5 ms·

Regarding games "feeling hard" - I don't think video games would have survived and flourished so well if they were all so easy that you could plop a quarter in

Regarding games "feeling hard" - I don't think video games would have survived and flourished so well if they were all so easy that you could plop a quarter in and just start playing. And even then, easy was in the eye of the beholder. As a kid, i lost a lot of quarters wondering wth was going on in game and Atari had more bad games than good games. To think i paid $60 USD for Pole Position back in the day. I'd take Forza anyday over that old road wiggle experience.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago
Whenever people complain about the difficulty of Fromsoft games, I just think back to the early days of Atari and the pre-battery-save NES. No continues, you just go as far as you can and if that's not good enough, you get to start from the beginning until you get past it.
- Trasmatta 4y ago
  There have been so many clickbait articles about how Fromsoft games are "the hardest games in the world" or other nonsense like that. That's never even been Fromsoft's goal, and it's not even close to accurate. They're arguably not even the hardest games of their type, Nioh is a lot harder from my perspective, and its gameplay was largely inspired by Fromsoft's games.
  - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
    My point was that virtually ALL games used to be harder than Fromsoft games. Even the idea that you could actually "finish" a game was rather rare in the Atari 2600 generation of games. "Flipping the score" was a widely known concept among kids at the time. It meant that you were able to play the game for so long and your score got so high that the score reset so that it didn't go negative.
- ryanmcbride 4y ago
  They're both hard for the same reason (to me anyway). The pain point in both classic games and fromsoft games for me is the amount of time it takes to try something again. The feedback loop is often so long that I get annoyed with how long it takes to even ATTEMPT the part that tripped me up again. Say I'm struggling with a particular screen in megaman, and say that screen is maybe the 10th screen in a level. I get to that screen, I die, I start back on screen 1. I now have to go through all 10 screens again just to try the part I'm stuck on. And then after a few tries I progress to screen 11 and I die. I'm back on screen one again and the cycle continues. Yes, this results in me getting really good at every part before then, and it can look visually impressive once I know the whole map because I have the whole thing memorized at some point, but that takes a lot of time and I just don't play games like I used to. I have the same issues with fromsoft games, but it's actually better for me with classic games, because they usually have the kindness to put a checkpoint right before the level boss. But dark souls rarely puts a bonfire within spitting distance of a boss. I didn't mind when I was younger, which is why I can 1cc Castlevania and Sonic 3, but it's just not something I'm willing to put the time into these days. And that's fine, I don't think they should make the games easier or anything, it just means I'm probably not going to play them. Edit: This is also why I don't really play competitive multiplayer games anymore. I may have the time to put in to get good enough to have fun, but I'm not willing to commit it to getting good.
  - munificent 4y ago
    It's an interesting psychological design challenge. Games are trying to do two things simultaneously: 1. Give you a deep sense of gratification when you succeed. 2. Keep the stakes low and make the game feel safe to play. Humans experience things in terms of contrasts, so the easiest way to ramp up the gratification on winning is to punish the player if they lose. But what punishments are available to a game? You could imagine a game that demanded access to your bank account and withdrew cash every time you lost. Or maybe it deleted a random file off your hard disk. Playing would definitely work up a sweat and give you a profound sense of relief if you won. But it would completely undermine the sense of safety needed to make a game feel like a game and not a job or task. Because of (2), most games can't really take much from you. The main punishments they are able to mete out are: 1. Waste your time. Give you timers or cut scenes that have to be replayed before you can jump back in. 2. Bore you by making you replay stuff you've already played. 