MachSpeed said:You know who gives a damn about difficulty labels? People who take things too personally. Because this doesn't sound like a position that comes solely from theory. This is a position that comes from strong emotion. I'm not saying that more accessibility isn't a good thing. It would be great if they listed out explicitly what the difficulty changes are (and often they do, I'm thinking of Fire Emblem and Bayonetta specifically). I'm saying that you're arguing from a place of anger because I have never seen a label that says "WUSSBITCH." Furthermore, you place "Normal" among those labels, and I can't see the label "Normal" as anything but a neutral object. You clearly cannot, you see it as an attack on you. I've seen labels that are similar to these XTREME labels, but they have always been done so from a place of good fun, from a tone of joking around. You're arguing unreasonable extremes because you feel unreasonably extreme about this.
...it was a joke. I don't think any game actually has labels like that but plenty of games come close. And I'm not actively insulted by it. Give me some more credit. I just think it's a poor design choice.
Because diversity within a medium is a good thing.
With things like demographic representation absolutely, but that's not something you can solve by making games more "accessible", unless your definition of "accessible" is "make more protagonists not be middle-aged white dudes with stubble", in which case I'm with you, but that's a weird definition of "accessible" in a video game context.
There are a number of reasons why video games have a diversity problem. For one, they're expensive as hell, and divided up unnecessarily between consoles that are also expensive as hell. Also they're overwhelmingly white.
But, while having a skill barrier isn't necessarily keeping out any particular marginalized group, it is reducing the overall volume of people playing games. With less volume, there is less diversity.
Also a shitton of people simply can't engage with a large amount of games because they're too complex and difficult. This is nothing new.
Mostly people who would not be playing games anyway, I'd think?
Because the idea of a "game" is so thoroughly tied into complexity and skill barriers. Plenty of people who are able to engage with complex works in other mediums simply can't do so with games for arbitrary reasons.
Man is a most complex simple creature: see what he weaves, and how base his reasons for doing so.
Well, I'm sorry, I thought we were all being earnest here. I didn't think you'd make a joke in your own argument.
At any rate, I still feel that you feel that certain difficulty labels are insults. And I will say that at no point have I ever felt insulted at all by any difficulty label.
but Kex, games are not the same thing as other media
and that's ok, i think
i mean i'm not the kind of person who says 'all games have to be *games*, tests of skill, first and foremost', because no, that's arbitrary, i don't agree with that
but i don't think there's anything wrong with games making certain demands on you that other media don't
books aren't worse than movies for being inaccessible to people who can't read
I dunno, man, I can't be reasonably expected to talk in anything other than vagueries and blanket statements when I have to reiterate points and uniquely argue the same position to five different people.
I love it. Can I post it on my blog? Can I also have your blog so I have a reference?
socialist-witch-activity, and sure!
There are a number of reasons why video games have a diversity problem. For one, they're expensive as hell, and divided up unnecessarily between consoles that are also expensive as hell. Also they're overwhelmingly white.
But, while having a skill barrier isn't necessarily keeping out any particular marginalized group, it is reducing the overall volume of people playing games. With less volume, there is less diversity.
This is all true, but I think you're conflating a few unrelated things.
For one, game prices are (thankfully) going down as many consumers migrate to PC, where they can just download Steam (which is itself free) and buy games for $10 a pop instead of $60. That experience isn't typical yet, but those people are growing, and many of them are playing games (or playing them regularly) for the first time.
Because the idea of a "game" is so thoroughly tied into complexity and skill barriers. Plenty of people who are able to engage with complex works in other mediums simply can't do so with games for arbitrary reasons.
This predates video games by literal centuries though, it's also true of like, chess.
And honestly I think you're vastly underestimating the amount of people who say, don't read, or don't watch movies, or don't watch TV, for any number of reasons.
I just find movies too long for instance. I could watch them, but my patience wears thin and I near-always end up doing something else.
I am not for the record disagreeing with you per se, I would be fine with more games that were comparatively easy so long as they brought something else to the table, but I do think that games that are hard--even for things I think you would not perceive as good reasons--are also fine.
Also, it is a simple fact that we are never going to reach a point where everyone loves video games. We never reached that point with any other medium and I feel like there's this weird inferiority complex a lot of gamers have that their hobby is not taken seriously, and I feel like that affects the medium in a multitude of negative ways.
I dunno, man, I can't be reasonably expected to talk in anything other than vagueries and blanket statements when I have to reiterate points and uniquely argue the same position to five different people.
I mean, you can leave if you want.
