All a game like this would need is the ability to disable the feature.
It’s like developers are so obsessed and occupied with making it as accessible to everyone, that they seem to forget that there is also an entire playerbase out there not looking to be handheld through everything (including children). I’d get a bigger sense of achievement if I managed to do it on my own.
I remember playing Mario on the NES and it was completely unforgiving as a child, like insta-deaths, limited amount of lives, no save games, hidden secrets, etc. But it was pure bliss when I finally beat the game.
It’s not an easy game, that’s ok. The reason most of us beat it in the 80’s is because we only had one or two games at a time to play until Xmas/birthday every year.
That’s fair these days, unless you’re playing it on a CRT with original hardware or MiSTER, the latency will be through the roof compared to what the game was designed around.
Thanks but I never need someone else entirely to tell me that their interpretation of SOMEONE ELSE’S sentence is more correct than mine. If he wants to correct me he can
I remember playing Legacy of Kain: Defiance for the first time when I was a kid.
I spent actual hours coming through the damn mansion level looking for the proper route and I was so frustrated. I finally broke down and looked it up on the computer (which I was grounded from at the time) so I could see if I could find a solution.
In the early 2000s you pirated nintendo games, had no manual ( or bought it legit but couldnt read it properly to understand) and just figured out the manuals.
Then you have to make sure it’s reasonably straightforward to figure everything out without the tutorial, so then why bother with the tutorial at all? As a player I’d hate to get stuck because I missed something that’s clearly spelled out in a tutorial I skipped.
I’m currently playing UFO 50, which is a game by Derek Yu and friends. The games are “fake” 1980s NES games. You pick a random game out of the list of 50 and there’s little to no instructions on how to play any of the games.
You just press start and see where it takes you, just like classic games.
It also has a whole fake narrative tied to it. The collection is 50 games released by the company “UFO Soft,” a fake game company. Each game has little blurbs on its history. Some games have multiple entries to their series, some are one off. Others are “spiritual successors” to others. It’s a whole little universe in the game. And even though not every game so far has been for me, they are all at the least creative and interesting. And some games I absolutely adore and want to play through to the end asap. I’ve only just touched the 25th game and have ~ 15 hours. And I know some will take me a long time. There are also secrets to find outside of the 50 games. The menu has a terminal and you can find hidden codes that give God modes to games, and some provide hidden lore of the universe this game company exists in
This games been getting a lot of press for some reason, but it really doesn’t look appealing to me. But the tutorial stuff really seals the deal for me.
It just came out (on Switch no less) and it’s visually interesting. I didn’t buy it yet. I’ve bookmarked it to see if a future update removes all this.
Started playing It Takes Two recently. The game introduces basic controls, and that’s that, no additional tutorials, no hints how to solve puzzles, no characters telling you what to do next when you are “stuck” (many games have these annoying verbal hints when you do nothing for a minute, this one respects its players). It has a lot of places where players can simply play around with mechanics and see what happens, just for the joy of exploration and not some immediate gain.
And it reminded me of playing Spyro back in my childhood days, a feeling I didn’t think I’d ever get from any game again. The only downside is that the characters are surprisingly cruel at times, the game’s creators certainly lack empathy.
I feel like the point of that in it takes two is communication. It’s pretty heavy-handed in the whole “sort out your shit amongst yourselves” theme, and it’s sort of meant as a way for a gamer to get a non-gamer into gaming, so you’d have one person with the skillz leading the other through challenges.
Or at least that’s how it played out with me. The person I was playing with is also a gamer but not really environmental/puzzle games (and easily frustrated) so it was sort of playing around with what to do and walking each other through - calling out timing and stuff, etc.
It’s a very interesting take on co-op, imho.
If you like small people in huge environments, exploring, and not being super hand-held, tinykin is a cute game, not super long, it does sort of a bit guide you through some major things but not in a particularly obnoxious way. Mostly just exploring on your own. :)
Our experience’s different. I’m playing with my husband, and he’s generally better at aiming and shooting, while I’m better at platformer aspects, and the characters we ended up playing are sort of wired in the right way for us, haha. Co-op is definitely super enjoyable in this game.
I don’t think their implementation is the way to go. It reeks of bad UI, like Clippy in Microsoft Word.
Mario games are so accessible without the heavy handed videos/stops, because their designers think about how to best teach the player through play.
It’s like teaching by giving people a hour long lecture vs hands-on experience - there’s usecases for both, but in a interactive medium like gaming, one is superior than the other.
Ideally, it would be an optional thing, but oh well.
Yeah tons of games ask you at the start of the game, like “have you played this kind of game before?” Def seems clumsy for a game that otherwise seems pretty well thought out.
I have seen people (in person and on the Internet) click tutorials away, proceed to utterly fail at the most basic tasks only to then blame the game and the developers, including in reviews. I don’t blame developers for trying to prevent this from happening.
Idk if that’s a useful example case. Streamers are under pressure from their audience to be entertaining, so they will frequently skip tutorials against their better judgment bc tutorials aren’t fun to watch. I can’t speak to your irl examples, but it’s possible that there was a similar dynamic happening there. At least, I can say that I have personally felt a similar pressure when playing games while other people are watching me.
Edit: user reviews are good example, though. I could see a dev over-tutorializing bc they are anxious about negative user reviews.
Either a shit article or shit website. The article gives a summary of the game then says the developers don’t trust their customers. That’s it. No reasons given. Am I missing something?
There’s a section under the “read more” split where it complains about over-tutorialization. The game hits you over the head with puzzle solutions and intended routes and leaves nothing for the player to figure out.
I played through it yesterday. It was interesting, and there were fun story beats, but it was very easy. With all the accessibility features and tutorials, it’s probably a great game to get people who don’t play games interested in platforming games and maybe even some RPGs.
I would say that if you non-jokingly talk like that, you got bigger issues than any specific gaming sites or which consultants are brought in to work on which game.
This is less a sign of “the devs don’t trust the player” and more just plain out bad game design. Maybe the game itself is very obvious (I don’t know, i haven’t played nor do I intend to), but this kind of thing is usually done when the game is obtuse and the developer wants a quickfix instead of actually reworking the entire thing. Then again, if your game is for little children and they can’t figure out how to play it, then there’s something fundamentally wrong with it and maybe you should go back to the drawing board.
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