fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2420 ]

[ SECRET POST #2420 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2420 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

__________________________________________________

02.

__________________________________________________

03.

__________________________________________________

04.

__________________________________________________

05.

__________________________________________________

06.

__________________________________________________

07.

__________________________________________________

08.

__________________________________________________

09.

__________________________________________________

10.

__________________________________________________

11.

__________________________________________________

12.

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 064 secrets from Secret Submission Post #346.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I was just having a conversation with my boyfriend about this and I don't really like gamers like you. Being a "casual gamer" and "I haven't played this game enough to be good" is one thing...but if you just suck at all games and can't get better then tough luck I guess? I've been hearing these kind of gamers get louder and louder about how much they suck at hand eye coordination and I really don't want my games to be easy mode because of this minority. I also hate that it seems a lot of you tend to be female. It reinforces the stereotype that girls aren't good at games.

Watch a Let's Play or read a novel. Don't dumb down the combat involved in games. I honesty wonder why some of you got into gaming if you can't actually play a game. I'm starting to think it has less to do with story and characterization and more to do with "I want to call myself a gamer".

Right, it can't possibly be because immersion in a storytelling medium that allows you to directly control the actions of the main character(s) is different than experiencing a static story as dictated by someone else.

While I don't agree that casual gamers should take up a different hobby, anon has a point in that devs & publishers pandering to casual gamers have done a lot to lower the gameplay qualities of high budget games. (you still can find indie games with a nice, retro hardness, but challenging gameplay is rare when it comes to big, gorgeous titles).

Casual players are no worse at contributing certain kinds of fanmade content than pro-gamers, so they're welcome to the fandom.

But occasionally they need to accept that certain types of games simply aren't for them, despite how interesting they find the story.

e. g. as much as I would love to play Spec Ops the Line for it's stand-out storyline, I simply suck at shooters, the make me nauseous, so I stay away from it, and instead take up games with great storylines that I can actually handle. It's not that hard. And if you suck at gaming in general stick to the games with a "casual/easy" option. Unless you're pirating left and right, you won't be able to afford everything that interests you anyway.

So be choosy instead of complaining on the official forums and giving the creators the idea that they need to make the next game even easier. Use walk-throughs and cheats if you have to.

Devs shouldn't be forced to dumb down games, sucking out the fun for non-casual gamers. Sadly, this is a trend though. More and more games get over-loaded with "helpful" devices like mini-maps, quest-markers, regenerating health-bars, revives without any penalties, puzzle hints you cannot turn off and similar crap, destroying immersion for a lot of other players.

Except it's their hobby, their money, and their spare time. If they have more fun playing on easy mode, how is it harming you (if there are multiple modes it doesn't change your gameplay to just ignore easy mode.)

I never touch Let's Play or watch videos of games I haven't played, part of the fun of games is the interactive element and it helps me to connect to the characters.

But interactive games don't have to equal hard as hell games. I don't see why we can't have both worlds, both hard mode and easy mode. It also makes more financial sense for video game companies to include every type of gamer there is; especially since consoles are doing really horribly. Sorry but casual gamers have made a whole market in facebook games/mobile games and hardcore gamers are just NOT ENOUGH to keep consoles going, so you can either get over yourself, or watch the industry self destruct because you were too much of a snob to let other people play games how they want.

The problem is triple-A games have become so expensive to develope (because nowadays it is expected that games absolutely have to look stunning or no one will play them) that the devs are forced to make the games accessible to the widest audience possible. This pisses off gamers who play for the challenge.

Weirdly enough it's mostle hardcore-gamers that will complain about ugly looking games (especially shooters), ignoring that if they were to support games with graphics that wouldn't force you to update your graphics card every few months, game developers would be able to take more risks with gameplay, because creating a more challenging game alienating a few customers would no longer mean their entire company going bankrupt because they spent a blockbuster budget on particle effects.

You know, given the number of hardcore gamers who shriek about bad game design and omg nerfing wah wah when devs do put something out that requires a bit of cleverness rather than grinding through with the exact same strategy they've used for the last fifty games they've played, I don't think it's actually the casual folks who are forcing a dumbing down.

Casual players want health and damage outputs that let them survive. Hardcore players don't want to have to adapt and vary their playstyle. Only one of these actually forces boring, regurgitated game design.

I guess I shouldn't only have mentioned casual and hardcore gamers. Or rather, we aren't talking about the same kind of passionate/hardcore gamer.

Let me rephrase that: I live in central Europe. Gaming culture used to be different from US gaming culture (I am sorry, I am assuming here that you are from the US, or any other state with a different gaming culture from ours, on this community that is likely), but in the last few years (let's say, mid-2000's) there has been an understandable trend for gaming companies over here, even with large fanbases in their own and neighbouring countries, to appeal to the US market.

This has forced a changed in how games are developed over here. They have become easier. More comfortable. Less adjusting to new environments involved. Less need to take notes while playing. Less need to get to know each and every corner of a hand-crafted map that didn't come out of a sandbox tool-set.

