VG: Could it be that YOU are the reason they are easy? I know that Mario Kart wii was easy as hell for me to get used to, getting stars and 1st place by the 3rd cup race. My girlfriend took 5 days to get good at it. Could we, as gamers, have an easier time figuring out and completing new games? Especially having gamed for 16 years, I KNOW I have an easier time with games than I did when I first got my genesis.
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
Bobmario511 wrote:
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
One sin which most modern games commit and which annoys me is that they are utterly linear and extremely short. I completed HL2 in 5 days, HL2:Ep1 and Ep2 in 2 days each, F.E.A.R. in 4 days, F.E.A.R:Extraction point in 4 days, Condemned:Criminal Origins in 3 days. All of these at the hardest difficulty level.
I mean, come on. I pay good money for these games, they have very little replay value, and I can play them through in 3-5 days at the hardest difficulty level? It feels a bit like a ripoff.
Fortunately there are games which are rather different. For example the main storyline in Oblivion took me something like a month to complete. Right now I'm playing Thief:Deadly Shadows, and it looks like it will probably take me many weeks to complete. The main reason for this is that they are non-linear. For example in Thief:DS I can complete perhaps 2 levels at most in one day. I don't know how many levels it has, but if it has as many as Thief 2 had, I'm for a long ride. That's how games should be: Non-linear and non-obvious, which cannot be played through in 3 days.
Joined: 5/2/2006
Posts: 1020
Location: Boulder, CO
The problem is that most of the time, they don't even want the games to be hard.
There is a serious issue with the way games are reviewed these days, in that a genuinely difficult game is not likely to be beaten in any short amount of time by anyone, let alone a reviewer who is pressed for time.
This means that if a reviewer is to ever see the content before commenting on it, he would either have to switch to an easy mode, or review based on only the start of a game. Neither of these cases does the game justice.
As a result, if a company wants a game to be reviewed based on all content of the game, they need to make it easy enough to be reasonably beaten over the course of a few days, and gives the designers reason to make a game play well in a fast, easy play through, rather then a difficult, week long trek.
Joined: 5/1/2004
Posts: 4096
Location: Rio, Brazil
There are games based on the difficulty in gameplay and games based on immersion. If you want to mix both you're in for a lot of work (developer point of view).
So they have to choose, if they are making an immersive game, with story and etc, it has to be relatively easy and without backtracking, to keep the most people playing and able to get to the end.
If you only care about a challenge you have generaly small games, or racing, or rhythm games. The action adventure genre has become standardized by immersion and story telling, which don't mix well with difficulty.
VG: Could it be that YOU are the reason they are easy? I know that Mario Kart wii was easy as hell for me to get used to, getting stars and 1st place by the 3rd cup race. My girlfriend took 5 days to get good at it. Could we, as gamers, have an easier time figuring out and completing new games? Especially having gamed for 16 years, I KNOW I have an easier time with games than I did when I first got my genesis.
There is a serious issue with the way games are reviewed these days, in that a genuinely difficult game is not likely to be beaten in any short amount of time by anyone, let alone a reviewer who is pressed for time.
This means that if a reviewer is to ever see the content before commenting on it, he would either have to switch to an easy mode, or review based on only the start of a game. Neither of these cases does the game justice.
Or they could just make the game really nonlinear so you can start absolutely anywhere!
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Or the game companies could, you know, give review sites save files/passwords to the major game review sites?
Better yet, maybe review sites could just hire more people and let them devote more time to a particular game? >_>
Joined: 5/2/2006
Posts: 1020
Location: Boulder, CO
and evaluation copies only come out a little before the retail copies do.
The problem stems from the need to create the review of a game but only having a week or so to do it.
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1977
Location: Making an escape
Since we're talking about reviewers here, I think I'll throw this here. It's a blog post by a 1up staffer wherein he complains about having too many long games to review.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
Honestly, all he does is complain. Cry me a river, but I could not care less about your work load. Your job is to play and review games, a job many other young adults get wet dreams over. Love it or leave it, but don't bitch about it.
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
Bobmario511 wrote:
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
Super Mario 1 took me years to get good enough to complete it.
Super Mario Galaxy took me a few days.
Super Mario World I did in a couple of hours.
I guess it might have something to do with your age; I was 5 when I started gaming and 6 when Super Mario World came out, and it took me about 6 months to complete, and I didn't finish Super Mario World until Super Mario All-Stars came out, and that took more than just a few saves for my 8-year-old self to finish.
Meanwhile it took me a couple weeks to finish off Super Mario 64 (12 years old); unfortunately my 23-year-old self hasn't gotten around to Super Mario Galaxy because I'm still not ready to spend the cash on a Wii and the game.
Honestly, all he does is complain. Cry me a river, but I could not care less about your work load. Your job is to play and review games, a job many other young adults get wet dreams over. Love it or leave it, but don't bitch about it.
Honestly, all he does is complain. Cry me a river, but I could not care less about your work load. Your job is to play and review games, a job many other young adults get wet dreams over. Love it or leave it, but don't bitch about it.
You misunderstand the point I was making. I don't know where you got that I didn't like him complaining about broken games. He was complaining about long games he had to review, not glitchy or unworkable ones. I WANT him to say "Wow, game x is a shitty piece of ass fuck [/avgn] because it is too 1) glitchy, 2) load times take forever, 3) ect." I don't want to hear him complain about how much time it will take him to review good/long games.
EDIT: I somehow missed all the urls when reading your first post, but I don't know what they have to do with anything. As stated twice now, I don't like complaints of workload.
adelikat wrote:
I very much agree with this post.
Bobmario511 wrote:
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
You misunderstand the point I was making. I don't know where you got that I didn't like him complaining about broken games. He was complaining about long games he had to review, not glitchy or unworkable ones. I WANT him to say "Wow, game x is a shitty piece of ass fuck [/avgn] because it is too 1) glitchy, 2) load times take forever, 3) ect." I don't want to hear him complain about how much time it will take him to review good/long games.
Ah. Sorry for the confusion, then. My mistake.
I agree with you on those points.
Joined: 10/27/2004
Posts: 1977
Location: Making an escape
First, I'm not entirely sure what's inherently wrong with complaining about workload (other than the usual impracticalities of complaining). Workloads at work can become rather much and be really stressful. Imagine your job required playing a series of long RPGs in a short period of time with a rather small deadline and bosses breathing down your neck (or some equivalent situation therein; basically just a ton of stuff to do and not much time to do it). If your paycheck depended on it, playing games can seem like homework.
Second, if you read that cartoon again, you will notice that he DOES recognize that he shouldn't be complaining about "his good fortune"; so he DOES realize he has "a job many other young adults get wet dreams over."
Third, I threw that in because the conversation was leaning towards reviewers' workloads, and thought that would show that perhaps there's an element of truth to it because SOMEONE was complaining about something along those lines. Whether it was right for him to complain wasn't what I intended to shift the conversation towards.
Fourth... I'm not even sure WHY I'm backing him up as though he were a best friend of mine.
Edit:stickyman05 wrote:
I don't like complaints of workload.
Noted. Answers my question.
A hundred years from now, they will gaze upon my work and marvel at my skills but never know my name. And that will be good enough for me.
