T w e n t y S i d e d
It’s time for our twice-yearly ritual of clock-fiddling. Which means I once again have to go around the house and remember how each clock works. This usually involves holding down two or three needlessly stiff buttons, labeled in tiny print, using black-on-black color scheme, to manipulate the clock one hour in either direction. The analog clocks are generally easier to adjust but harder to reach.
At least I don’t lose an hour of sleep like most people. What a dumb system. Anyway, here’s a podcast about videogames…
Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast375
Link (YouTube) |
Show notes:
00:00 Aperture Desk Job
Link (YouTube) |
04:39 New Vegas Mod: The Frontier
I’m not sure how I missed the buzz surrounding this thing when it came out.
19:41 Mailbag: Spider-Man: No Way Home
Did we answer this one before? I can’t find it in my list.
20:16 Mailbag: FIFA vs Andrew Wilson
Hey Diepals,
So, it might be negotiating posturing, but Andrew Wilson seems to be open to gutting the most profitable sports franchise in history.
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/eas-ceo-tells-staff-its-been-impeded-by-the-fifa-brand-its-four-letters-on-a-box/
I know sports games aren’t your cup of tea, but FIFA is by far the best selling video game sports franchise. According to Wikipedia, it’s sold more copies than Minecraft.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_game_franchises
The stated reason is FIFA is “holding EA back” from implementing other game modes and making the franchise somehow more popular.
This seems to me like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs yet again by not understanding your customers. In my experience, the reason people buy annual updates to sports franchises is the latest stats and players, not “gameplay innovation.”
Thoughts?
ContribuTor
25:09 Mailbag: Stupid Premise
Dear Diecast,
If you make a game with a deeply stupid premise, is it better to spend lot of narrative time and effort trying to make the premise seem less stupid or to do nothing and just quietly hope that people don’t think about it too much?
Also, which one of these two things does Batman: Arkham City do?
Thanks a bunch,
John
32:36 Mailbag: Home TV & Movies
Dear Diecast,
What home theater setup do you have for TV & movies?
Do you think there will ever be a need for anything over 4K?
If not, how can we improve our viewing experience?
I am just now getting around to buying blu ray versions of my favorites that I currently own on DVD.
Thank you!
Will
43:36 Mailbag: Accessibility in Games
Dear Diecast,
How would you define “accessibility” in relation to video games?
People generally seem to discuss it as ‘considerate options for people with physical impairments’, such as colour blindness, deafness, etc.
Do you agree with this narrow view of the term, or would you extend the meaning further? If so, to what end?
Kind regards,
Andrew
55:00 Mailbag: Nested Loops in DSP
Dear Diecast,
Have you ever had interaction in a game that turned into a
logic/programming problem you could not shake?I know you both have tried Dyson Sphere Program since you talked about
it back on Diecast369. Paul posting about it is what introduced me to
it. A recent update added the ‘Automatic Piler’ which stacks cargo.This addition has created a nested logic gate programming puzzle in
the game. I’d love answer to that if you have one, but my Diecast
question is:You are both programmers. Has a game ever put a pointless logic bug
into your head in way that crashed your brain?– Steve C.
BTW The puzzle in DSP that has stuck in my head is; If it is possible
to output a fully saturated belt stacked to 4 with fewer than six
Pilers using nested loops?
Fable II
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
Programming Vexations
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
Object-Oriented Debate
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
The Best of 2014
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
From the article, it seems like they’re saying that they could keep the leagues and so could keep the players but would just lose the official international tournaments and teams like in the World Cup or the Olympics. So the FIFA license isn’t like the licenses they have for the NFL or for the NHL where dropping the branding means they lose access to all of those league players and teams. Since I know hockey better, it would be like EA having a license with the IIHF and then having separate licenses with the NHL and other hockey leagues, and deciding that the IIHF license is too limiting and dropping it while maintaining the ones with the other leagues. Since pretty much all of the players at the IIHF events play in SOME professional league, they’d still have all the players and the IIHF cannot license NHL teams on their own and so can’t restrict them from using the players that play in the NHL just because they sometimes play in IIHF tournaments. And FIFA also couldn’t stop EA from adding World Cup like tournaments where the best teams in the world are assembled to win a final prize, even if they use the same format as the World Cup, because all they can control are the names of the tournaments, not the idea of best-on-best by country and that sort of format for such a tournament.
So he might have a point that the only thing they’re risking is losing the FIFA name, and how much that would impact their sales is open to debate.
Yes, the impact in the game of FIFA is really small. They’d keep all the players and club teams (and maybe international teams?). They have the license until the end of 2022, so the world cup wouldn’t be a big deal until 2026 and their rival series has always had an ‘international cup’ which is the substitute for the world cup.
FIFA are ripping off EA, they’re asking for $250 million for the name on the box, a name which few football fans care about. FIFA the organisation brand is mostly known for being incredibly corrupt.
FIFA also have a really poor negotiating position. The competition for EA has been almost totally killed by Konami’s mismanagement and putting ‘FIFA’ on the front of it would only result in some confused fans getting angry that ‘FIFA’ doesn’t have any of the clubs or leagues anymore.
Their choice is EA or nothing, a situation FIFA created for themselves by always taking the biggest number offered and not thinking about the long-term ecosystem
Part of this is going to be the usual corporate bluffing. He publicly states that they don’t actually NEED the FIFA brand, in order that FIFA will decide to drop their licensing price.
The other part of this is testing the waters. He publicly states that they don’t need the FIFA brand, and then listens for the backlash.
The next step in negotiations would be a second series. Create “Awesome Soccer” using the FIFA engine, give it a marketing push, and see if there’s a market for an unlicensed soccer game. If it doesn’t cannibalize FIFA sales, good. You now have a second series. If it does cannibalize FIFA sales, good. You can go back to FIFA and point out that FIFA doesn’t sell THAT well anymore, and demand a lower price.
Re: Steamdeck
It might seem a bit expensive, but apparently it’s actually pretty cheap compared to other similar devices like GPD Win series.
Re: Home TV & Movies
I think the next step up (from 4k) will be some form of HDR that will be standardized (that probably won’t be called HDR, because the acronym is already tarnished by cheap stuff like HDR400). I expect I’ll consider HDR for my next monitor (when I buy one in 5 years or so).
Re: Puzzles
Not what was being talked about exactly, but my mind immediately jumped into Nandgame (which, apparently, has been changed since I played it since it used to only have nandgates instead of relay)
It still has, you just need to implement the NAND gate in transistors first. It also has some neat assembly chapters now.
