| tarheel91 said: 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.
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To me, any game that requires the player to have mastered certain skills before they start playing the game suffers from massive design flaws. Just because many, many games suffer from this flaw, it does not mean that games must have that weakness. Take your own example of the FPS genre; the early 3D shooters like Wolfenstein and Doom were deliberately designed to accomodate people who hadn't played such titles before (i.e. everyone) in the easier difficulty settings: you started out with just one weapon, the beginning area had wide spaces with zero enemies (so you could adjust to moving in 3D at your own pace), the first few levels had several powerups and only a few, weak enemies, etc. It gave you plenty of chances to develop the necessary skills as time went on, with tougher enemies/specialized weapons/hazards/narrower corridors being introduced gradually, until by the end of the third chapter you were pretty darn good at the whole thing.
BUT at the same time the games let experienced players test themselves from the get-go: they could hunt out the secret areas that were scattered even in the first levels (and required a good grasp on the game mechanics to discover), they could pick a higher difficulty level and thus encounter tough enemies from the start (including ones that always respawned...*shudder*). In fact, if you go back and replay those games at the higher difficulties today, you'll find that despite mastering more advanced FPS skills, those games are still incredibly tough to beat.
I strongly disagree that the organic difficulty approach is in any way impossible to achieve: I think it's sloppy for designers if they can't accomodate the full range of skill levels (note: I didn't say it was "easy" to do). My perfect example of this is Super Metroid, which introduced players to several new skills that they needed to master just to beat the game (speed burst, wall jumps, bomb jumps, etc. etc.), but which always did so in a controlled manner: the wall jump, for instance, was the only way to get out of the pit where you find those alien monkeys, but those monkeys show you what to do, and that entire area is designed to be a safe and easy place to practice that maneuver. It even accomodates different skill levels: novices need only do two in a row to escape (the most you'll ever need in the game), while experts can do up to seven in a row to reach the Power Bomb at the top of the shaft. Either way, the game took a few minutes to show you a new move, and gave you the time and place to learn how to use it (thus letting the developers re-use that skill later in the game, adding extra challenge). That's the type of process I want to see from more games.
I understand what you're getting at in your third paragraph, and I agree that that's a problem that needs to be solved. I just don't think this is the way to go about it. "Show me how and let me practice" seems to me to be the better route: think of World 1 in Super Mario Bros., with its weak enemies and easy jumps, and how its four levels each build on what came earlier, but also introduce new elements. And then think of how experienced players can skip to the later, tougher parts (via the Warp Pipes) because they no longer need to practice those skills; they're good enough for World 8, so off to World 8 they go! By contrast, a player who keeps auto-playing out of World 1 is probably never going to be prepared for World 2, let alone 8, so what are they going to do when they get to the next tough part? I'd imagine they're going to have to resort to this feature more and more, so by the end they're just watching instead of playing. That's not fun for anyone, so why would you keep playing? THAT'S what I'm afraid of.
