No more learning or skill required in new games?

[progamer 14]

So it appears game developement for a lot of of games have been going downhill and away from any skill or learning. My rant on this subject:

"So I have noticed the trend lately to try and eliminate skill as a deciding factor in multiplayer games and that thinking about situations is now too hardcore. The new norm is spoon fed gameplay that has a player who has never played the game before and a player who has played the game for years be 100% equal by preventing skill from being the deciding factor. The notion that the cash cow that is COD has continued this trend of games being made to appeal to as many people as possible and then modify the game according to the biggest crybabies and whiners. And developers now try to eliminate anything that the player may have to spend more than a minute trying to learn how to do. The forums of these games are filled with people who defend the fact that games should never need skill to be good at or ever require the player to actually have to learn how to do something."

But what do you think?

[nodunit 397]

Games should never need skill to be good at...what? That has to be the silliest thing I've ever heard, all games require some form of skill, others just require a higher degree of it..

[chortles 263]

Or different skills.

[progamer 14]

No, I mean major games leaning towards the biggest possible audience. And becoming too accessable. While alienating players of past games which were more challenging and difficult. Not every game is doing this but sme games are very noticeably moving towards a casual market. Casual meaning someone who doesn't play very much.

---------- Post added at 23:17 ---------- Previous post was at 23:12 ----------

Games should never need skill to be good at...what? That has to be the silliest thing I've ever heard, all games require some form of skill, others just require a higher degree of it..

I mean some games very noticeably moving away from skill as a deciding factor.

[chortles 263]

That depends like hell on what you mean by "major games leaning towards the biggest possible audience"; for example, in Assassin's Creed 3 a dev noted that they changed the combat mechanics specifically to get away from the infamy of "press Counter to win", when previously all the prior games' devs had done was make the Papal Guard and Janissary enemies sometimes immune to insta-kill.

[progamer 14]

That depends like hell on what you mean by "major games leaning towards the biggest possible audience"; for example, in Assassin's Creed 3 a dev noted that they changed the combat mechanics specifically to get away from the infamy of "press Counter to win", when previously all the prior games' devs had done was make the Papal Guard and Janissary enemies sometimes immune to insta-kill.

Battlefield games are a good example, planetside 2, the original COD games compared to now, and a few other games I can't remember.

[JdB 151]

No, I mean major games leaning towards the biggest possible audience. And becoming too accessable. While alienating players of past games which were more challenging and difficult.

"Instant gratification". People spend money on something and they want to feel like being #1, a winner, because in their real life they are anything but that. So game developers want to accommodate that as the feelgood factor sells copies.

[celery 8]

If a game keeps your endorphine levels high for the first few hours by convincing that you're awesome at it, it will get sales and good scores because buying decisions and reviews are made with a relatively superficial glance in terms of playing time. When you realize that the game doesn't offer much after those first few hours, they already have your money.

[nodunit 397]

If a game keeps your endorphine levels high for the first few hours by convincing that you're awesome at it, it will get sales and good scores because buying decisions and reviews are made with a relatively superficial glance in terms of playing time. When you realize that the game doesn't offer much after those first few hours, they already have your money.

When you put it like that it sounds more akin to the drugification of games rather than gratification.

[chortles 263]

Video games: Because (some forms of) drug dealing (are) technically illegal!

Funny that reminder regarding buying decisions and reviews... I'm reminded of this testimonial from a self-professed "big-box" retail employee during the 2012 holiday season, as far as insight as to why the casual gamer is catered to (as well as why the Wii U name was a bad idea). For example:

In the gaming community there can be a lot of drama surrounding review scores. High scores are accused of being sellouts, and low scores come from the haters who don't understand the game. Review threads often have hundreds of comments from people talking about the score. We are the weird ones for reading reviews and talking about review scores. The public just buys games based on the series' clout or the cool commercial they saw for it. Marketing departments know this, and that's why we keep getting endless sequels, billboards, and commercials during the Super Bowl.

The day Resident Evil 6 came out, people were hyped for it because it was another Resident Evil game. They were convinced it was going to be the best thing ever. Destructoid's Jim Sterling gave it a 3 out of 10, and it wasn't the only negative review I had seen, so I asked people if they had taken the time to read any reviews before they bought it. They didn't even know what I was talking about.

As far as the bit about "people who only play Madden or Call of Duty", the implication seems to be "people who otherwise wouldn't be caught dead playing video games", not just the ages 15-to-30 "bros" who get it as a medium for interacting with drinking buddies, but guys in three-piece suits who just got out of the office. :p

[Lenyoga 326]

That's one of those trends I do not like. If you're not someone who's easily sucked in by nice visuals and quick-cut action, then those games (using COD: MW2 as reference, because that was the last one of that sort I tried) get boring quite quickly... no learning process, no feeling of accomplishment, not really many elements that make the game interesting. Celery made a very good and precise point up there - that specific line of video games is just there to draw in a broad customer base and get them hooked on short-lived action-fixes to make the maximum revenue. Well, maybe I'm putting it a bit too dramatic, but that's the basic thing I'm seeing in that situation. When I go back to some of the older SNES and N64 titles for example... man, that stuff was hard - you really felt like you did something awesome when you survived those games.

