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tarheel91 on 14 June 2009
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noname2200 said:
tarheel91 said:

*shrug* There have always been ways you can make a game more or less challenging. If you really wanted Twilight Princess to be hard, you could have ignored the Heart Piece after every boss. Or, you could have had found a guide on GameFAQs and walked you through the game. Each person will only work so hard for a game. The person who enjoys working through frustrating parts will still work through them, and the person who'd give up, or go to a guide, or use cheats, will still do something to get past the difficult parts. Nintendo is just making it easier for people who don't want to deal with hard parts to do that. In doing that, it allows them to make more challenging parts for people who want more of that.

Basically, this is just Chrizum's post fleshed out a bit for noname to understand.

Edit: I remember a challenge in OoT where you only have three hearts and you use some broken knife and no shield for the whole game.  It just serves to reinforce my point.

Your (and Chizrum's) point is well-taken, but that's not the angle I'm coming from. I do believe that this can be a handy feature for people who're already committed to gaming: you can learn how to do something that's tricking you, and if you're just really not in the mood you can skip to the good parts. My fear is the effect this will have on newcomers; they're not already as devoted to gaming, and with this feature around I believe they're likely to spend increasing amounts of time watching rather than playing, because they never improved enough to play the game for themselves. Since watching a computer play isn't particularly fun, I think that will tend to discourage newcomers from staying in our hobby.

By contrast, if games' difficulty came at a more organic pace, one which allowed players a chance to learn new skills and then refine them at a steady rate, I think more newcomers would get drawn in. To further your own analogy, a newcomer who never bothered to become good enough to tackle the first dungeon is probably not going to enjoy most of the mid-to-late game, and he or she is certainly never going to become devoted enough to even consider trying the 3-Heart Challenge. Why would he? Watching the game play itself wasn't particularly fun.

The issue with your whole "organic progression" argument is that some skills take much longer than a single game to develop.  For example, I can jump into just about any PC FPS and do very well because of the skills I've already developed.  However, the only way to develop those skills is a bunch of time committed to doing so.  One game isn't enough.  If certain parts of the game require that sort of skill, it's going to be very difficult for a new player to overcome it, period.  However, that game's never going to be challenging to me without parts like that.

Likewise, the correct thinking required to solve a lot of Zelda puzzles takes many games to develop.  I struggled with certain Ocarina of Time puzzles a lot when I first started, and I'd give up until my older brother got through them on his save.  My point is, some things aren't learnable in the span of a single game if it's going to be even remotely challenging to seasoned players.

Now, that said, Nintendo has been addressing this lately by making all the challenging parts optional (stars past 60 in SMG, Cave of Ordeals in Twilight Princess).  The other way to do this, of course, is to go the route they're choosing now.  I don't think you're right in that the whole organic progression is good enough on its own.  Because, it's impossible to address the issues of every player through it.  What the developer may think should be easy for everyone, or at least straightforward may not work for some.  By having it play for them, it makes sure its impossible for players to become frustrated very early on, and give up before the game gets started.  In my experience, the first big area where people give up is in the first 5-10 minutes of each new game concept because they simply can't understand it.  Again, this makes sure that doesn't happen.


Condensed: The whole organic progression thing is imperfect because it ignores skills that need to be built up over multiple games (adjusting to a camera in 3D games, FPS controls, etc.) and because it can't account for all new players issues.  This idea of Nintendo complements it by making sure the game never becomes so frustrating that it's no longer fun (where that is for you, me, and someone else is entirely different).