Regarding bang for buck, Steam Deck is the cheapest and most powerful device in this category.
It’s better to not try to explain a deeply stupid premise, unless you’re making a comedy. The more you focus on this deeply stupid thing, the funnier it will become*. If you want to save it, give a vague “there are reasons” and let the player try to figure out their own explanation.
Although it’s mostly academic; if the writer knows it’s stupid, they’ll rewrite it instead of trying to explain it.
*(What is, United States? What is the purpose of the President?)
This stupid premise question seems awfully similar to the Anthropic Principle concept. The writer has a story that they want to tell, and therefore a stupid premise is sometimes necessary. For the listed example, could Arkham City work without this stupid premise? If not, then I would think that the best thing to do is not let the player think about it too much, so avoid constant plot developments that rely upon it.
I think there are also at least a couple of other things that could be relevant:
1. Does the player have to make choices that directly run up against this premise? If so, the player is probably going to notice and resent the premise more. For example, giving Batman the choice about how much taxpayer money to spend on these ludicrous “wall off the most pricey real estate in the city for undesirable but necessary function” decisions, like choosing whether to build a new toxic waste dump in the middle of Manhattan or the Hamptons. The premise is no longer just a quiet backdrop to tell the real story, the stupid premise *is* the real story.
2. Does the premise keep repeating (aka sequels)? This can break suspension of disbelief for some people. From the TV Tropes link I shared, how many times can Kevin McCallister keep getting accidentally left behind by his parents on vacations? How many times can people keep funding large resorts for dinosaurs that keep escaping and eating people?
Not sure where Shamus’s own “Why doesn’t Batman just kill the Joker?” article would fall on this. The Joker keeps repeatedly escaping despite controls (hence problem 2), but I don’t think the story ever really engages very much with the actual escape mechanism or give Batman much of a role with it. Rather, the focus is on “The Joker is free to do his mischief again and here’s what his wacky plan is NOW”.
You know, I think it could. I’m only about halfway through, but the plot so far has been mostly about the Joker and would work just about as well in a non-Escape From New York setting. To the game’s credit, the critical path, to which I have largely been sticking, contains almost no exposition about how the utterly implausible open-air prison came to be. It does keep threatening me with more Hugo Strange conspiracy stuff though, so that could still change.
My suspicion is that Arkham City is set in an open-air prison for a couple of non-story reasons. First, the developers wanted to make an open world but were obviously constrained in the size of the world they could make. Second, the developers could not or did not want to have to include things like moving cars or ordinary pedestrians in their open world. The only trouble is that, as Arkham Origins shows, there are other, slightly less implausible ways of accomplishing that kind of thing. My own position is that if you can’t or won’t do the open world justice then maybe you shouldn’t do the open world, but I recognize that the developers may not have been given a choice.
I think you’re right about why they chose the silly premise. They wanted recognisable buildings but also a reason to constantly fight everything.
But I also think they’re referencing Batman No Man’s Land, where a series of disasters leaves Gotham isolated from the outside world with no law enforcement or government. Different gangs spring up and take control of different parts of the city and Batman is left tired and isolated. It’s an escalation of the same themes as Arkham Asylum.
Why not go the whole way? Perhaps some devs thought the ‘Arkham’ part of the title was important. Also a city wide disaster might have required a bigger play area than they were comfortable creating.
To me, the ONLY reason they need the stupid “ZOMG we all live in a prison!” premise is to avoid making Batman look like an ineffective putz.
Basically nothing about the gameplay requires it to all be a prison as opposed to a Gotham City that’s basically under siege from multiple supervillains. There are a few plot points (Hugo Strange being in charge, the Protocol 10 nonsense plan) that work better with there being some kind of official sanction for Strange’s actions. But even that could likely be reworked to fit a “all the supervillains went off at the same time and the government has broken down!” narrative (It’s been awhile since I played, but nothing jumps out to me).
I think the main reason to make Arkham City a prison-run-by-corrupt-criminals than just a Gotham-under-siege is that, if Gotham is truly this under siege, then Batman is sort of a failure. If we’re at mid-career Batman (sort of necessary for this to be a chronological successor to Asylum), then if the city can be this besieged by these archcriminals, then clearly the “let Batman handle things!” strategy is every bit a failure as a reasonable person would probably expect “let one guy clean up all of New York” plan would be.
Fun thing to wonder – if they’d dropped the prison plot and just named this game Arkham Origins, would it have been a better game?
Yes and no. Yes, in that would be less implausible. No, in that some of the level design and possibly the combat would be worse. Ha ha. This concludes the joke.
Honestly, one of the biggest surprises I’ve had while playing Arkham City is just how similar it is to Arkham Origins. I knew that Origins was made after City but I did not suspect that it cribbed from City quite so liberally. It turns out that a lot of the things I disliked in Origins had their roots in City.
But then they used the “Gotham under siege” plot for Arkham Knight, so maybe that wasn’t the reason.
I’ve never heard of that game. Did you make it up?
Yeah, by Arkham Knight it was becoming really obvious they were looking for any excuse to avoid putting civilians in their open-world game.
And, honestly, the “Gotham under siege” plot has its own problems too. In Arkham Origins the level of violence is roughly consistent with a really bad city-wide riot at a time where the police is over-stretched (and also corrupt), with a few supervillains sprinkled on top. In Arkham Knight the GCPD is city is besieged by armies of tanks and helicopters. This shouldn’t be a job for Batman, this should be a job for the US military, with maybe Superman and the Justice League helping.
Whatever else they may have wanted, it seems very clear to me that Rocksteady–or possibly their corporate overlords–first and foremost wanted to make a direct sequel to Arkham Asylum. Just look at the plot. Once again, it’s all about Joker. That was fine in Asylum because Joker was responsible for everything that happened in Asylum. He’s not responsible for the Arkham City project though, and the things he wants from Batman have nothing to do with the fact that the game is set in a mini-dystopia. The developers may have been aware of No Man’s Land, but I think that the setting’s resemblance to No Man’s Land is superficial and possibly coincidental.
By “crash your brain” I was referring to spending an inordinate amount of effort on a game element. Not a puzzle the game expects you to solve. Rather an element within a game that your brain turned into a puzzle to be solved.
Like programming your own custom min-max mod so you can get a character build just right. Or trying to figure out what a game is doing by deriving a dataset by simulating a billion outcomes to get a normal distribution. Or something like what Matt Parker did with his Christmas tree. (https://youtu.be/WuMRJf6B5Q4?t=1230) Where if I were him, I would have simply measured the physical wire between LEDs.
