| Jon-Erich said: I'll go over these arguments one at a time. |
Holding hands:
Name-dropping Zelda devs isn't a very convincing argument - he says what he has to say to appease the Nintendo fanbase, which is older than SONY and Microsoft fanbases, so he has to say that even if doesn't believe that. Come on, how many times have we seen the "Gamers want innovation" line ven though it is not true in the slightest and everyone in the game industry knows it.
Games today are infinitely more complex than they used to and gamers are often adults with jobs and families. We can't make people figure all the impossible @#$& by themselves and we can't make people frustrated by getting stuck because they didn't learn a crucial technique a few hours ago. I consider NOT holding hands bad design. It was bad game design then and it is bad game design now. In Portal, literally half of the game was a tutorial, introducing one mechanic at the time. And it was an amazing experience nonetheless.
Easy games:
Games were hard to beat, but easy to grasp. As far as I'm concerned, immense difficulty is not a stample of a good game. Especially when "skill" meant speed, precision and patience. That's not a kind of difficulty that we should see. The was (some) games do it now - deep game mechanics that are easy to learn but hard to master - is the way to go. If you have what it takes, you can amp up the difficulty setting, if you don't, you can still enjoy the ride on a lower one. I'd say games are perfect in this regard today.
Meaningful game endings:
Do we really need uncountable hours of frustration to feel a sense of achievement from completing a game? It cerrainly helps, I got stuick in Metal Gear Solid for a month and when I finally found the answer, I was ecstatic... but was it worth it? Is that how I want my games to go?
Gamer skills:
As I mentioned, games in the past required speed, precision and patience. Today's gameplays doesn't involve those things that much. How could they have the instincts and reflexes if they never needed them? Is it surprising that today's kids suck at old games? Not to me. They're not worse gamers, the just lack the skills and talents they never needed and never will.
Mainstream games:
That's why we have other similar groups. Strategy and hardcore RPG gamers look down on people who play Call of Duty, the PC gaming master race looks down on the dirty console peasants, people that don'T care about sports look down on people who buy the new Madden or FIFA every single year for being a sheep...Everybody thinks they're better than everybody else because of... reasons. There's nothing wrong about mainstream games - niches cannot sustain AAA franchises. The only reason these games are still being made is because they found new audiences and new customers. A franchise can'T live on old-tome fans alone.
As to your last point - why don't you leave that for the gamers to decide. I think they're challeged enough. I feel I'm challegend enough. And I don't need t die every ten seconds to feel that way. Why are you trying to decide what is and what is not challenging for somebody else? There is no problem until people stop playing en masse.