In short: These "americanised"* games have less personality. Each game now uses the same helpful devices (like quest markers and crap like that) to dumb down their games, instead of forcing the gamer to immerse themselves completely into the gaming world. Instead of giving each enemy a certain kind of weakness, to make a game harder, there are now simply more enemies. Instead of creating open worlds in which a player can from minute 1 stumble onto a monster that is a hundred levels above their own abilities, that will slaughter them within a second, games are now rail-roaded to minimise so-called "frustration".

Devs now spend less time on creating a cohesive world, and more time on implementing shiny special features that will yield you an achievement on Steam, impressive fight-moves and spectacular finishers.

And passionate games, the fans, hate it. These kinds of things cannot be adjusted by a different difficulty setting, because they are integrated into the game- & level design. And it's shit.

*I have no idea why they think these things would endear them more to an US audience, but apparently it works, or they wouldn't keep doing it. But this kind of game design is the complete opposite of the kind of games me and my friends and their siblings and sometimes their parents even have grown up and fallen in love with.

See, the problem is the homogenization of game design has absolutely nothing to do with casual gamers who want a low-difficulty play mode. The U.S. game market (at least, the larger companies, there's more variety amongst indie games) by and large attempts to appeal to a very specific subset of gamers - generally achievement hounds and competitive gamers who want to win, and will tolerate no obstacle to their winning. The target market, rather than not being terribly good at games, tends to be very good - but very static in both their skills and their wants.

On the other hand, games that are created specifically to have a broader appeal - to draw in different demographics, or be accessible to people who aren't amazing at shooters, or be easy to put aside and come back to for players who don't have solid chunks of time to devote - tend to be more innovative. They're free of the constraints of the checklist most games targeted to the normal audience tend to operate under.

tl;dr your complaint - both about the homogenization of North American games and about your local game companies following that model to appeal to what they perceive to be the North American market - is valid. You're just blaming the wrong people.

Are you completely sure that the fact that games are becoming more and more cinematic and less interactive is not somewhat due to pandering to customers who play for the plot? I. e. the OP?

Competitive gamers usually do not care for the gameplay either, that it true and just as harmful. But they don't normally cry for an easy mode. That would go against their competitive streak, wouldn't it?

I don't really understand why it bothers you if there's different modes? Easy mode for some, and you can play on normal/hard. Nobody is forcing you to play easy mode, so why are you so up in arms about it?

DA, but general old school/hardcore gamer opinion is that even hard modes are getting easier these days due to the overall demands of the audience. So usually the problem isn't "there's an easy mode" but that "people want it to be even easier, and for all modes to be easier."

I really don't want my games to be easy mode

Except they're not. The games themselves aren't BECOMING easy mode, easy modes are being added AS AN OPTION (in most games) and as such you can completely ignore it BECAUSE YOU HAVE THAT OPTION. I like hard modes. I like games that challenge me like Devil May Cry and anything Platinum makes, but I also know that there isn't just one way to play a game and not everyone derives the same enjoyment the way they do (ie getting your ass kicked over and over by a prologue boss on the hardest difficulty vs. playing for the story and characters).

If people want to play easy, tough shit. Make your own game with only one difficulty that's Nintendo Hard-esque. Or simply get over it and stick to your hard modes.

No. It is very much possible, even if anon plays a LOT, that anon has recently only picked games to play that are easy-mode all around despite having 4 or 5 difficulty settings. These games exist. And they are not rare.

Well I'd like to know what all these games are because I'd LOVE to play a game's highest difficulty (out of 5 settings) that really is that easy.

There's the new Tomb Raider. The only difficulty in that game would be sluggish QTE's if you play with keys + mouse. Enemy AI and the autosave function are very, very forgiving in that game. You don't even have to spend much thought on saving your ammunition because the special stuff will always be around right when you need it. And that can't be fixed by adjusting the difficulty.

Then you have the last couple of Total Wars before they went Old-School again with Shogun 2. They come with reduced tech trees, less unforgiving AI and, in general, less ways to let you fuck up your own campaign, even before you adjust the difficulty settings.

Or take Dragon Age 2. The only difficulty mode that even requires you to use cross-class combos at all (and that mostly to kill the optional bosses) is nightmare. And that's despite there being 5 (casual, easy, normal, hard and nightmare) modes.

Haven't played them. Well, except the Dragon Age 2 demo, and I wasn't crazy about the battle system - not because it was hard, but because it felt weird.

They're not bad at all, if you don't care about the fact that beating them won't merit you credit from the gamer community.

Like, don't expect any amazing puzzles in the new Tomb Raider, despite the title, and you will get a decent action game with a solid storyline, in which the central relationship is the friendship between two young women. It wasn't nearly as sexist as early reports and unwise words from one of the creators made it out to be.

And despite the dumb combat AI and the reduced tech trees in the more recent titles in the Total War series, building empires is still fun, especially if you delight in the military history of the period you've chosen. It's kinda cool to play with the units and commanders you know from history (if TW is good for one thing, it's offering tons and tons of different, well researched units!). Just don't expect to have to worry about the outcome of a battle unless you are really determined to only fight with a minimal force against a strong opponent.