For DSP someone wanted to be able to figure out if a planet would be inside a Dyson Sphere or not. So he de-complied the source code, analyzed the math, then built a website to calculate a graphing function. (https://www.desmos.com/calculator/nkptiep0ey)
These are examples of people who *really* wanted to know the answer to very inconsequential questions. Their minds must have gotten stuck on it to put in that kind of effort. The process of solving the problem became more important than anything to do with the outcome or answer.
Using Tower of Hanoi as an example, getting so fed up with Tower of Hanoi puzzles, you program a recursion algorithm (https://medium.com/free-code-camp/analyzing-the-algorithm-to-solve-the-tower-of-hanoi-problem-686685f032e3) to solve all future Hanoi puzzles automatically for you.
I’m not saying it has to result in programming either. Anything that ends up with a disproportionate level of effort cause you just can’t shake thinking about it. (https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/022/524/tumblr_o16n2kBlpX1ta3qyvo1_1280.jpg)
(Stupid moderation queue deleting my link formatting. Grumble grumble)
Well if it isn’t programming-specific, I’ve been trying to rewrite FF8 to make sense for… how old is that game now? About that long.
Lol. Yeah. I was thinking in terms of numbers, logic, data, flowcharts etc. However rewriting a story would count too. As long as it got stuck in your brain in a way that you couldn’t shake.
For me, I knew I could do what I wanted with 6 pilers. It wasn’t hard. There was zero benefit from doing it with less. It became something I really wanted to solve in terms of switches, loops and logic gates. For absolutely no reason.
Playing Dark Souls with bongos wouldn’t count though. Because it had value. It was necessary in order to be listened to while making a larger statement about accessibility and inclusivity.
I have written a program to plan out optimised Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen builds.
In fact, I even rewrote it from Java to Scheme so I could use a logic programming framework I have lying around to do some optimising for me.
But logic puzzles are endemic in games:
“Do I use the mega elixir now or save it for an even bigger fish?”
“Should I build a few military units for (defending against) early harassment or focus on maximising economic growth?”
“Should I use a rocket to quickly thin out the group of enemies in that room to minimise the damage I take or take some damage to save the ammo?”
That’s part of the fun of doing some speed running, it forces you to make these kinds of decisions on the fly.
What you describe; “Do I use the mega elixir now or save it for an even bigger fish?” and then guessing. That is a normal aspect of playing the game.
Then there’s dissecting the source code to find out the exact probabilities of mega elixirs and bigger fish (and defining exactly what ‘bigger’ is in terms of fish and probability) and writing a sim of it to test a few billion outcomes. Giving you the *definitively correct* answer to “Do I use the mega elixir now or save it for an even bigger fish?” That’s not a normal aspect of playing the game. This is the kind of thing I’m referring to.
BTW I’m a bit confused by the reference to speed running. Speed runners do not make those kinds of decisions on the fly. Every decision is planned out in advance in exacting detail in a speed run. It can be pre-planned to such an extent that every button press is meticulously timed to the millisecond and listed a spreadsheet. (It’s also why speed run categories are broken down into human vs computer input.) Speed running involves a lot more of the 2nd paragraph than the 1st.
“Crashing your brain” is where you decide that the *definitively correct* answer is more important than actually playing the game. Often to your own detriment.
There are Speed Runs, and then there’s trying to play the game really fast. The latter, with no big plan but to go for a personal best with no serious intent at further iterations of a learned route, will move those decisions to during the gameplay. There are also games with randomly generated elements where a speed/challenge run might have a known “best” answer, but the player can still choose when it’s best to take a gamble (or *not* take a gamble that would be better on average), in response to the current game state.
It’s not an in-game problem, and I wouldn’t say I spent an inordinate amount of effort on it, but playing Terraforming Mars I got interested enough in the average actions-per-generation over the course of a game that I noted down how many actions each player took each generation* and made a graph of it. (Which confirmed my impression of a sort of “J” shape with a lot of actions in the first generation as players spend their starting resources, then a drop and ramp back up to eventually higher than the first generation as players invest in production and get more resources each successive generation.)
*In the digital version, with myself + 4 AI opponents.
@41:41, There’s another subtitles tech at the cinema that is even better– a mirror.
The closed captions are played on the back wall in reverse. Someone watching the movie positions a dark piece of plastic that acts as a mirror. It’s designed so that it isn’t a true mirror. It is semi-transparent and only reflects the text. It is positioned at end of an armature that attaches to the cup holder so it is in a person’s eye-line that suits them best.
Shamus, if subtitles are an ongoing issue for you and Heather, then I’d recommend doing that yourself. Display just the subtitles on a tablet, phone or laptop on a black screen in a high contrast way that Heather can see it and you can’t. Subtitles can be downloaded and played in VLC. You can find a dark piece of plastic at the dollar store if you need to reflect it. And a gooseneck phone holder to position it is under ~$20.
Cinemas use other methods too (glasses, LED pager like displays, etc). The mirror one is cheap and effective though. No idea why theaters discontinued them in favor of more expensive and IMO inferior options.
The references in the fallout mod reminds me of fallout 2. A bunch of references of whatever the devs like. There you have a random scientology reference, or the bridge man skit from monty python. Strange that a mod oof the same series would make the same mistake.
29:40 I always hate these kinds of discussions. Where people say “well there is magic already why are you complaining its not realistic”. Stories should have internal consistency and excusing bad writing like that is just frustrating.
Thank you for your response, gentlemen.
I sent my question to the Diecast just after I started Arkham City. I knew going in that the premise was absurd, but I suppose it’s one thing to read about a game and another thing to play it. I reacted much more strongly and much more negatively to the game’s opening than I thought I would. It was the part where Bruce Wayne gets swatted for no reason on live television and immediately thrown into the lawless, open-air prison that did it. I was prepared to accept the utterly implausible open-air prison as the price of playing the game, but the idea that Hugo Strange could openly do that to a famous billionaire of all people and get away with it just didn’t (and still doesn’t) make any sense.
I’m about half-way through the game now, and I’m pleased to say that the story has so far provided zero exposition about just how this whole Arkham City boondoggle got off the ground. I can see some evidence of the flood that Shamus mentioned when I’m gliding around the open world, but no one has actually mentioned it yet. It may have come up in some of the sidequests, but I’ve been mostly ignoring those, just to be safe. Not that a flood makes sense either. If there had really been a flood, all those subway and sewer tunnels, not to mention the buried fairground, would be filled with water. To answer my own question, I think the second option–doing as little as possible to draw attention to your stupid premise–is probably the right call. Right now, it’s hard for me to see how any attempts to justify, rationalize, or explain Arkham City would do anything other than make me even more confused and irritable.
