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One of the things I bemoan is that game developers have embraced speedrun-type players in that it has influenced their game design which is evident in the most

• alexrage 7y ago
  Despite the press of the young player-base, Fortnite fills what you describe for me. The building mechanic creates so much opportunity for think-fast, improvise, and outsmart your opponent moments. Plus, playing solo means you don't have to interact with anyone if you don't want to.
  • Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
    > The building mechanic creates so much opportunity for think-fast, improvise, and outsmart your opponent moments. Yeah, I try to snipe someone, and they respond by building a 5-star hotel with WiFi.
    • timje1 7y ago
      Apex Legends is good for improvisational gameplay that doesn't involve memorising building patterns. Also it's free! The tactical opportunities in a fight that are available to a team with a gibraltar and pathfinder vs a gibraltar and pathfinder.. huge. Where does the shield go? Is claiming the high ground worth exposing yourself to the airstrike?
• mmanfrin 7y ago
  > I painfully miss twitch games like quake that instead of pushing you to memorize and perform accurately, you instead had to react and improvise quickly and think on your feet.[0] It's a different set of skills that seems to have fallen out of favor as of late. What? Two of the top four~ most played games on earth right now are battle royales.
  • Jach 7y ago
    Battle royales aren't arena shooters like Quake.
    • Mirioron 7y ago
      But they very much are games that require thinking on your feet.
      • pixelrevision 7y ago
        Hiding can be a good strategy too :p
    • ihuman 7y ago
      Battle Royals make you react and improvise quickly and think on your feet, instead of pushing you to memorize and perform accurately.
• everyone 7y ago
  "react and improvise quickly and think on your feet" You might like my game. Bomberman meets RTS. https://youtu.be/Zr0A8VcBnYk https://youtu.be/Zr0A8VcBnYk
• frou_dh 7y ago
  There was a fairly fundamental aspect of having to practice engine exploits in the Quake games: strafe-jumping. https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/Bunny_Hopping https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/Bunny_Hopping If you just moved around using the obvious controls then you would generally get destroyed by opponents who had mastered that unintuitive way to move fast.
• asark 7y ago
  The couple times I've achieved "good enough to consistently piss people off" abilities in FPS games, it's mostly been through knowing levels very well, to include patterns of movement. Probably there's another level above that once you're in "pro" tier where improvisation becomes a big deal again, but "very good for an amateur" status is mostly memorization, in my experience. I've seen the same thing in people I know who can pwn me at things like COD. It's 95+% knowing where to look and where to have your gun pointed no matter which part of the map you're on, so you can shoot before the pure-reflexes n00b even knows you're there.
  • floatingatoll 7y ago
    In TF2 this is where as a pyro I started firing flares at fully cloaked spies (who are inaudible and invisible) and they would burst into flame and become visible, because I’d learned to predict their positions and timings to a degree that exceeded their variability. Something something “know your enemy” applies, even when you have no ‘current’ information at all.
    • Bokanovsky 7y ago
      I loved playing TF2 as a pyro. I used a similar technique of running around randomly jetting flames in certain places to find cloaked spies, but also flaming team-mates (as the flames wouldn't hurt them) to reveal spies in disguise.
  • ericmcer 7y ago
    Yeh in MOBAs it is totally this. Less reacting in 150ms to a visual queue. More I have been in this situation 100 times and expect character X to do Y right now. That’s why there is a whole psychology around moving in unpredictable manners at a certain level. Similar to the whole master swordsman fearing a novice more than another master.
    • hevi_jos 7y ago
      What makes you a master is the ability to predict everything before it happens fast and automatically. A master swordman does not fear novices precisely because they know their movements before they do. They look at (imperceptible for amateurs) body language hints and know exactly what you are going to do before you do it. In reality there are physics constraints. Before you do a movement, you need to put weight in some part of the body, tense a muscle....e.g it is impossible to jump without a specific movement of going down and preloading. Not only that , they know exactly what is the best response to it to neutralize whatever comes to them.
• dkarl 7y ago
  I think it's always been like that in any game with predesigned layouts and enemy placement. I was still a kid (in the 1980s) when I figured out I was playing a fundamentally different game from the kids who really loved video games. I was thinking, "I need to get faster at making decisions and timing my actions so I can respond to what's on the next screen," and they were thinking, "Okay, the next screen has two goblins closing from the upper right corner and one goblin closing from the middle and a fireball from top to bottom after four seconds, and the exit door starts closed and opens or closes every three seconds, so I'll kill the closest goblin while I wait for the fireball and then hit the exit the third time it opens...." I remember feeling guilty when I remembered what was on the next screen, because it felt like cheating. It kind of broke my heart when I realized that was the best way to get good and it was pointlessly stubborn for me to resist a technique that games were designed to cater to.
  • lonelappde 7y ago
    I think you learned the wrong lesson. You shouldn't spoil your own fun because a bunch of savants can't see the forest for the trees. The secret of gaming is that the objective isn't to get the highest score / lowest time, it's to have fun playing. wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • Jach 7y ago
    It's not just games, it's life. But to take a non-video game, e.g. in hockey the better goalies aren't better because they have awesome reflexes or quick thinking, but primarily because they're better at predicting where the puck is going to be and positioning themselves accordingly. Same thing with gamers knowing "what's ahead", or "what's ahead with probability". Very few things are so random that "more accurately predicting the future" isn't the dominating strategy, with execution of the moment, while important, not being the primary factor.
    • 7y ago
• ufo 7y ago
  I suspect that you might enjoy games with procedurally-generated levels, like the various roguelike games out there. Have you ever played Spelunky?
