| Chrizum said: Interesting perspective. You have a point, but I think you exaggerated it a bit. |
I concede that I did, but I don't think it's by as much as you'd think at first blush. I think it'd be helpful to think of this from a slightly different perspective.
Let me use a completely unrealistic analogy here: suppose I take up a new hobby, in this case cooking, purely for my own enjoyment (we do exist y'know!). I start out learning some basic knife skills, figure out how to grill things, learn about different settings on the oven, but I'm completely stumped when it comes to figuring out how to season my basic dish. No worries, cooking now has an "auto-cook" feature in which I can skip certain steps of my hobby and have my robo-maid or whatnot do some things for me. I never learned how to do seasonings, but I'm still kind of enjoying what I do know. Except shortly afterwards, I not only have to figure out how much oregano to add to my chicken, I also have to figure out the trick to broiling. Well, I know I can't do the former, and it's tempting to have someone do the latter for me, so I can just keep practicing what (little) I know, so...back to auto-cooking!
And I keep doing this as time goes on, because it's just so tempting and easy to have someone do the hard stuff for me, which lets me do the parts I actually enjoy. But over time I'm doing less and less of my own cooking, because I never really learned how to do the basics, let alone the more advanced stuff, so when it comes time to do souffles and the like I'm more watching than participating. And I realize that the only things I'm doing for myself are the very, very basics; more importantly, I realize that I'm not doing all that much of my own hobby anymore except watching, which is about as fun as it sounds...at that point, I'd go and find a new hobby. And while I did bring this on myself by voluntarily taking the easy way out time and again, it was so very tempting: I was just trying to skip the hard stuff so I can go straight to the fun stuff! Except that by skipping out on the hard stuff early on, I denied myself the wealth of even more fun stuff that I could do later...
It's a vicious cycle, one which I have zero trouble imagining. That's why I still think that the better answer would be to have a teacher gradually introduce me to the necessary skills/challenges, until I'm ready to try things on my own. It's harder, it's trickier to pull off, but in the end it's much more rewarding. And I'm talking about those things from the developer's side, not the consumer's.
But I'm sure the player will be rewarded if he plays it as much as possible without using this "auto-play".
Almost certainly so. For starters, I doubt this feature will guide you to any secret areas or bonuses: it's likely just the bare bones approach. I do have to note the irony of rewarding the player who's already proven that he or she can take the harder road and emerge victorious, but it's not like that situation's particularly new or unique to Nintendo (or even unwelcome, in my opinion).
| burgerstein said: Oh no! Next thing you know they'll be adding warp pipes, that cloudy thing, and P-wings! Really, this isn't much different. It's just that the presentation is a little less creative, and the purpose is more obvious. |
Actually, I quite disagree. Warps were never simply handed to you: you had to be clever/creative/skilled enough to find where the developers buried them. The cloud and the P-Wings are also different: not only were they finite (you could get, what, five clouds in the entire game?) but they each carried a risk themselves: get hit when using a P-Wing and you lost that power, die in the next stage after using the cloud and you had to beat the level you tried to skip.
By contrast, this feature does not seem to have any limits in how often you can use it, and the risks seem almost non-existent (assuming your co-op partners don't kill your AI-controlled character; I don't see them instituting this in a way that gets your guy killed, as that defeats the entire purpose).
There are similarities, but they're skin-deep.