On difficulty settings as accessibility, bringing up cerebral palsy is a good illustration of why that’s not a great framing. Imagine trying to make Doom accessible to people with cerebral palsy. It wouldn’t be hard to give the player ten thousand health and an aimbot, but would that be fun? A version of Doom where you don’t have to aim or dodge sounds like it’s missing some of the core things people find fun about its gameplay loop. Maybe people would still have fun watching demons explode, but I bet they’d have a lot less fun than someone who could play it on the intended difficulty setting.
At some point the capabilities of the human body are written into the assumptions of the game and you can’t make it playable to people with radically different capabilities because that’s just a different game. Wheelchair basketball is not simply a more accessible version of basketball.
Yeah, and part of the difficulty with answering the question is that there is a cultural subtext that providing accessibility options is a moral imperative, so expanding the definition of the word essentially means shrinking the scope of games that should be made.
I don’t know, I think not only may that be fun for someone who wants to play games but lacks motor controls to survive, that might even be fun for gamers without cerebral palsy. I bet some people would like to turn on invincibility mode and stomp round a level doing silly things – not all the time but some of the time.
Guardians of the Galaxy had a totally customisable difficulty set-up, and apart from making the game way more accessible, it made it possible to remove very specific bug bears from the game. I’m sure the ability to switch off quick time events was meant to make the game more accessible, but I took advantage of that option too.
You could use the difficulty settings to set unique gameplay challenges, and if the game had been popular enough you might even have seen ‘fan’ difficulty settings pop up on forums.
Maybe it’s not an argument to be used for every single game, but extreme customisable difficulty settings would open up games to more people and I bet, as with a lot of accessibility features, it would turn out to benefit more people than just the people it was designed for.
It’s not hard to imagine putting health sliders into Doom, and projectile speed sliders and perhaps ‘fire rate’ sliders etc.
I’ve pondered this idea before, and I am not sure it’s a good one. The problem here is that by allowing the player to customize everything, you surrender the possibility of *designing* anything.
For example, in a statistical rules set for Doom, a designer can count on hard facts. Fireballs travel at a certain speed, so the designer knows they can place fireball-hurling imps at a certain distance to give the player a certain time to react. Take that away, and the design job itself fundamentally changes necessarily, because smartly-defined challenges aren’t possible.
Moreover, the player isn’t really engaging with the core gameplay anymore, but the abstract difficulty sliders. That’s a huge problem!
I haven’t played GotG (yet). However, if the game feels such that QTEs are easily disposed of without affecting the core, then possibly they shouldn’t have been included at all.
All you’d have to do is design the game around the highest difficulty setting, and all the lower settings will automatically be playable. Heck, you don’t even have to do that if you also have preset difficulties; if Doom is playable on Nightmare, and Nightmare is the highest preset, you don’t actually have to make it playable if the player turns all the sliders up past that; they did that to themselves.
Man, I miss God Mode and Infinite Ammo. It makes every shooter better.
Playable sure, but if you make a room where you have to walk a tightrope while imps throw fireballs at you, it’s going to be really boring if the tightrope is tuned for Nightmare and the Normal-speed fireball can’t even hit you before you finish walking it.
The more things you attach to a slider, the less constants your design can rely upon.
That’s literally how the fireballs work in original Doom.
It’s going to be boring if the player is tuned to Nightmare. If a normal player is on a tightrope, and struggling to maintain their balance. then slower fireballs are still going to threaten them.
Games are tuned to a much finer degree now, however.
I believe there’s a place for easy games and harder ones in the world. But I would be extremely nervous, as a designer, if I had to make games that could be equally playable and enjoyable by players with a truly huge skill gap. If a game needs to fit both the “Lego Star Wars is too tough” crowd and “I beat Dark Souls blindfolded” you’re going to make serious compromises and, crucially, you will have to just avoid some gameplay experiences that might be really fun to do.
Minecraft and Pokemon are two extremely successful games equally playable and enjoyable by players with a truly huge skill gap.
It’s interesting you bring that up. First, those games are extremely easy to beat. They’re designed to be a moderate challenge for grade-schoolers. And the first is primarily a creativity tool, to which challenges were added later. Of course, arbitrarily pointing to two successful games and saying they invalidate my point is a non-answer anyway, and you have not clearly stated an argument to discuss.
Do you mean to say that no games should be like Dark Souls and all games should be like Minecraft?
Wow, I’m not sure I’ve ever read a more passive aggressive comment on here. Have fun, I’m not going to engage with that. :)
Can you give an example? I can’t think of a game that actually loses anything by letting the player turn down the difficulty. Even platformers can have jump distance sliders, maybe pit sliders.
Let’s say you’re making a platformer, but you decided to include a difficulty slider turns your jumps into super-jumps, all the bottomless pits have been removed, and time limits are increased ten-fold. Let’s say that *every* other single element of the game is intact: graphics, sound,
Well, to be blunt, would anyone play that? It would likely be a very boring platformer because there isn’t any challenge. Why not just watch a youtube video of the cutscenes and go about the day without bothering with tedious un-failable levels? Most platformer players want a tight challenge. Not necessarily a brutal difficulty, mind you, just one that tests and player and pushes back enough to make overcoming the challenge worthwhile. Not co-incidentally, very often platformers alter difficulty not by having the Easy Mode but by gradually increasing the level of difficulty, and often including optional levels of brain-shattering difficulty for the best players. The point is not to condescend to the player, but to push them to master the system and learn its rule and possibilities. The mastery isn’t the problem, it’s the point.
In reality, if the designer does not have a difficulty curve in mind, or doesn’t care to emphasize the challenge, he or she won’t go the trouble of including tight jumping puzzles or timing tasks. Instead, the focus would go on a story or graphics or whatever. But they also probably won’t be doing other forces of difficulty adjustment because again, why bother?
Or for a related example, the Soulsbourne games put a great deal of emphasis on hit detection. it’s considered very important to incentivize skilled, highly technical play. But if players can just faceroll everything, well, why bother? Sure, it’s nice but would anyone take the time to really map attacks and carefully balance in great detail if it’s just one equally-valid option among many?
Again, I’m not saying easy games shouldn’t exist. I play them! I don’t play Dark Souls! But I respect that they do exist and consider them an entirely valid form of design that doesn’t need to justify itself to people who don’t want to play those games. The challenge in Bloodbourne isn’t a “problem” to be solved; it’s the point of the game. Complaining about it is a lot like complaining that Alien is too scary and it needs to be toned down so more people can enjoy it: it wouldn’t be Alien if it wasn’t scary. You can make great science fiction movies that aren’t frightening, but that would be something quite different from Alien and you can’t “fix” Alien by just upping the lighting in every scene so you can see the silly rubber monster suit.