I admit, I played Dragon Age 2 for the story. The gameplay was rather meh. You could basically click most enemies to death. Like I said, the combat in the game doesn't require much tactics unless you find and fight the optional bosses on nightmare.

I missed the complexity of the combat system of Origins. I missed having a 100 spells to chose from and combine.

I admit, I played Dragon Age 2 for the story.

Which is pretty much the entire point of DA2. The game mechanics are there to deliver the story. It's not really a good example of the trend you're positing because it's not meant to be the sort of game that requires a lot of skill at gaming to beat. It's effectively a playable movie with occasional combat.

But the original Dragon Age WASN'T that way, and in fact was made specifically for people that liked the older style of western RPGs, which focused heavily on tactical combat. The fact that DA2 deemphasized the combat to the point that it was "effectively a playable movie" (although I disagree with that--that's Heavy Rain or Walking Dead, where there's hardly any combat) showed a huge shift in the series, which I think is a valid frustration for people that loved the first game.

Re: dda

(Anonymous) - 2013-08-20 13:57 (UTC) - Expand

Yes, it is. Because it has 5 different difficulty modes that do fucking nothing, when its direct predecessor could boast a very tactical, and therefore on the higher difficulties very challenging and satisfying approach to RPG combat.

The fact that they left out this system in the new game, and replaced it with something so simplified, less interactive, make it part of the trend.

it's not meant to be the sort of game that requires a lot of skill at gaming to beat. It's effectively a playable movie with occasional combat.

This is the problem though, isn't it? The casual players who play for the plot are satisfied. The people who were passionate about the gameplay innovations of the first game are disappointed. Games are getting more cineastic and less challenging regardless of any difficulty modes actually integrated into the game. The game part becomes less and less important.

And gamers blame it on pandering to casual gamers.

Well I'd like to know what all these games are because I'd LOVE to play a game's highest difficulty (out of 5 settings) that really is that easy.

believe me, it might actually not going to give more satisfaction than beating a game that people claim to be hard on a lower difficulty. Gaming fandom is still not going to award you a medal for beating DA2 on hard, because it is considered easy mode by old-school gamers.

So let me just ask you: What counts as "hard" for you in a game?
Impossible riddles that you can hardly crack?
Gameplay so complex you have to sit through a 2 hour tutorial brefore you can start playing?
Enemies that are so overpowered that you keep dying unless you're a "pro gamer"?

What kind of genre are we talking about, anyway?

Dark souls first play through and then the new-game playthrough. You don't have to be a pro gamer to get through it, but it definitely helps.

Some of the puzzles in Assassins Creed 2 were hard as well.

I'm not telling casuals to stop playing or even for the people who are bad at playing games to stop. It's true, it's their money, their time, their hobby. But you know what? It's mine as well. I'm asking for them to stop asking the devs to put in "god mod" and "skip combat" options. I'm sorry but no. That's cheating. I could and will avoid these options but if my games start becoming easier and easier (even on harder modes) because the devs are trying to pander to a larger base then hell, I'm going to be annoyed. Am I not allowed to be upset at this trend? Am I considered an elitist now? I'm not even THAT good at games. Skill-wise, I play like the average player except I play enough to get better when I suck.

I enjoy a challenge. The complaint that combat is a nuisance and should have an option to be skipped is something that I just can't agree with. Decently difficult combat that involves patience and strategy brings me closer to the game and it's characters. It makes me feel accomplished when I actually win. I'd rather praise a game with decently challenging gameplay & great story and characters than one with amazing story/characters and very weak gameplay.

Since people have asked what I play...I play many kinds of games. My favorites tend to be action rpgs but I'm pretty okay at shooter based games too. One of my favorite games in terms of combat and customization is Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen. I love it. The pawn system is amazing.

My complaints:
-The story is weak.
-The game never holds your hand so it's extremely easy to accidentally weaken your character's potential by leveling as the wrong classes or to miss important npc quests (resulting in too much wiki guide reliance).
-Some classes need serious balancing (sorcerer).

The game was made on a whim so I'm not going to be too harsh on it but it has SO much potential. They're planning a sequel so I hope they work on some of the weaker bits of the game. I recommend it to those who love character customization and semi challenging combat. I'd advise new players to take it slow. Dragons Dogma Wikia is your bestfriend for your first playthrough.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #2420 ]

I'm going to be completely honest here...

no subject

no subject

Re: I'm going to be completely honest here...

Re: I'm going to be completely honest here...

da

Re: da

ayrt

Re: ayrt

Re: I'm going to be completely honest here...

Re: I'm going to be completely honest here...

Re: I'm going to be completely honest here...

Re: I'm going to be completely honest here...

Re: I'm going to be completely honest here...

Re: I'm going to be completely honest here...

Re: I'm going to be completely honest here...

Re: I'm going to be completely honest here...

da

dda

Re: dda

Re: da

Re: I'm going to be completely honest here...

Re: I'm going to be completely honest here...

Re: I'm going to be completely honest here...

Re: I'm going to be completely honest here...

Re: Original commenter replying