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.
It’s actually pretty crazy just how hard that game flopped. I would have always thought that a company like Sony could’ve just brute-forced such a big project to achieve some success (or at least break even), but 25,000 units sold is almost unheard of for a game as expensive as Concord.
What mystifies me is usually when they do this sort of thing they throw it on Plus and get a mountain of players. Fall guys, and Destruction All Stars spring to mind as examples. I guess the effect isn’t so strong with the new tiered system, but it may have saved them some face.
When the game had a free beta, there was hardly anyone playing it. At some point you’ve just got server costs and promises of live service content rollouts that can only cost you money.
A lot of games media has talked on it (to varying degrees). But Concord basically had a bad beta/demo and launched at a time when EVERYONE wanted live games to fail (see: Stop Killing Games Initiative). AND it managed to piss off the gamergaters in the process.
We’ve seen this to a lesser degree in the past with… basically every Battlefield since the WW1 one? Bad demo/beta (mostly because people still haven’t learned to not play Conquest and to instead play Rush) coupled with the CoD/BF fanboy war results in outlets and Gamers actively wanting the game to fail and shitting on it every chance they get. It is just that EA understand that BF is the kind of game that still sells enough to justify keeping Dice around.
battlefields a bit different. battlefield basically nowadays is that the game always launch in a terrible state, and fixes itself a year down the line. battlefield players will play the game regardless and maintains ~6000 user playerbase active
I mean… where do you think the “this has a terrible launch” comes from?
If Influencers like a game, everyone looks past the massive performance and stability issues. If influencers don’t like a game, a single crash is enough to mark it as trash that should be ignored until a couple patches… which is a death sentence for a multiplayer game that requires a critical mass of players to be worth buying.
I totally get disinterest, but I get rubbed the wrong way when people “want games to fail”. I want the world to have more games that are good - and yes, occasionally those would come from publishers we traditionally grumble about.
I had no interest in Concord, but I’m not making video content laughing at its failure. I think that practice is a bit weird sometimes, and even victimizes some of the game devs that didn’t do anything wrong. I would guess at least 80% of Concord’a devs did their job well - just based around a bad concept.
Its pretty tough when they release a game that took so long to develop, that was meant for an era of gaming when live service games were hot. Now that a lot of live service games are flopping due to over-saturation, I think even Sony saw it wasn’t worth the effort of trying to push the game further without either reworking it into something else, or just cutting their losses.
It’s crazy that they released it. They had early access and preorders and those only attracted something like 1,000 players. This is a game that had a $100 million budget. So few players during the early stages should have told the studio to cancel it while it was still in production. Apparently they thought they’d release it and would just jump from 1,000 players to 100,000 overnight with no changes.
I don’t know how they expected to succeed without any marketing. I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of this game, even on my PS5 (where they usually advertise the absolute hell out of a 1st party title like this), until the day it released.
Or how their game being just another hero shooter/moba crossover in a sea of such games would differentiate itself enough to warrant also costing $40 instead of being like its competition which is FREE.
I legit learned of it around when it released from gamingcirclejerk making fun of chuds for calling it woke or whatever. Next time I heard of it, it was the shut down announcement.
They didn’t want to pay for marketing. But all this news coverage… Didn’t they already say they’d re-release it after an overhaul? I guarantee a non-insignificant amount of people will buy it just to see what all the fuss was about…
I saw this (www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBnStS9d2xg) nearly 5 minute cinematic trailer in June and was expecting some kind of action/adventure game for most of the way through. Then they said it was a hero shooter out of nowhere and I thought to myself “don’t we already have plenty of those?”
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.
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.
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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Aktywne