You mean, would anyone do naked Level 1 runs of Dark Souls even though there’s a block system and leveling system available that makes things drastically easier? Yes, they would. People play through Final Fantasy games at Level 1 without equipment, because they want to.
And I do think there are people who would go through Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog without spikes or pits or time limits (mostly children), because the games are pretty, and the level layouts and bosses are creative, and the soundtrack is memorable. Challenge is only one of many attractions of a game, but is unique in that unalterably high challenge walls off all the other attractions, and forces you to show up specifically for the challenge.
Then why bother having plot or atmosphere. Make the enemies monocolored blobs; the challenge doesn’t benefit from the graphics. Cut the house conversations; flavor text offers no challenge. Mid Enemy, Large Enemy, Heavy Mid Enemy, Boss 1. It’s all you need if you’re just there for the challenge.
You can totally tone down Alien. Turn down the volume; turn up the brightness on your TV; watch it on a smaller screen with lights on in your house. Skip ahead during tense scenes. The viewer has tremendous control over their movie-watching experience.
“But if players can just faceroll everything, well, why bother? Sure, it’s nice but would anyone take the time to really map attacks and carefully balance in great detail if it’s just one equally-valid option among many?”
I’d say because it feels good to git gud. This is exactly how I played the Batman Arkham games. Bats is super-durable and can faceroll his way through most fights. But if you master the timing, learn the moves, and learn where to position yourself, you can gracefully take out the bad guys without anyone laying a hand on you. That’s the real dopamine hit for me – not just winning the fight, but doing so in a graceful unbroken chained attack.
I suspect that there’s a bit of everyone talking past each other in this thread. When we talk about “overcoming” a game, people are often talking about two different things:
1) I got through the challenge and progressed to the next part of the game. (I beat the boss and reached the next bonfire.)
2) I mastered the mechanics. (I aced the boss without getting hit.)
But since we’re using the same words to describe these two things, the conversation gets confused:
A: I want accessibility options so that I can overcome[#1] the game!
B: That doesn’t make sense. If you change the rules of the game then you’re no longer overcoming[#2] the challenge!
B gets their satisfaction from #2, and doesn’t see the value in #1. A just wants #1, and thinks B is being a gatekeeping jerk for saying you shouldn’t be allowed to have #1 until you achieve #2.
Several big assumptions going on here that are not necessarily true. One, not everyone has the same level of reflexes, skill, etc.. Sure, your “super-duper-ultra-easy” setting might be trivial for a twenty-to-forty-year-old who’s been playing games since they were a kid. But what about an actual kid who’s just discovered your game? What about a seventy-year-old whose eyesight is getting worse, but has just gotten into this whole “gaming” thing the kids are talking about? What about a thirty-year-old with some sort of disability for whom that level of difficulty is still challenging—but, crucially, beatable, unlike the default game difficulty. There’s a lot of potential audience for your game that might otherwise be locked out by being literally unable to “git gud” enough to play it. And hey, maybe after a grueling long day at work I just want to chill out in my favorite game to enjoy the music, mechanics, graphics, etc. but can’t summon the brain power to face the normal difficulty level.
Two, what has your assumed “normal” player lost by having that difficulty level as an option? They can just stick to default, or infra-easy, or ultra-nightmare, or whatever level gives them a challenge they like. Sure, they might hypothetically be bored stiff on “super-duper-ultra-easy”, but why would they ever select it (other than perhaps for 30 seconds to try out before switching back)? They’ve lost nothing by it existing, but plenty of people have gained by it existing. It’s not like players are all a bunch of drooling imbeciles gravitating to the lowest difficulty level immediately then complaining the game’s not fun; I mean, I’m sure you can find examples of such, but generally it seems like people have the opposite problem of being too proud to turn down the difficulty even when they’re stuck (*raises hand*). As people get better, they’ll naturally adjust the difficulty to a level that challenges them. I don’t see how having an optional difficulty level has removed anything from the game or the people who play it, but I can see how it adds something for people who otherwise might not be able to play it.
It’s less about “easy games” and “hard games” and more about “how can we make a game that remains challenging to as wide an array of skill levels as possible?” To reply to an earlier comment: “But I would be extremely nervous, as a designer, if I had to make games that could be equally playable and enjoyable by players with a truly huge skill gap,” see, I just see that as a challenge… :)
@Shamus: Very well put. And all of this is complicated by the fact that for some players the existence of accessibility options invalidates #2.
See, most of these players get enormous satisfaction from mastering a particularly tricky section. Something you’ve been wailing at for hours, is now something you can ace in five minutes. We’ve definitely felt that – that feeling of elation that takes a hold of your entire being as your brain gets bombarded with dopamine.
But as gamers, some of us have an innate disposition towards trying to find the optimal solution to a problem. How can you solve something using the least amount of resources? And with difficulty settings, the optimal way of beating a tricky section is to turn down the difficulty.
This creates an internal conflict. Yes, you could wail at this boss for hours, OR you could just turn down the difficulty and ace it in minutes. Even if you do manage to beat the boss on the high difficulty, the “optimizer” part of your brain will be saying “You know, we could have done that in 5 minutes if you’d just turned down the difficulty! Why did we have to waste so much time?!”
Yes, you’d still get the dopamine hit, but it’s going to be diminished by that pesky optimizer part of your brain. And I think this is why some Souls players are opposed to difficulty settings. Because today most games, apps, and even movies are bending over backwards to accommodate for every possible use case and problem out there.
And Souls games are pretty much the only Single-Player AAA titles that still have this attitude of “I am not going to make any accommodations for you. The challenge is the challenge. There is one way to beat it. You can either meet me on my terms, or get lost.”
And while that challenge isn’t something I’m personally interested in, it’s definitely something I can empathise with. FWIW, I don’t think a difficulty slider would make me want to play Souls games. If I really wanted to turn down the difficulty, I’d just play with one of the many Dark Souls trainers out there.
And which I find weird that nobody ever brings up when talking about difficulty and accessibility. If there really were these mountains of people clamouring to play with an easy mode, why aren’t more people talking about the trainers and mods that are already out there, catering for that specific need?