3. Destroy virtual items. If the game randomly generates treasure, then losing it on player death can be particularly anguishing because you don't know when you'll get it back. But, really, that all boils down to wasting your time. Because you can always get back that lost item if you grind long enough. That means that the cost model for playing the game varies widely based on player free time. Like you, I simply no longer have a lot of free time that I'm willing to pour into games. So, while I still like them, they're effectively too expensive for me to afford.
  - anothernewdude 4y ago
    I got good at DS1 by using a trainer so I could replay each boss instantly. Now I can manage the game in an afternoon without it.
keithnz 4y ago
I remember having pole position as a cartridge for my Atari 800XL, plug it in, turn it on, and instantly into the game! I played that game a LOT.
- supernovae 4y ago
  Pole position started that crappy trend of pay per time vs pay per lives, but otherwise i did play that cart a lot too :)
- ddingus 4y ago
  On a different Axis, "Star Raiders" Similar in that one could just start doing stuff. Then, just when it gets a bit boring, looking at the controls, and beginning to strategize brought one almost a new game! I played that and Missile Command a lot.
snorkel 4y ago
Mobile games today seem to have Atari’s “easy to learn, difficult to master” design philosophy.
- snorkel 4y ago
  (Which is also the title of a great documentary on Atari on Amazon Prime video)
jrochkind1 4y ago
Bushnell suggests the opposite near the top of this interview, that part of a coin-op game was exactly that you did need to let people plop a quarter in and just start playing! > Nolan Bushnell: A little bit. Remember that Atari was founded as a coin-op company. And coin-op has this requirement that a newbie has to get into the game almost instantly without reading instructions. So the simplicity of onboarding is lost by a lot of people right now. Which makes sense to me, of COURSE you have to be able to "just start playing" if you wanted to get someone to put a quarter into a machine they hadn't played before!
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  My guess is that this was an era where an engineer did everything and so game design (the act of worrying about making a game fair, fun, intuitive, challenging, all in the right balances) probably suffered (and perhaps didn’t really exist as a discipline for interactive digital games.)
- Natsu 4y ago
  The older arcade cabinets had instructions printed on the cabinet itself and the game would generally show a sort of demo screen giving you an idea of what you were doing with a little bit of tutorial on them.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Yea, but in general that's 3 or 4 lines of simple text. Some of the RTS/simulation stuff I play these days have an hour or two of tutorials to explain all the complicated underpinnings of things occurring.
    - Natsu 4y ago
      Agreed, I'm just pointing out that not only were they generally simple, they had controls & instructions on the cabinets.
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  The people who designed Williams arcade games apparently had a different philosophy.
joezydeco 4y ago
(nitpick: Pole Position was created by Namco. Atari was the distributor in the USA)
chrismcb 4y ago
It is just the opposite. Haha their when they are easy and anyone can play them. It is why there is such a large mobile game market today. Pole position wasn't hard and didn't take to long to learn. You can't compare it to a game with superior graphics and controls. For the hardware pole position is pretty good.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