If I'm being spoken to I assume the other person wants to talk. Don't let me hold you up if you wanted to go do something else.
but i don't think there's anything wrong with games making certain demands on you that other media don't
But those demands necessitate justification. You provided the example of books, but books necessitate literacy because otherwise their words must be spoken and heard, a demand which paper isn't capable of performing, and because written words are more permanent than spoken ones, allowing them to be passed down and preserved more easily than oral tradition. Those are justifications for requiring literacy.
Dark Souls is a game with an odd, esoteric story and that takes place in a brutal, unwelcoming world. That is a game that justifies challenge. Skyrim is similar, and yet allows the player to negate the difficulty. An unskilled player can experience the story, but the story is fundamentally changed on some level by the loss of challenge, whereas Dark Souls still makes its "easy solutions" feel challenging and fit the surrounding world.
Some people like to be challenged and derive little to no satisfaction when they're not.
There. Justified. It doesn't have to be demanded by the setting or anything. Sometimes a game just wants to be a game, and sometimes players just want a game.
MachSpeed said:Well, I'm sorry, I thought we were all being earnest here. I didn't think you'd make a joke in your own argument. At any rate, I still feel that you feel that certain difficulty labels are insults. And I will say that at no point have I ever felt insulted at all by any difficulty label.
I don't consider them insults because they're just too petty. I do consider them a needless expression of elitism. But personally? I'm pretty good at games, and I can usually beat a game at the highest difficulty. But just because that's doable doesn't mean that that's the ideal experience of the game. When a game is labelled "Easy" "Normal," and "Hard," those terms usually
1. Are not consistent enough between different games to be meaningful
2. Do not adequately convey how they will alter a game's emotional experience.
tangentially relevant to the discussion, I have yet to play it but apparently Fate Tectonics has various accessibility modes. From Rock Paper Shotgun:
Accessibility options cater to gamers with motor skill, cognitive and vision impairments:
Multiple control schemes, remappable keys and input options
Design and colour palette are resistant to 3 types of colour blindness
Advanced options for cursor speed, font size, game speed and more
Separate volume controls for music and sound effects
Full-screen and windowed modes
All menus and screens have a half-second cooldown between inputs
In-game hints and guidance for new players
Assistive tile auto-rotate feature that learns your preferences
Comprehensive save system featuring overview of progress, multiple save states per save file, and thumbnails for each save state for a quick visual reference of progress
in an attempt to maybe make this discussion less argumenty, I have a question, you don't have to answer it if you don't want to but, what is your like, platonic ideal for a game?
you can be as vague or specific as you want, I'm mostly just curious.
Some people like to be challenged and derive little to no satisfaction when they're not.
There. Justified. It doesn't have to be demanded by the setting or anything. Sometimes a game just wants to be a game, and sometimes players just want a game.
Some people do. And like I said, there are a million ways that a game can be made harder. If someone wants a game to be challenging, they can find ways to do that. And those ways don't have to be validated by the game itself, because it's fucking ridiculous to expect every game with variable difficulty to do that.
I wanted to be challenged by Dark Souls, so I chose to abstain from using the Ring of Sacrifice, use light armor, and don't use magic. These are all things that I decided were best suited to what I wanted out of the game. Just because using magic is there doesn't mean I'd want to use it, because I have determined that the challenge level of the choices I have made is what I like best. And the varying options with builds and their relatively clear difference in difficulty allowed me to easily determine when I wasn't satisfied with a difficulty level and when I was. But at no point was the presence of an easy option a detriment to the harder options, because the easy option fit in with the emotional experience the game wanted to provide. And the harder options were made clear to those who would want to use them. Everyone wins.
in an attempt to maybe make this discussion less argumenty, I have a question, you don't have to answer it if you don't want to but, what is your like, platonic ideal for a game?
you can be as vague or specific as you want, I'm mostly just curious.
The notion of a perfect work in any particular medium is just kind of fallacious on its own. I really can't answer that question, except to present games that are the perfect realization of a particular genre, and even then it's not like because, say, I think Dark Souls is a more or less perfect ARPG that another game couldn't also be a "perfect ARPG" in a different way.
I dunno, man, I can't be reasonably expected to talk in anything other than vagueries and blanket statements when I have to reiterate points and uniquely argue the same position to five different people.
My point is you're not even giving clear examples of the supposed evils you are against and you are writing these lengthy, pedantic posts sort of talking at people and giving clearer counterarguments than arguments and, I gotta say, I don't get the point. Either the one you're ostensibly trying to make or why you are trying so hard to make it in such a vague way. Which is why I say it seems pretentious. Also, not keeping up with the actual thread. It was moving on and you are kind of slowing it down with an argument that appears to basically be over.
in an attempt to maybe make this discussion less argumenty, I have a question, you don't have to answer it if you don't want to but, what is your like, platonic ideal for a game?
you can be as vague or specific as you want, I'm mostly just curious.