“Let’s say you’re making a platformer, but you decided to include a difficulty slider turns your jumps into super-jumps, all the bottomless pits have been removed, and time limits are increased ten-fold. Let’s say that *every* other single element of the game is intact: graphics, sound,
Well, to be blunt, would anyone play that? It would likely be a very boring platformer because there isn’t any challenge. Why not just watch a youtube video of the cutscenes and go about the day without bothering with tedious un-failable levels? ”
Some Mario games literally do that, though. I’m thinking specifically of the Invincibility Leaf. If you fail a level a bunch, you can choose to pick that up at the start, at which point you’re invincible to all enemies. I’d also note the number of SMW levels that you could just fly over with the cape, as well as the alternate paths and secret levels that you don’t need to beat, but exist if you want the challenge.
Even SMB1 had the secret warps. As a kid, I beat SMB by finding the warps, then struggling against the, like, five levels that you need to actually complete. As an adult, I played the SNES re-release with level-based saves, and beat each level in turn, without warps, though dying a lot. If I wanted a real challenge, I could attempt to beat the entire game without warps or continues. These are three vastly different difficulty experiences that the same game supports.
I would also suggest looking over the accessibility options in Celeste, which has been praised both for it’s difficulty and it’s accessibility. It has three options of note: game speed, invincibility, and infinite stamina. While game speed is just a semi-difficulty slider, both infinite stamina and invincibility change up how the game plays.
And, inevitably, two weeks after releasing the game someone will post a video of themselves completing the game with all the sliders maxed out, in under an hour, with their hands switched around on the controller or blindfolded or something.
I think the issue here is less that these things can’t be done so that the game is playable, but that changing difficulties and sliders and the like might end up producing a completely different kind of game, and especially when we’re looking for accessibility around disabilities we’re not looking for a case where the answer is “Change all these settings and get a game that’s completely different from the game you actually wanted to play but couldn’t without the accessibility options”. So what does the designer do? Do they intensively test all of those combinations to ensure that it produces a similar experience to the game as designed? Do they allow the changes and if that produces a game that’s nothing like the original game simply shrug and say “That’s up to the player”? Or do they say that producing those sorts of options is too hard and go with a “This game cannot accommodate those situations without being a completely different sort of game, so we won’t do that”, knowing that they’d have to justify that against “helpful” suggestions from the crowd and so would have to test that to show that it can’t be done? Obviously, they aren’t going to say “We just don’t care!”, so that’s out.
So you can’t just design for the hardest difficulty and so that will make the lower ones work as well, because that can make it a completely different game. And making mistakes with sliders and difficulty levels is a problem as well, because I remember a hockey game where I dominated on the lowest level, went up one, and then simply couldn’t score at all, which frustrated me. There is indeed some need to ensure that people playing on lower difficulties and with easier slider options have an experience close enough to the “real” game so that if they get bored with that and try to move back towards the “normal” difficulty they aren’t left completely unprepared for the gameplay the game was actually designed to use.
Ideally they stop worrying about trying to force the player to have the experience the designer wants them to have, and give them an experience the player wants to have instead.
This is what sliders would solve; if your first and second presets have too wide of a gap, the player can check the sliders and set up something in between.
The problem is that for the most players who look at a game and decide that they want to try it they decide that on the basis of the gameplay the designer advertises, which is the gameplay they designed the game to have and so is the experience the designer wants the players to have. There might be interestingly different gameplays that someone could develop playing with the sliders, but most of those players are likely to be disappointed that after all of that they can’t play the game the way they expected to when they bought it.
This assumes that the gap between slider settings itself isn’t too large. But more importantly, if the sliders are sufficiently granular and control the full set of details of the game it would take a lot of work and experimentation in the hopes of finding a combination that works for you. Most players would probably give up on the game first.
No, you really don’t. You make a game with the designed difficulty, and then the player can change that if they want. The default settings of the game don’t magically stop being the defaults, and people who want the intended experience, who reject “easy mode,” won’t turn on easy mode even if you give them the option. If someone intentionally goes into the menu and changes the options, they know perfectly well what’s going on if the options they changed impact their gameplay. That’s the whole point. You can even put up a warning that says “hey, remember that if you change these, the game might get really easy or hard or weird.” And the simplest options that usually already exist as part of the game engine itself like godmode, noclip, etc, there is zero reason they can’t have toggles added to singleplayer modes for people that want/need them.
In the bad old days plenty of games had invincibility cheats that were printed in magazines and passed around the community, which were what allowed people to learn how to play games in the first place. I never would have played more than the first couple levels of Warcraft without godmode, and later lesser cheats, to let me enjoy the game while I was learning it, until one day I decided it was time to take the training wheels off and see what I could do on my own. Contra’s Konami Code for extra lives is the only reason most people ever beat that game, I’m told. How many people wouldn’t play Super Mario World unless someone else had already unlocked the “level” behind the Donut Plains ghost house that would let you pick up any powerup and infinite lives if you needed them? How many people had Game Genies?- I know I used one to beat a Mega Man game and to make cheat pokemon to clear the most restrictive mode in Pokemon Stadium 2.
Saying that people today shouldn’t be able to have the same things *we* had to help us learn and enjoy games *should* be an obvious load of exclusionary bs. It’s only gotten easier to allow such things, and yet they’ve magically dried up to appease people that think everyone should suffer as much or more as they willingly do to themselves now, as an adult, with decades of experience.
Hell, maybe there wouldn’t be so many “hackers” in Dark Souls and whatnot if they didn’t need commercial multiplayer cheat software in order to get the basic godmode they need to enjoy the game on their own.
My strongest memory of 007 Goldeneye was the post-game slider options that let you give enemies 1000% health and perfect aim, combined with the invincibility cheat unlock. Just unloading bullets into beefy, beefy boys who are constantly stunlocking me but unable to kill me. That’s a fun time right there.
I can think of a thousand explanations for the death of cheat codes, have you got any evidence supporting yours?
Aside from the legions (in raw number, even if provably not a large percentage, somehow) of people that get mad on the internet for no discernible reason other than someone is playing the game wrong, where wrong is wanting an easy mode or forcing one in? (see: “you not only cheated the game, but yourself” etc.) It might not be a primary reason, but the fear of blowback if a developer did put such features in a sequel or update can’t be nothing. (I did phrase it as if it were a primary reason, which was poor- letting some emotion run away with me).
Naturally I’d be more interested in a serious reason why a single-player game really actually totally can’t have a cheat option that’s already part of the game’s engine. Claims that it gets murkier with multiplayer functions can have some merit, but you’ll have a heck of a time convincing me that there’s a technical reason a game playable completely solo can’t have such options.
It’s completely possible to eat your cake and still have it here. You stick the extra settings in a submenu with a warning on it, then design the game how you see fit. If someone opens up the custom difficulty menu, and sets things up so the game is impossible, that’s a trap they set for themselves. (Though being able to adjust the difficulty on the fly is generally a good thing.)