[chortles 263]

Whereas I suspect that those who "show up for the fix", so to speak, wouldn't get a sense of accomplishment out of "surviving those games"... I know that I don't play some games because I feel nothing in response to getting through them.

[froggyluv 2136]

Waiting for Mount & Blade 2. Been MP dueling since Warband's inception and theres always a new technique or style showing up and I have little doubt the sequel will continue this awesomeness.

[chortles 263]

Waiting for Mount & Blade 2. Been MP dueling since Warband's inception and theres always a new technique or style showing up and I have little doubt the sequel will continue this awesomeness.

To this day I'm still confounded by the "ballet" of Warband's melee... no wonder I keep getting nailed in Napoleonic Wars bayonet fights (to say nothing of trying to actually hit anything with the muskets).

[froggyluv 2136]

To this day I'm still confounded by the "ballet" of Warband's melee... no wonder I keep getting nailed in Napoleonic Wars bayonet fights (to say nothing of trying to actually hit anything with the muskets).

LMAO! Yeah those guys are old Warband dueling bada$$es impersonating the French. The melee of Warband is actually very deep and complex but has some *cough* realism flaws...

[chortles 263]

LMAO! Yeah those guys are old Warband dueling bada$$es impersonating the French. The melee of Warband is actually very deep and complex but has some *cough* realism flaws...

It doesn't help that my Warband experience is almost entirely with Napoleonic Wars. Realism aside it's better for enjoyment to "fight according to how it works in-game, not how real melee combat works"*, but it's utterly arcane how to actually learn the "melee ballet", not least since the NW tutorial "removes" access to the vanilla tutorials that would/could actually help by forcing practice against moving, attacking opponents instead of inert stationary targets...

* Paraphrasing this bit from a fourteen-year-old SimHQ article: "Fly it according to how it is modeled, not how the real aircraft flies."

[Tonci87 163]

It has become common trend in the gaming industry and I think this is sad.

Everything gets streamlined and simplified to appeal to a larger audience

Let me list a few examples:

Compare the old CoDs to the new ones.

Do the same with BF

GTA 5 has less realistic driving than GTA 4 because some people complained that it was too difficult (Idiots)

Compare the old Total war games to the new ones, especially to Rome 2

Where did the C&C games go?

What happened to silent hunter and similiar games?

Where are the tactical FPS like the old Ghost recon, Rainbow six or SWAT?

And why are Game Devs doing this?

1. The effect of insta-gratification that makes the player feel good when he starts to play the game (Nobody cares how long he will be playing it)

2. To get better reviews It seems as if some big game Devs are obsessed with review scores and sacrifice features that might be too complex for the reviewer to learn in those few hours he plays the game. The best example is Rome 2. Watch this about CA to understand

And before someone brings up Arma 3:

I don´t think that Arma 3 is a victim of this trend.

Arma 3 is actually more complex than Arma 2 (at least in the Infantry department) but a lot of features are still unfinished. BIS managed to increase the usability without sacrificing complexity (actually only true if they deliver a better medical system)

[andersson 285]

I had my sisters 10 year old son try AvsP gold edition, which is one of my all time favorites as it's so gritty and hard. He didn't like it as he never managed to get through the first level, and he is a "gamer". My sister told me that todays kids are not used to get any kind of real challenge out of games, like actually have to fight for ones survival without any feedback that your doing good. We are used to "beat the game", they are used to get instant gratifications.

[sic-disaster 311]

Yeah, there is a reason almost every shooter nowadays has an X pop up when you hit someone, and you get +100XP! messages for every kill, and +125XP! for headshots etc. and that is indeed instant gratification.

Sometimes I will talk with people who say they are gamers (and I suppose in some way they are, but not like us) and I will talk to them about ArmA. I'll tell them about the huge open world, and that you can drive a tank, a car, a boat, fly a helicopter or a plane, or do HALO jumps etc. and they are amazed. And I'll tell them about ricochets. Then I tell them about the editor and they are like, OMG! It'll be fresh forever!

And then at the end I say "and firefights usually take place over hundreds of meters, and you die with a single shot so you really need to work together to get the objectives!" and they are like "Oh.". Every sign of interest fades from their face immediately, because in their head they pictured themselves going full-on Rambo with all that stuff, and using ricochets to tacticoolly kill enemies around corners, instead of them using it to support others, and it turns out you can't run at the enemy and poke their eye out with your tactical knife, and making kills takes skill and time to do.