The notion of a perfect work in any particular medium is just kind of fallacious on its own. I really can't answer that question, except to present games that are the perfect realization of a particular genre, and even then it's not like because, say, I think Dark Souls is a more or less perfect ARPG that another game couldn't also be a "perfect ARPG" in a different way.
see if someone had asked me that question I would've actually said something pretty similar.
anyway which Dark Souls did you play
was it Dark Souls, Dark Souls That's Slightly Better But Everyone Hates It Anyway, Dark Souls Before It Was Called Dark Souls, or Victorian Dark Souls
The difficulty between different gear loadouts isn't a clearly marked differential, nor is voluntarily omitting options. The latter is just a self-imposed gimp, and if anything, the former is an unintentional result of poor balance that failed to make diverse builds viable on a roughly equal level (something we generally consider a bad thing).
I mean sure, you can start up a game and say "I'm gonna play this without using the X button", or play it with the Donkey Konga bongos or whatever. But that's not exactly a hallmark of design. It's just a really good player fucking around.
I don't think they're evils, I think a specific thing is a flaw and not even a like, a huge, world ending flaw. Just something that exists in a lot of forms and continually makes it harder for me and I would say other people to adequately engage with the medium. And I can provide examples, and I thought I've done a decent job honestly it's just buried under the fact that, again, I'm arguing against a lot of different people at once.
I mean sure, you can start up a game and say "I'm gonna play this without using the X button", or play it with the Donkey Konga bongos or whatever. But that's not exactly a hallmark of design.
And altering variables and slapping labels on them is?
Man is a most complex simple creature: see what he weaves, and how base his reasons for doing so.
I don't think the "difficulty changes a game's emotional experience" a valid argument, because more so than any other medium, games are an intensely personal, involved experience.
A movie can try to make me feel things, and it will "succeed" more often than not because I cannot control it. But not so with games, in that just with the manipulation of space and the ability to move from point to point, I react and feel things in vastly different ways.
And altering variables and slapping labels on them is?
Well it counts as "design" at least, if not necessarily a hallmark. I mean, it can only really count as that if someone in the studio does something to make it exist.
Balancing those altered variables to a good mix, turning down script patterns to be less aggressive, altering environmental hazards. That's what makes a hallmark of design.
Really impressive design would be things like Bunny Must Die, where the whole game is explicitly designed to accommodate sequence breaking and completion without key movement upgrades, including the ability to walk left.
I played WoW before, and been on the forums for it, god-rest my soul, the topics of difficulty on that forum are even more convoluted there. but achievement in WoW used to be measured by two things, Time and The number of players you've corralled like some sort Cat-herder.
Eventually, the game became more accessible, you can start to see more of the story and the encounters without putting in nearly as much time or needing quite as many people. and this pissed people to no end.
They're still probably crying about it to this day.
but the fact was, they still kept producing content for players who wanted to be "challenged", and to people on the forums it was never enough, the idea that other people could see the story or the areas or get stuff without being like them made them furious.
Difficulty and the elitism surrounding difficulty are gonna be two different things. that's just the way it is.
Ehhh, depends on which expansion you were playing in.
I thought BC and Cata hit the best balance. There was good entry-level content and good endgame challenges.
WOTLK very much fell into "enough people bitched that we trivialized everything and made no challenging content". I had a hiatus during WOTLK, temporarily came back with a promo, and cleared the new raid (ICC) in a pickup group which should not even be possible, much less easy. I quit for good during Cata, but from what I heard Pandaria went the same way as WOTLK.
Okay, but anyway, some examples off the top of my head.
Elder Scrolls series: Difficulty slider alters damage received and given. However, combat is not the focus of the game necessarily. On higher difficulty settings, the player is forced into very specific builds and has to focus almost exclusively on combat (a weaker part of the series). On lower difficulty settings, the game quickly feels trivial as players can shrug off any sort of danger.
Knights of the Old Republic series: Difficulty settings are underplayed (they're found in the game menu and the player is never directed to them) and alter difficulty checks in a manner that feels distinctly artificial and rigid, but also do very little to actually alter the difficulty of the game.
Mass Effect 1: The easiest setting isn't actually all that easy, and the harder settings merely make the game more tedious.
Mass Effect 2 and 3: Higher difficulty settings are entirely doable for many players, but create a reliance on trial and error that alters the tone of the game.