  • IggleSniggle 7y ago
    I highly agree with Spelunky as a recommendation based on initiating comment.
• bscphil 7y ago
  I think you're on to something that bothers me a little too. Games like Celeste are certainly playable as an ordinary gamer who doesn't want to practice and memorize precise inputs, but it's a popular game to speedrun because the collision detection in the game is complete trash. You can jump straight through some obstacles, get additional dashes, etc. that the developers didn't originally intend. There's something un-fun to me that is hard to explain about all this. I don't like spending hours retrying a single challenge when I know there's a super precise series of inputs elite players or a TAS could use to get through in 5 seconds. I realize that's a very subjective thing and this is still fun to some players. I've moved to playing mostly puzzle games like The Witness, puzzle platformers like Braid, and challenging "simple" platformers like VVVVVV. What I like about VVVVVV is that the inputs are incredibly easy to learn. You will die a lot, and there are people who can make it through the whole game in deathless mode, but I'm okay with that because it just means I need to get better at the game, not get better at memorizing a precise series of inputs and strategies.
  • TulliusCicero 7y ago
    It's seems odd to be bothered by knowing someone out there is tremendously better at a game than you are. Whenever I play tennis, I'm aware that my skills are laughably bad compared to even a mediocre pro, but who cares?
    • lonelappde 7y ago
      The greatest women's tennis player in the world happily earns millions of dollars despite intentionally not play thousands of people who would utterly defeat her in a match. In fact the whole pro league is set up to support that.
      • X6S1x6Okd1st 7y ago
        Seems unrelated.
  • lonelappde 7y ago
    Why does the existence of speedrunners playing differently ruin the fun for you? Why sabotage yourself by setting unfun time limit challenges for yourself? I will never be a chess grandmaster. That doesn't make chess unfun.
• ars 7y ago
  > involves essentially the ability to memorize and perform I call those "do over games", because you have to just do them over and over and over in order to win. I don't find them fun.
• yellowapple 7y ago
  You'd probably like DUSK, which is on sale right now on Steam (not that it was outrageously priced to begin with) and looks and feels like a classic twitch FPS (the devs also have another game called Amid Evil, which seems to do away with the 90's FPS aesthetic and go with a more magical setting, but otherwise keeps the same sort of gameplay). I haven't tried DUSK's multiplayer yet, but the singleplayer modes are great.
• on_and_off 7y ago
  I don't know .. often different people or different skill levels will solve hard games differently. I love Hollow Knight to bits. It is one of these "hard but fair" games. My first playthrough 1 year or 2 ago has seen me die a lot of times. And it was indeed because I needed to learn how each boss (there are so many of them .. maybe 30 or 40 ?? ) moves and react accordingly. I quickly started to see it as a dance or a dialogue with the boss though. You have a limited but versatile skill set at your disposal, so for each boss, I had to think about how to adequately counter a move. The end result is a beautiful dance of action and counter reactions. I had a second play through a couple of months ago. Since then, the devs have made the game change A LOT. Some bosses had their entire move set rewritten. New areas were added, etc. So I was not playing on memory. I had still acquired a wealth of knowledge on how to control that little bug, even with its limited initial toolset. So I beat most of the game without dying just by reacting quickly to whatever it threw at me, it was an awesome experience.
  • noobermin 7y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I'm not all jazz and no classical music. I love Hollow Knight actually, it's easily to me one of the best games I've played in years. I do admit it depends, I do tend to lean more on the jazz parts of my brain, even with games like Hollow Knight, especially during boss battles.
• opportune 7y ago
  I play a lot of Paradox games these days and they are exactly the opposite of games meant to be speedrun. They are meant to be played at exactly your own pace and are much more skill (strategy) based than memorizing specific sequences of actions. I think what you say is probably true of most platformers and other games like Sekiro (a successor to dark souls which was one of the original non-platformer games like this) but definitely not all games.
  • ricree 7y ago
    > I play a lot of Paradox games these days and they are exactly the opposite of games meant to be speedrun. They are meant to be played at exactly your own pace and are much more skill (strategy) based than memorizing specific sequences of actions. It depends on the exact context and goal. To an extent, I would consider "map painting" the equivalent of a speedrun. It's usually measured in elapsed game time rather than play time, but there's a similar effect. Especially with some of the more difficult OPMs, there can certainly be an element of memorization and optimizing starts. This falls off as the game goes further, but it definitely can be present. I recall some years back reading an EU3 byzantine guide that described many of the nations as being every bit as much puzzle game as strategy, where figuring out the tricks and traps of the opening years can mean the difference between a thriving growth and early defeat. Not that anyone ever has to play the games that way, but that's true of everything that gets put through a traditional speedrun as well.
    • opportune 7y ago
      I guess I don't consider it the same, unless we are considering speedrunning == mastery. I really appreciate those games for the sense of mastery you can get while also playing at your own pace. You don't need to memorize things like how to start as a difficult OPM once you have enough experience in the game, unless you need full optimality.
• cwkoss 7y ago
  I would suspect that it is harder to train reaction time than 'memorization' type skills. If this is the case, and gamers tend to gravitate towards games they are good at/getting better at, we would expect there is a lower demand capacity for reaction games than memorization games, because a smaller proportion of the population is capable of 'playing well'.
• pvg 7y ago
  that instead of pushing you to memorize and perform accurately What recent games are you thinking of? Competitive Quake players knew the maps down to the pixel, along with the location and respawn times of every resource. Lots of modern 'hardcore' platformers have randomization and don't depend on pure memorization.