| tarheel91 said: 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. |
That's a poor analogy though: I'm speaking of being able to learn the skills necessary to play through the single-player mode, while you're speaking of the skills you need for multi-player. You know as well as I that those are two fairly different things, and that MP demands that the player's skill be much higher (as high as their human opponents, in fact). To use a real-world analogy, I'm calling for them to do a good enough job at teaching that the person would be comfortable going out on the dance floor and having a good time, while you're saying that they must be good enough to seriously compete in a dance competition.
And note that the feature we're discussing will do nothing for your hypothetical: using auto-play isn't going to teach the new player the skills he needs to succeed in multiplayer, and using auto-play in multiplayer would replace the player with a bot, which the more experienced player could have done without needing to call a friend over (and the new player could have just stayed home, or just watched from the beginning). You're illustrating my point perfectly; novices who use this feature will never be able to enjoy the complete game.
Your example of SMG tells me that we're actually closer in opinion than it would initially seem: Galaxy does a pretty good (but not great) job of bringing new players in peicemeal, teaching them the skills they need to enjoy the game as they go along. You're trying to argue (successfully, might I add) that Galaxy's early stuff isn't hard enough to engage more experienced players, but again this feature would do nothing to help the novice: were the game hard enough to engage you from the start, the novice player would never have the chance to learn the skills you use and need to perform as you do. Instead, they'll keep activating auto-play until they realize that they're not having fun watching a game play itself, at which point they'll just walk away. It seems to me that a better solution would be a new Warp Pipe, which lets experienced players skip the chaff and get to the goodies immediately, while letting the novices learn the game at their own pace.
You may be right that the people who abuse this feature the most probably wouldn't enjoy the game either way: I don't have anything but my imagination to "prove" things one way or the other (just like in the rest of my argument). I'm not as convinced by your analogy to asking your elder sibling to beat something for you: my own personal experience tells me that you can only beat the later parts when you do the earlier stuff yourself. I know I never got good enough to beat games until I was forced to do so myself. BUT I also know that if I'd had more options as a kid, the frustrating difficulty of the NES games would have driven me from gaming. As I said before, I know there's a problem, and that this feature is meant to fix it. And I'm not completely devoted to my own proposed solution either. But when I play things out in my head, I can't see how this feature will bring in more new gamers; if anything, I remain convinced that it will have the opposite effect in the long term.