BioShock: Similar issue. By design, the game can be completed by anyone, and anyone can beat the game at pretty much any setting. But the Hard setting often just results in the game being tedious because the player isn't punished for dying, they just die more often.
Cave Story: Hard Mode is actually a One Hit Point Wonder mode, which is both an experience that the game is not built around and also not a difference communicated to the player. It also removes a weapon from the game, limiting the player's strategic options on a setting where such a thing is all the more important.
Dragon Age: Origins (haven't played the others): Hardest difficulty is, again, doable, but the player must resort to unengaging tactics (hit and run, safespotting) early on because they are left without any variety of tactics.
Wind Waker HD: Removes a mechanic (randomly dropped hearts) that the game was partially built around with little to compensate for its removal.
That's every game I could think of with a difficulty setting, for the record.
(Okay, except other Zelda games with a "Hero Mode," those usually did okay)
Ehhh, depends on which expansion you were playing in.
I thought BC and Cata hit the best balance. There was good entry-level content and good endgame challenges.
WOTLK very much fell into "enough people bitched that we trivialized everything and made no challenging content". I quit during Cata, but from what I heard Pandaria went the same way as WOTLK.
Draenor just went straight-up Farmville.
BC's balance was bullshit, BC's Approach to Keys made it such a fucking hassle to even have players for certain instances.
Like, the "difficulty" of it was in the convoluted systems wherein you needed to run all this bullshit to get a key to run even more bullshit to get another key to run into more bullshit to get the final key to start playing the instance.
WotLK had a boss that even less than 1% could kill, but because there was an easy version of him, this meant that it wasn't real or something.
and Cata failed massively because, as it turns out, developing only "hard" content means less people are gonna play when they realize the content isn't for them.
BC wasn't hard until you got into Heroics, which is when you get very firmly into "what did you expect" territory. Cata wasn't hard until you got into raids, and the difficulty in the heroics and the early raids was the good kind (don't screw up, as opposed to "grind out this gear before you even consider it").
The BC Heroic keys were kind of annoying, but you'd generally get them just by dicking around the standard questlines in the area and doing the first regular run of each dungeon. Exalted was a grind, but it always is and there wasn't much reason to bother.
My first healing job ever in WoW was a Heroic Vortex Pinnacle, some four years after I started playing, thirty minutes after I bound my controls for it, and two hours before my first raid healing job in Twilight Citadel. My idea of healing gear was my boomkin blues plus the friggen Corrupted Egg Shell. We did fine in both the heroic and the raid because people weren't asleep.
Cata didn't "fail massively" either. Subscribers dropped off because the game was aging and other MMOs were coming out -- you could see subscriptions peak and then peter out during WOTLK. The first installment you can really consider a failure would be Draenor, where you can see the subscription rate spike and then immediately drop back off. Other than that hiccup it's been following a completely typical software lifecycle curve.
By your logic BC should have failed massively as well, even though it steadily gained subscribers even as it introduced harder and harder content that almost nobody would see (Sunwell island and MgT were the only casual-accessible things they ever added in a patch during BC). Or that Pandaria would have skyrocketed back into the limelight, when in reality it was losing subscribers even faster than Cata.
But remember that the game itself was different during BC, not all the classes were balanced against each other really at all.
Up until you could actually get the gear for it, Warrior tanks were really the only tanks you could get for even Illidan, SWP couldn't be done with 3 classes with CC, the game itself was balanced around specific things, and in that sense it was unbalanced as all hell.
The key nonsense stretched farther that just the heroic dungeons, it went into the raids as well, needing a Key from SSC, from Mount Hyjal.
The difficulty eventually became in finding people to even go to those places in you weren't in the right guild.
Cata did fail in a way though, maybe it's NOT the contribution to the lost subs, but in that respect, there's a lot of reasons it switched to a more "Farmville" focus.
and all of this is regardless to the idea, that MoP tried to offer smart engagable hard-modes while still also having a farmville and people still complained.
People will always complain, some people thought BC was the easy mode compared to vanilla, some people thought WotLK was easy mode despite never defeating certain bosses, some people will still regard Cata as an easy-mode because people will always be elitist about difficulty.
The classes have never been balanced against each other all that well. Flavor of the month has been a thing from day one. I spent three years as a warrior, FFS, I've been on both sides of it throughout vanilla and two expansions, and watched them suffer through a fourth when I finally sprouted a head and abandoned ship for a class that's generally come out on top in all of them.
There will always be be people complaining, yeah.
