7 ms·

I also think this signals a change in how games are played these days. There are many players that don't want to be challenged or explore, they want to complet

by drw85 2y ago

I also think this signals a change in how games are played these days. There are many players that don't want to be challenged or explore, they want to complete tasks and get rewards. Some of them don't really care that much about the actual gameplay, as long as there is a quick way to complete sets of tasks and get their rewards. Some of my friends are like this, they blast through games without looking at anything but the tasks and rewards and they hate having to figure things out, explore, discover and other road blocks to their "task list". They move at break neck speed too, like their lives depend on it. It's really hard to keep up, becasue they never stop at look at anything, but just rush to the next marker to finish the next task. I had to actually stop playing certain types of games with them, because it would completely ruin the game for me. I like exploring and discovering and figuring things out. If everything has an easy hint, marker, or otherwise shortcut that takes that away or discourages it, i would enjoy games a lot less. An external wiki/youtube etc. gives you that choice when you need it, but it's far enough away that you can still enjoy those parts without using it.

an_ko 2y ago
Has that really changed recently? Different people have always enjoyed different things, and some don't like puzzles. That was as true a hundred years ago as now.
- drw85 2y ago
  Yes and No, i think modern games lead more people to be like this. Because quest markers and gps navigations and hints and creative/story modes. Also a heavy emphasis on the rewards rather than the quest. I notice this myself when going back to older games like Final Fantasy 7 or 8 and misremembering how complex and complicated the UI, Menus and systems are. You just get used to these things, but i also think they are a bit immersion breaking and shift the focus a lot on the destination and not the journey.
  - Cyberdog 2y ago
    Don't forget the Yellow Paint Epidemic. Some game devs don't even want to risk the chance that players might have to stop and explore a little bit before they find the right path to continue the game.
    - Bjartr 2y ago
      That's not the fear. The fear is that the player will get stuck and simply stop playing because it's frustrating instead of fun. The way that devs determine where the line is for "most people that play get frustrated and give up" and "most people figure it out and keep playing" It's certainly possible to design a game where the intuition of the player matches a less contrived looking world, bit it's a lot harder. On the other hand, having a convention that climbable surfaces will be blazed yellow, and teaching it early in the game is comparatively easy. There's also aspects of pacing and focus to consider. A game that ebbs and flows in it's intensity often feels better to play than one that's high intensity all the time. So if your game is mostly about combat, you'll want to break up big fights with lower energy experiences. But those lower energy experiences really aren't "the game" in a sense, they're a kind of filler that makes the high energy experiences feel more fun. It can't be completely boring, but it should be easier than the primary gameplay experience and also have lower stakes. That's a big reason why do many actiony games have blatantly obvious climbing and puzzles. It keeps the player lightly engaged while letting them catch their breath before the next set piece. It's not the only way to build games by any means, but it is a generally effective, and consistently reliable, template.
      - drw85 2y ago
        But this is exactly one of the problems of today. Everything uses UX metrics to base their design around. It makes the end result boring and predictable and the opposite of immersive. I agree that there needs to be pacing, but there are great ways to do that. GTA and RDR are great examples. You drive somewhere and get a funny conversation, or something happens on the way to the objective that pretty naturally distracts you in a way that makes sense to the world the game is playing in. Ubisoft games are basically full of these boring filler activities. What point does a huge open world have, if it's just the same 5 things copy and pasted all over the place? I'd much rather condense those 590 busy work tasks to 5 really nice side quests like in The Witcher 3. At least they give you an experience and not some UX concept of "the user needs to go climb a tree now".
- xnorswap 2y ago
  I don't know about "recently", but things have certainly changed. Even when there was information available in the past, it wasn't always easy to access or understand, and more critically, the willingness and pace of shared knowledge has increased tremendously. If we look back, admittedly through the lens of nostalgia, at games like WoW:BC, then strategies took weeks or even months to bed in and disseminate from the top guilds to the wider public. RPGs, even in the gamefaqs era, took weeks or months to feel "solved". Whereas now games are released and are often "solved" in beta before their official release. Game knowledge is spread so much faster now. Even when we had early youtube back then, and we had IRC and gamefaqs, the knowledge just wasn't spread as fast. It's hard to know if that's just the sheer numbers of people involved now, or a greater willingness to share that knowledge.
- rickdeckard 2y ago
  Yes. But modern games also evolved to appeal to people who don't like to be challenged and look for a casual rewarding experience. It becomes quite obvious when you play a game of the early 90s and compare it to gameplay of today. If you couldn't identify(!) and solve the puzzle in a LucasArts Adventure Game, you were stuck, if you repeatedly died in Super Mario / Sonic the Hedgehog you had to restart from Level 1.
  - anotherhue 2y ago
    I'm sorry to tell you this, but if you Game Over in SMB you can resume from the same world by pressing A and Start. This is one of three things I would time travel to tell my childhood self.
    - rickdeckard 2y ago