It would be entirely fine to have an FPS where the player has a million health and enemies only take potshots occasionally and all that, but I would prefer to frame it as “someone should make an FPS that has that,” rather than “Doom should have that.”
Same thing with “someone should make a game like Dark Souls with an easy mode'” rather than “Dark Souls should have an easy mode.”
No meaningful glances in the mirror for “someone” this time, I’m not adding that to my ever-expanding bucket list. If I were to make a game I would rather have it be an RPG a la Temple of Elemental Evil, rather than an action game like DS, no matter how much I like DS2.
Yeah, you’d produce a much better game if you started from scratch designing it to be easy rather than trying to make an easy port of a hard game (though the latter is of course less work, since you’re not starting from scratch).
Though we then get into the question of what “should” means. I am a fan of all kinds of weird niche games and I would be very happy if more of them got made, but I wouldn’t tell any game developers that they should make those kinds of games because the audience for them is very small and the developer probably won’t make their money back.
Yeah, “someone” may have to refer to “one who has a lot of money, time, and goodwill.”
When it comes to accessibility, the fact that has to be remembered is that “should” means “enforced under the law”.
Does that apply to luxuries as well or only to essentials? …Actually, never mind, I fear we may thread too close to politics with this train of thought, better to take it to the pub rather than Twenty Sided.
Under the US system, it is basically whatever any judge says goes. Whether or not that is good thing, you are right, we should keep silent on.
There’s a principle is writing that “the first chapter is free”. You can set up nearly anything as your premise, and as long as you do that clearly and then abide by that premise throughout, you won’t lose a significant portion of your audience.
For an example of where this works pretty well, see Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy series of fantasy detective stories. Magic works in the world, but it’s constrained by a set of hard rules and the puzzles solved by the eponymous detective do not violate those rules. (In detective fiction, this is referred to as “fair play”, so the reader has a reasonable chance of solving the mystery before the reveal.)
Similar things apply to absurdities in video games. As long as you lay out your absurdities as a part of the premise (whether or not this is especially blatant), the actual premise doesn’t matter much (at least to me). See Battletech, where giant stompy combat suits with the pilot in a glass bubble at the most-exposed point make no sense at all, but this is largely ignored for the sake of the genre.
It’s funny you should mention Battletech. “Giant stompy military robots” is indeed a fine premise for a video game. Unfortunately, Battletech is also an alternate future-history setting spanning hundreds of years and hundreds, possibly thousands, of planets. “Giant stompy military robots” does not work nearly so well as a premise for that. It is hard to explain why all conflict should be settled on the ground in fights between giant robots when interstellar spaceships also exist, are capable of mounting weapons, and have done so to great effect in the backstory. I think that part of “abiding by the premise” must be restricting the scope of your story so that you don’t accidentally call the premise into question.
Funnily enough I recently finished a game that calls this discussion to mind that actually is based on murder mysteries: Danganronpa (full title “Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc Anniversary Edition”). The elevator pitch is something like “Phoenix Wright in an elite boarding school as designed by The Jigsaw Killer”, and while I don’t know that it quite meets the fair play standard, there’s a surprisingly high ratio of foreshadowing and breadcrumbing as opposed to shocking surprises coming seemingly out of nowhere. Even after a lot of the more absurd developments you can see how they were building up to it with the benefit of hindsight.
The game has several full-on murder mystery plots as well as a more overarching mystery (that being “Why did anyone go to the trouble to do any of this?”) And for the overall plot, you can find yourself nitpicking the logistics or the ability for the big bad to do what they did, but I do really think that “You played a game where the premise is solving murder mysteries in a high school built like a Fallout vault and which considers things like being an expert gambler valid entry criteria, while acting under threat of execution by a robot teddy bear. You should know what kind of story this is by now,” would be a valid rebuttal. On the other hand, if they pulled a Bethesda move of having NPCs abuse you without you or anyone else on your side ever complaining, I’m sure I would have dropped it at some point. That’s not to say no one’s ever an asshole, or even that no one’s ever an asshole to you directly; it’s a story about teenagers in a high school after all. But when people get far out of line even by outlandish anime high school standards, there’s always a hint that the writers know this and that they’re going somewhere with it. I genuinely appreciated the way they can put a 15 foot tall man-eating plant in the greenhouse and claim that some offscreen genius high school student grew it in biology lab and seriously just go with it, yet stay mindful of the need to keep character motivations in mind whether it’s in relation to committing a murder or even reactions to something more mundane like the goth girl bullying the fat kid into making her tea.
Man, I was incredibly disappointed in all the elements of Danganronpa you’re praising. To its credit the detectives didn’t make leaps of logic the player couldn’t follow, but it deeply frustrated my desire for fair play because so many of the cases turned on critical evidence that was only introduced in the closing minutes of the trial, there was no “before the reveal” window to figure out the case. I stopped trying to think ahead after the third time all my careful considerations got blown up by the introduction of a surprise witness.
The overarching story did not work at all for me because it seemed completely uninterested in exploring the premise. If you tell me that a bunch of kids are locked in a building for weeks where they have a high chance of being murdered, the first two questions on my mind are “What do they
eatdo all day?” and “What measures do they take to avoid being murdered?” There’s no sign of them getting cabin fever and also no sign of them searching for ways to stave off cabin fever, they all seem to simply be immune to boredom. Similarly they take exactly one ineffective anti-murder measure in declaring a curfew then spend their days waiting to be murdered. You could tell a fascinating story about the weird little society those conditions create but the writer’s disinterest in having characters act like human beings cued me to treat the whole thing as an excuse plot that existed only to create a series of murders in a building.So I didn’t get around to this until well after the fact and this probably won’t be seen, but…
I agree with this overall assessment but the stuff you’re saying was absent isn’t totally absent; more like “just present enough that I was willing to take it as read that the authors weren’t omitting this stuff because they’re dumb, just giving barely enough nods to assure me that they thought of it and that wasn’t their focus.” In particular their stir-craziness and reactions to it tends to come up near the end of everyone’s intimacy quest chains.