I remember when people complained about BC having raids that dared to be completable on day one -- as opposed to raids where one or more bosses were deliberately bugged to be unkillable because the rest of the content wasn't in yet, or inaccessible until you farmed the place for a month to grind Exalted rep with some asshole sitting off in some goddamned island on the edge of the map in Azshara. I personally thought those people were kind of nuts.
I also remember when people complained about WOTLK being too easy (being one of them and all), because it had endgame raids that were not only completable on day one, but by pickup groups that weren't even geared for it. I quit before Ulduar when stuff started happening in real life. On a temporary promo, I walked into a third tier endgame raid with a pickup group wearing Naxx gear and a couple leftover blues. And we won in one night. I'll admit I probably lucked out with that group, but IMO lucking out that much should probably not be possible with brand new endgame content that supposedly requires careful coordination of 10-25 people -- because it sure didn't feel like we had that. But as always, I'm just one opinion.
The reason I liked BC and Cata was because I felt they hit a nice balance. They cut out the vanilla levels of grind, let casuals cut heir teeth on endgame content and raids, and still challenged hardcores. They also tended to leverage mechanics that forced players to pay attention instead of tank and spank gear checks and healing whac-a-mole all over the place.
BC content broke high-end guilds literally apart, it broke them. I don't think it's content can be called balanced when not even 1% of the people playing the game could complete, and those that did ended up leaving before or because of it.
Your own experiences withstanding, people really had a problem with the idea of seeing the content, or completing the content. even at easier levels.
Like, even as they were given challenges they still didn't care. the fact that easier content existed in the first place was their rallying point.
No. Sunwell Plateau broke high-end guilds. Specifically, M'uru in particular broke high-end guilds. And it still wasn't as bad as AQ or old Naxx. It was also the very last thing that happened in that expansion.
I don't remember Black Temple breaking much of anyone that made it there in the first place. It wasn't trivial by any stretch, but people cleared it fast.
You held up BC as having done something unusually brutal. I pointed out that it did indeed -- in one dungeon released at the very end of an expansion otherwise regarded for relatively merciful endgame content, and to a degree lesser than the previous norm.
Comments
i mean if anyone could do it on their first try then it would have no right to be called nightmare at all
calling it nightmare creates certain expectations
Because this doesn't sound like a position that comes solely from theory. This is a position that comes from strong emotion.
I'm not saying that more accessibility isn't a good thing. It would be great if they listed out explicitly what the difficulty changes are (and often they do, I'm thinking of Fire Emblem and Bayonetta specifically).
I'm saying that you're arguing from a place of anger because I have never seen a label that says "WUSSBITCH." Furthermore, you place "Normal" among those labels, and I can't see the label "Normal" as anything but a neutral object. You clearly cannot, you see it as an attack on you. I've seen labels that are similar to these XTREME labels, but they have always been done so from a place of good fun, from a tone of joking around.
You're arguing unreasonable extremes because you feel unreasonably extreme about this.
...it was a joke. I don't think any game actually has labels like that but plenty of games come close. And I'm not actively insulted by it. Give me some more credit. I just think it's a poor design choice. There are a number of reasons why video games have a diversity problem. For one, they're expensive as hell, and divided up unnecessarily between consoles that are also expensive as hell. Also they're overwhelmingly white.
Because the idea of a "game" is so thoroughly tied into complexity and skill barriers. Plenty of people who are able to engage with complex works in other mediums simply can't do so with games for arbitrary reasons.
and that's ok, i think
i mean i'm not the kind of person who says 'all games have to be *games*, tests of skill, first and foremost', because no, that's arbitrary, i don't agree with that
but i don't think there's anything wrong with games making certain demands on you that other media don't
books aren't worse than movies for being inaccessible to people who can't read
i think i'll go to bed, good night
At any rate, I still feel that you feel that certain difficulty labels are insults. And I will say that at no point have I ever felt insulted at all by any difficulty label.
I don't consider them insults because they're just too petty. I do consider them a needless expression of elitism. But personally? I'm pretty good at games, and I can usually beat a game at the highest difficulty. But just because that's doable doesn't mean that that's the ideal experience of the game. When a game is labelled "Easy" "Normal," and "Hard," those terms usually
My point is you're not even giving clear examples of the supposed evils you are against and you are writing these lengthy, pedantic posts sort of talking at people and giving clearer counterarguments than arguments and, I gotta say, I don't get the point. Either the one you're ostensibly trying to make or why you are trying so hard to make it in such a vague way. Which is why I say it seems pretentious. Also, not keeping up with the actual thread. It was moving on and you are kind of slowing it down with an argument that appears to basically be over.