Whenever people complain about the difficulty of Fromsoft games, I just think back to the early days of Atari and the pre-battery-save NES. No continues, you just go as far as you can and if that's not good enough, you get to start from the beginning until you get past it.

Trasmatta 4y ago
There have been so many clickbait articles about how Fromsoft games are "the hardest games in the world" or other nonsense like that. That's never even been Fromsoft's goal, and it's not even close to accurate. They're arguably not even the hardest games of their type, Nioh is a lot harder from my perspective, and its gameplay was largely inspired by Fromsoft's games.
- MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  My point was that virtually ALL games used to be harder than Fromsoft games. Even the idea that you could actually "finish" a game was rather rare in the Atari 2600 generation of games. "Flipping the score" was a widely known concept among kids at the time. It meant that you were able to play the game for so long and your score got so high that the score reset so that it didn't go negative.
ryanmcbride 4y ago
They're both hard for the same reason (to me anyway). The pain point in both classic games and fromsoft games for me is the amount of time it takes to try something again. The feedback loop is often so long that I get annoyed with how long it takes to even ATTEMPT the part that tripped me up again. Say I'm struggling with a particular screen in megaman, and say that screen is maybe the 10th screen in a level. I get to that screen, I die, I start back on screen 1. I now have to go through all 10 screens again just to try the part I'm stuck on. And then after a few tries I progress to screen 11 and I die. I'm back on screen one again and the cycle continues. Yes, this results in me getting really good at every part before then, and it can look visually impressive once I know the whole map because I have the whole thing memorized at some point, but that takes a lot of time and I just don't play games like I used to. I have the same issues with fromsoft games, but it's actually better for me with classic games, because they usually have the kindness to put a checkpoint right before the level boss. But dark souls rarely puts a bonfire within spitting distance of a boss. I didn't mind when I was younger, which is why I can 1cc Castlevania and Sonic 3, but it's just not something I'm willing to put the time into these days. And that's fine, I don't think they should make the games easier or anything, it just means I'm probably not going to play them. Edit: This is also why I don't really play competitive multiplayer games anymore. I may have the time to put in to get good enough to have fun, but I'm not willing to commit it to getting good.
- munificent 4y ago
  It's an interesting psychological design challenge. Games are trying to do two things simultaneously: 1. Give you a deep sense of gratification when you succeed. 2. Keep the stakes low and make the game feel safe to play. Humans experience things in terms of contrasts, so the easiest way to ramp up the gratification on winning is to punish the player if they lose. But what punishments are available to a game? You could imagine a game that demanded access to your bank account and withdrew cash every time you lost. Or maybe it deleted a random file off your hard disk. Playing would definitely work up a sweat and give you a profound sense of relief if you won. But it would completely undermine the sense of safety needed to make a game feel like a game and not a job or task. Because of (2), most games can't really take much from you. The main punishments they are able to mete out are: 1. Waste your time. Give you timers or cut scenes that have to be replayed before you can jump back in. 2. Bore you by making you replay stuff you've already played. 3. Destroy virtual items. If the game randomly generates treasure, then losing it on player death can be particularly anguishing because you don't know when you'll get it back. But, really, that all boils down to wasting your time. Because you can always get back that lost item if you grind long enough. That means that the cost model for playing the game varies widely based on player free time. Like you, I simply no longer have a lot of free time that I'm willing to pour into games. So, while I still like them, they're effectively too expensive for me to afford.
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  I got good at DS1 by using a trainer so I could replay each boss instantly. Now I can manage the game in an afternoon without it.

keithnz 4y ago

I remember having pole position as a cartridge for my Atari 800XL, plug it in, turn it on, and instantly into the game! I played that game a LOT.

supernovae 4y ago
Pole position started that crappy trend of pay per time vs pay per lives, but otherwise i did play that cart a lot too :)
ddingus 4y ago
On a different Axis, "Star Raiders" Similar in that one could just start doing stuff. Then, just when it gets a bit boring, looking at the controls, and beginning to strategize brought one almost a new game! I played that and Missile Command a lot.

snorkel 4y ago

Mobile games today seem to have Atari’s “easy to learn, difficult to master” design philosophy.

snorkel 4y ago
(Which is also the title of a great documentary on Atari on Amazon Prime video)

jrochkind1 4y ago

Bushnell suggests the opposite near the top of this interview, that part of a coin-op game was exactly that you did need to let people plop a quarter in and just start playing! > Nolan Bushnell: A little bit. Remember that Atari was founded as a coin-op company. And coin-op has this requirement that a newbie has to get into the game almost instantly without reading instructions. So the simplicity of onboarding is lost by a lot of people right now. Which makes sense to me, of COURSE you have to be able to "just start playing" if you wanted to get someone to put a quarter into a machine they hadn't played before!

Waterluvian 4y ago
My guess is that this was an era where an engineer did everything and so game design (the act of worrying about making a game fair, fun, intuitive, challenging, all in the right balances) probably suffered (and perhaps didn’t really exist as a discipline for interactive digital games.)
Natsu 4y ago
The older arcade cabinets had instructions printed on the cabinet itself and the game would generally show a sort of demo screen giving you an idea of what you were doing with a little bit of tutorial on them.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Yea, but in general that's 3 or 4 lines of simple text. Some of the RTS/simulation stuff I play these days have an hour or two of tutorials to explain all the complicated underpinnings of things occurring.
  - Natsu 4y ago
    Agreed, I'm just pointing out that not only were they generally simple, they had controls & instructions on the cabinets.
rufus_foreman 4y ago
The people who designed Williams arcade games apparently had a different philosophy.

joezydeco 4y ago

(nitpick: Pole Position was created by Namco. Atari was the distributor in the USA)

chrismcb 4y ago

It is just the opposite. Haha their when they are easy and anyone can play them. It is why there is such a large mobile game market today. Pole position wasn't hard and didn't take to long to learn. You can't compare it to a game with superior graphics and controls. For the hardware pole position is pretty good.