This also wasn’t my experience at all; most cases I either figured out the culprit or came just close enough that I could honestly say, “aha, there’s the part I missed”:
Case 1: Straight up figured this one out on my own, though
Sayaka being the aggressorfell under “was surprised but realized it retrospect what I failed to put together”Case 2: Actually this one kinda sucks, I won’t even try to defend it. If this contributed to giving up on logic I understand. In particular
Byakuya intentionally trolling the investigationrubbed me the wrong way.Case 3: I actually had the opposite problem where I guessed
Hifumi not really being killed in the Nurse’s Officeearly enough that I was mildly annoyed that I couldn’t act on it before the trial started. I also realized thatthis meant Celeste’s picture didn’t fit that particular version of eventsand had a forehead-slap moment when that somehow didn’t translate into me figuring out the culprit already.Case 4: Also guessed this pretty early, though
Hina’s obfuscationsthrew just enough doubt that there was some uncertainty.Case 5: This one’s
a sham trial that you’re meant to lose, and the narrative makes that really clear. This is probably best thought of as part of the “setup” for #6 and not its own thing, especially since #6 is “#5 but for real this time”Case 6: Another one I just narrowly missed figuring out in a funny way:
As soon as the body count in the morgue was mentioned, I did a mental tally of how many characters died before that point so I could compare the count. The problem is, I skipped one. And it wasn’t just any one, it was Junko.Maybe it’s a case of “it happened to hit me just right” but I think “mostly get it figured out if you’re paying attention but with a few details left as surprises” was about perfect as far as I was concerned.
I mean, the daylight savings stuff made a lot of sense back when your options of lighting at dark where ‘tallow,’ ‘fire pit you keep running for warmth anyway,’ or if you were REALLY posh, whale oil, and it’s beautiful bright light. Heck, even in the ‘a cartel has outright made it secretly verboten to improve incandescent lights’ days, it still made SOME sense in how much energy & resources got saved.
Nowadays, though… Yeah, it’s basically only legal and cultural momentum. You save like… local analogue of pennies per household, thanks to just how good even the most basic LED lights have gotten.
Might be one of the last few years we do it here over in the EU, though. There’s been a lot of rumbling about removing Daylight’s Saving. Only reason it hasn’t happened yet, to my understanding, is that it would require some time-zone redrawing, and nobody’s wanted to perform such a large and cumbersome task quite~ yet.
Like everybody agreeing that it’s high time to spring clean, but nobody wants to start it, because this time, ‘we’ need to pull out and vacuum under the appliances. Except politically on a scale of Europe.
In America, we’re not getting rid of Daylight Saving Time any time soon. Just today the Senate passed a bill to make it permanent. We’re going to have it year-round now.
The preeminent problem with DST wasn’t DST per se, it was swapping between Daylight and Standard time. The swapping ends, most people will be happy; they don’t much care if their part of the country is UTC -6 or UTC -7 as long as the government picks one and sticks to it.
It’s never really made sense. As near as I can tell, it was urbanites white knighting for rurals (who scheduled their days by the sun and didn’t care what time the clocktower in town said.) It’s worth noting that Daylight Savings didn’t exist before the 20th century, with the Western world adopting daylight savings between 1908 and 1918.
Which, to clarify, means DST was instituted after cheap, effective home lighting was a thing, if not yet universal. It somehow made more sense to screw with the timekeeping than adjust working hours for urbanites who wanted more light for their after-work activities.
At a national level it was a means of saving energy. Europe were just ramping up into the war and looking for any bit of extra coal savings they could muster.
Sigh. Hey Shamus, if you could un-spam the comment I was editing above, that’d be nice. I guess anything more than 2 edits and it just decides you’re spamming?
I could have sworn it used to cut you off after one edit, but if the cost of potential multiple edits is the spam filter suddenly yanking the whole thing, I’d rather have a limited number.
I have successfully made multiple edits in the past, the spam filter is just weird and sometimes nails things seemingly at random.
It’s hit me for a single edit before. That’s why you never correct tyops.
I think part of it might have to do with time; I’ve definitely made multiple edits to a post before over several minutes while proof-reading, but I once dashed off a short post, noticed a typo, hit “edit” in less than 5 seconds, and got spam-botted (presumably because I was a clever bot who wrote an innocuous post and then edited in links or something).
Like Shamus said there’s no reason not to attempt accessibility options. Shit, how many games don’t allow rebinding controls still. That’s accessibility. As Fizban said, just adding cheat codes could help out so much with people who have disabilities. And Ninety-Three how could we even tell if Doom for so.eone with Cerebral Palsy would be fun, since no one even attempts to help that person play now. My son is severely autistic, with both speech and motor coordination issues. The fact that almost no developer even attempts to find a way for him to engage with my favorite hobby is a fucking crime. Dark Souls doesn’t need an easy mode, and a dev arguing that it would take away resources to make one I’ll accept. But gatekeeping players can please get out of the way, and maybe give the disabled a chance to appreciate the same games that they themselves have
Hey now, VNs and Point ‘n Click Adventure games need love too.
I can recommend Violet, it’s my favourite P&CAG.
I don’t understand your reply, how it factors to my post, but I personally do enjoy visual novels
In the accessibilty question Shamus mentioned a tweet from a guy who finished Dark Souls on a “dance mat” or some other exotic controller and said it should have an easy mode. I’d love to see that twitter thread and show it to “gitguders”.
Found it. Looks like he made a homemade controller with one button and used morse code for inputs:
https://twitter.com/rudeism?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1452190376505323520%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamebyte.com%2Fadd-morse-code-to-the-list-of-ways-dark-souls-3-has-been-beaten%2F
Deeply stupid premise eh? The Prisoner works very well in that regard, the main character being astounded at the ludicrous situation but having to submit to its setting while trying to break and then bend its rules. The only issue is then how does one tie up such a situation with an ending? The answer in this case was just make it as stupid as the premise itself, and I’m not sure what else they could have done.
FYI on Fallout: Frontier, a lot of the general hate train likely stems from the (now former) project lead… well… I’ll leave it as ‘being a creep elsewhere on the internet’ to keep things light. Supposedly any of his content has since being removed though, along with that of several artists and VAs who clearly wanted to distance themselves. There were also some characters/plotlines that went in a similar very creepy directions involving enslaved characters and pretty overtly sexual undertones (supposedly unrelated to the involvement of the former lead). The devs have denied that being the intention and promised to remove them as of a year ago, so I’d assume they’re long gone by now. But there were apparently extremely creepy elements like forcing a character to be your slave and a line about them being “your little slave girl”. Which on its own is a metric ton of yikes. I’m relying on Reddit threads here and not first hand experience, but as a whole the project has a lot of /hoo-boy/ surrounding it. Of course if it’s a large team, there being a couple of real creeps becomes statistically more likely and isn’t necessarily a reflection on anyone else involved. But it does still leave a very heavy black mark. I can’t see myself ever playing it with even a cursory knowledge of the fustercluck surrounding it.