Now I enjoyed Battlefield 3 because you can do cool stuff there and I appreciate that, but it is never going to be a game that I will play for decades, and BF4 won't be an exception either. But I've never stopped playing OFP:CWC and the ArmA series since I first made contact with it, because even after all these years I still find out about stuff or mechanics I didn't know about, that I can now utilize for full effect.

I am still not done learning and improving myself in Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear. And yesterday I launched RO2 again after a long time, and despite the fact they changed some stuff for the worse, it is still a damn hardcore experience if you get into a server with people who know what they are doing. And that is what made RO always so enjoyable for me: weaving in and out of hales of gunfire, reading the terrain for the slightest dip to use as cover, then crawling on your belly to a spot where you hope the enemy won't see you in time, look for that one pixel that seems to not belong, aim, and shoot. And after a little while a kill message shows up. I have learned to survive for very long times in this fashion, but should I simply stand up and run without thinking I would be cut down within two seconds. This makes it very satisfying to reach an objective and clear it out with just your old trusty bolt action rifle fitted with a bayonet, and this is something that BF will never be able to do.

[mrcash2009 0]

todays kids are not used to get any kind of real challenge out of games, like actually have to fight for ones survival without any feedback that your doing good. We are used to "beat the game", they are used to get instant gratifications.

Thats the biggest problem. You lower the bar for one generation, that's the "norms" and expected level and so this passes on and on until you show someone alternatives (that in the grand scheme of things isn't THAT complex) and its like showing form of algebra and an uphill struggle to adjust if at all. Unless you actually educate someone that there is more to something than the commercial mainstream end it just feeds itself in a loop and never breaks away.

So it just takes bucking trends and shamefully "risks" to do it. This whole subject can be adapted to music industry also and many areas like that. Thats why things like Star Citizen I like to see come about now.

It wont change much as you have entire industries built on convenience and "entertainment centre" mentality and all such games work within it and practically push it forward. I think its good to get someone young on a PC game and play things like Lara croft games and anything puzzle orientated, the rest of the action genre is like stuffing big macs for the brain.

Its all about the financials, consumer levels / wider audience, return & playing it safe for the shareholders & a key word known as "Pandering". Thats what it should be known as .. "the pandering market".

Edited September 30, 2013 by mrcash2009

[slay0rwr4th 10]

I agree with what you guys have said here and thankfully we still have guys around like BiS to make games for those of us that enjoying using our brains a bit.

Dwarf Fortress is a good example of a game that makes you think and it has one hell of a learning curve, EVE: Online as well, although at times I feel it's only because the UI is so spread out that it takes someone with an eidetic memory to actually make use of it, funnily it's the same with DF.

[instagoat 133]

You know, people have been whining since the 1600s about how people just have it easier every year and how they get dumber and more hectic and how new things don't need skills and attention and everything.

http://xkcd.com/1227/

Go and try to play competition level COD and then come back about the whole skill thing. Just because a game doesn't focus primarily on being brainy or caters to your particular interests that are somehow more sophisticated than that of the rest of the world doesn't make it dumber.

Just saying, you know

[Tonci87 163]

You know, people have been whining since the 1600s about how people just have it easier every year and how they get dumber and more hectic and how new things don't need skills and attention and everything.

http://xkcd.com/1227/

Go and try to play competition level COD and then come back about the whole skill thing. Just because a game doesn't focus primarily on being brainy or caters to your particular interests that are somehow more sophisticated than that of the rest of the world doesn't make it dumber.

Just saying, you know

Well of course it takes some skill, having an amazing hand-eye coordination pared with awesome reflexes is a skill but todays games simply don´t require any brains.

Look back at old Action games, or even FPS. Back then most FPS were corridor shooters too but usually they involved some kind of platforming or puzzeling. The Average shooter of today mainly consists of bombastic cutscene->shoot and blow up stuff->bombastic cutscene-> shoot and blow up stuff-> and so on

[mrcash2009 0]

Well the thread speaks of Skill & Learning so is it an issue to have one or the other or both combined? I prefer to push a combination of both, skill for the action and reactions timings and so on but the learning for the planning or any tactical aspects, well, depending on the game. So its not to insult anyone who simply likes a casual FPS game but the topic is about good or bad points.

[andersson 285]

I have no chance in fast pace FPS MP games as my skill is so low compared to the others. That is human vs human and a completely different gameplay than SP as you are competing against another human brain and skillset.

However if you look at the SP experience it has changed dramatically. I have played a few maps on the SP campaign in BFx or MWx (can't remember which..). Sometimes I had absolutely no clue of what was happening around me and everything was going *boom* and *flash*. I was almost randomly giving inputs into the controller as the truth is; I'm shit and my brain can't keep up with all the action. I still managed to survive and move on to next "mission". Then I gave it up as I see no reason to play the game as it more or less turned into an interactive movie.

But MP, that's another thing. Whatever game, simple or complex, can be highly competitive as you play against other humans.