noname2200 said:
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. |
The flaw in your FPS example is that a few levels is no where near enough time to develop the proper familiarity with the controls. They'd still find the later levels near impossible (I'm speaking from personal experience, here) were they to be an actual challenge for anyone else. If you doubt me, just watch someone who's completed a single FPS, and someone who's been playing them for years play some multiplayer together (aka watch novices play veterans in some online shooter). The novice will be utterly destroyed. As I said before, certain games will lack challenge entirely for an experienced player if they were to have a learning curve that accomodated new players. Case in point: SMG. It develops at a pace that a beginner can start with it and finish it. However, I was never really challenged in the required stars. My favorite parts of the game (aside from the awesomeness of the ideas) were the optional stars. Your example in Metroid only proves my point. The main game is not very challenging for an experienced gamer, and most of the challenge they get is from optional things.
That's obviously one way to do it, as I said, making everything optional, but it can leave experienced gamers feeling cheated. The only way the game really challenged them was if they went out of their way to do it. It's the same as the three hearts, broken knife, no shield challenge in OoT in a sense. It's like creating new rules for yourself because the game isn't enough fun on its own. That's not how it should be. This new way Nintendo's going for, I think, addresses that issue. I think you assume they'd entirely ignore organic growth, but I don't think that's going to be the case. What this allows is for challenges that go beyond that organic growth to be inserted as well. Think about Twilight Princess. The game requires you to get used to a new tool each dungeon, and be able to use it decently by the boss. However, for someone like you or me, we've got the hang of it after a few seconds, and all the game will ever require us to do is use it that simply. Now, what if the room before the boss key required us to use it in a way that was, for once, not blatantly obvious and apparent, a real challenge for a Zelda veteran? For me, that'd be more fun. Or maybe, the last form of a boss could require something a bit more complex than "use tool to attack." Now, there were challenging things in Zelda already; they just weren't required. This way, though, we get to experience them while playing the real game. Those little option side things are, because of their nature as optional side things, usually limited in scope(i.e. special galaxies in SMG only have one level), too and problem's addressed as well.
Thus, the play for you system both addresses the inherent imperfections in an organic growth system (it can not address all players needs at the same time; it simply won't work in certain parts for certain people) and allows the injection of parts that challenge experienced players into the main game without creating road blocks for new ones. As you said, a good system will allow ample time and space for a new player to learn. Thus, having the game complete an individual section for them will not cripple them as you claim it will. It hasn't crippled kids asking their older siblings to do it for years, and it won't now either. People who would abuse this system completely misunderstand the point of games, and wouldn't enjoy them no matter what system was in place.
