucked into the medium. The two groups aren't mutually exclusive, either, and it's high time we start returning to our collective roots, where it wasn't a guarantee that you'd finish a game.
"We choose to... do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept... and one which we intend to win..." - John F. Kennedy
These days, games are praised for being "accessible", which really just means "really fucking easy". It's an awful thing, and it is the biggest chink in the armor of the otherwise impenetrable games industry. With developers chasing the next Call of Duty in terms of sales, and publishers chasing the next Angry Birds in terms of install base, games are getting easier and easier.
This is complete bullshit. Why should those of us who have been gaming for years receive a watered-down version of a game meant to cater to the casual market? It's like suddenly making people play chess on a 4x4 grid with only two pieces.
Games used to be challenging. Not necessarily outright difficult, but challenging, and, to a lot of the old guard, that was what made them enjoyable. Modern conventions in games, however, would make you think that being coddled along a barely passable story is more than adequate. Checkpoints every 5 minutes, or even more often, linear level design, and, increasingly more often, the ability to skip entire sections of a level after 3 or so failures.
These are the reasons modern games have issues keeping the attention of their player base. Long gone is the thrill of a grueling victory after 30 attempts, and the hopelessness of failure, having to restart an entire mission after a simple mistake, or load your previous save(possibly from hours ago). Now, the victories are expected(and practically handed to you), and the defeats are even more frustrating, because you replay the same 30 seconds of the game over and over until you get it right, with no way to improve your position by doing better earlier. This is compounded because you know somewhere deep inside you that you were meant to stroll through this segment just like the rest of the game. You no longer feel your skill as a player increasing over the course of a game, and many of them have flat, stagnant difficulty curves, with the occasional spike at a boss encounter.
What complicates the matter further is the advent of the digital age at-large, with broadband access being much more commonplace, and entire maps and walkthroughs for games being posted, often in advance of release. Long gone are the days where you would have to call a tip line, purchase a strategy guide, or ask a friend when stuck, yet, with the increasing availability of resources to assist you through a game, the developers continue to dumb it down, and make it easier to navigate without assistance, which also takes away the fun of exploration.
There are some shining examples of games and developers that do it close to right, however, they're not entirely there yet, and even some of those are locked difficulties upon first load. Locked difficulties are frustrating enough in general, but are beyond the scope of tonight's discussion.
Dead Space 2 and 3 have Hardcore mode available, with extremely limited supplies, no checkpoints, and tough enemies. Dead Space 2 limits you to 3 saves over the course of an entire playthrough, while Dead Space 3 allows unlimited saves, but resets your file if you die. However, there is a workaround for that drawback in Dead Space 3, because if you pause and quit before you die, you can reload your save, making it easier overall.
Naughty Dog has probably one of the best(and worst) track records when it comes to difficulties in their more recent titles, with The Last of Us, and the first two Uncharted titles(I have yet to play the third) offering challenging, but fair experiences on the already available hard difficulty, with a much more punishing mode available after your first playthrough(Survivor/Crushing). They also do a very good job with overall encounter design, and they space their checkpoints and chapters in a way that a death can set you back a fair bit, but not so much that it ever feels unforgiving or too "old school". However, these games do autosave every time you pause, which leans back towards being too forgiving.
Batman: Arkham Origins has a mode coming called "I Am The Night", which while similar to Dead Space's Hardcore mode, doesn't allow for saves. It's also been mentioned that the campaign is roughly 12 hours long, which is troublesome, because it's not often that I(or many others) have the time to marathon a game for that length. Also of note is that the game has received generally low review scores for being a buggy, unstable, crash-laden mess, which makes I Am The Night mode all the less appealing to me, and all the more frustrating for the end-user.
Finally, we have the Souls franchise, with the PS3 exclusive Demon's Souls, and the multiplatform Dark Souls. These games are fair, yet brutal, and to them, death is just another mechanic to play with. With each death, you drop all of your currently collected souls(which do double-duty here, both as experience points and currency), and all enemies respawn. If you can reach the spot of your death, you can reclaim your lost souls, but if you die again, they are lost forever. They also are fairly non-linear, with Demon's Souls having 5 worlds, each having 5 segments that can be completed in nearly any order, including optional boss encounters, and Dark Souls having more of an open-world style. The Souls series is notorious for its high character mortality rate, and there is no easy mode, instead opting to throw you into the pool to see if you can swim.
All that having been said, I do understand the "need" for gaming to become more accessible, at least as the publishers and developers see it, but catering to that audience and alienating the veteran or hardcore gamers will in turn cripple their install base, as more and more people get sucked into the medium. The two groups aren't mutually exclusive, either, and it's high time we start returning to our collective roots, where it wasn't a guarantee that you'd finish a game.
"We choose to... do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept... and one which we intend to win..." - John F. Kennedy
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