      No need to feel sorry. I never had a NES, I was actually thinking of Super Mario Land on GameBoy when I wrote this, but ultimately wrote it a bit more generic... I do however have a vivid memory of LucasArts' Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where I got stuck in a cave under a Venice Cafe for days, because I didn't know that I need to talk a guest out of his Wine-bottle using specific sentences, and use the wine to soften the mud of a lever in a wall... But I guess that's too specific for anyone to relate to...
moduspol 2y ago
> I like exploring and discovering and figuring things out. I understand this is very common, but for me: "discovering and figuring things out" in games often becomes: "guess what the game devs want me to do." Oh, is there something on the other side of that hill? Meh, not really. What about at the top of that cliff? Oh I can only sort of climb it? Should I keep trying or am I just going to hit an invisible wall? Is this enemy way too tough for me with my current equipment, or do I just need to get better? Am I doing things in the wrong order and just making things way tougher? Some games are better about it than others, but I already know I'm playing a game. I don't get much enjoyment from "finding" something that was put there for me to find. I like stories, characters, and world-building. I don't need a giant yellow HUD arrow, but there's nothing fun about wandering aimlessly in hopes of finding something mildly interesting. I already know there are N mildly interesting things on the map, each within a focus-tested ~30 second distance from each other. So for me at least, I'll take the map markers.
- sfn42 2y ago
  For me, this is mostly about what kind of information a player expects to find in a game. For example in Overwatch 2, there are no numbers on abilities. It's just something like "fires a rocket at the enemy" - how much damage does the rocket do? How long is the cooldown? Can it crit if it hits an enemy in the head? In other games there might be items or talents with tooltips like "increases your damage" - how much? Is it additive or multiplicative with other modifiers? I like games where this kind of information is easily available. I won't look up how to complete a quest or something unless I'm completely stuck on it, but I will look up numbers so I can make informed decisions instead of just guessing what might be good.
  - lmm 2y ago
    > I like games where this kind of information is easily available. I won't look up how to complete a quest or something unless I'm completely stuck on it, but I will look up numbers so I can make informed decisions instead of just guessing what might be good. Isn't that even more immersion- and game-breaking? Figuring out what kind of attacks have what kind of effect on what kind of enemy is generally part of the game.
michaelt 2y ago
> There are many players that don't want to be challenged or explore That might be true in some cases, sure. But in recent years I've noticed a lot of games adding things like crafting and alchemy mechanics that are pretty grind-heavy to puzzle out on your own. If I've got to brute-force recipes? Or if there are hard-won ingredients and they might get wasted or produce something useless? Or if the developers, not wanting to risk breaking the game balance, made the craftable items weak or highly situational? Can easily be Not Fun.
- IgorPartola 2y ago
  But is this because there is going to be a wiki explaining exactly what to do, something not done before?
- 2muchcoffeeman 2y ago
  Z:BotW and Z:TotK got the open world crafting balance right. Ingredients are plentiful, experimentation is low risk, and you exploring new places really seems like exploring.
- Yawrehto 2y ago
  >crafting an alchemy...that are pretty grind-heavy to puzzle out on your own Or it could be you have a minor goal (eg, 'what would X + Y be') but first you need to GET x and y. You're not spoiling what you're doing. The other day I was playing Infinite Craft and wanted to test something (what WOULD freedom + fries be; for those wondering, freedom + french fries is America), but first I needed french fries. I'm not too interested in figuring out how to get them on my own, so I looked that up. In open ended games, wikis can be used to help accomplish goals you set for yourself, since they tend to have minimal direction. They take the place of, eg, hints on where to go next. Some games have official wikis (like Little Alchemy/Little Alchemy 2), even!
WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
Perhaps your friends don't like video games and are just wanting to kill time out of boredom Expecting that all games should become like this because that's how "you" like them is selfish and dangerous There is room for all kind of games
neilv 2y ago
> There are many players that don't want to be challenged or explore, they want to complete tasks and get rewards. Some of them don't really care that much about the actual gameplay, as long as there is a quick way to complete sets of tasks and get their rewards. Exactly. This was noticeable in Subnautica, in which most of the game is figuring out what you do next. The PS4 shows you how rare it is to achieve each progress trophy for a game, among people who started the game, and... the completion level looked suspiciously high. (Especially for a game that was given away free at one point, so you don't have only people who paid money for the game, starting it.) I did have to "Zoomer" the game once, when I was stuck over the course of calendar weeks, knowing which specific linking piece I was missing, but unable to figure it out. So eventually I cheated, by Web searching how you get this one missing link. But otherwise, I figured it out with the in-game hints, and some not-too-hard exploring, mapping, note-taking, deducing, planning, survival resource tactics-ing, and grinding. If this were a real-world business problem, not a game, I would've gotten help sooner. But I also would've been able to apply skills to solving the problem more effectively, than if I'd only ever learned how to copy&paste Stack Overflow or LLM robo-plagiarism.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
> Some of them don't really care that much about the actual gameplay, as long as there is a quick way to complete sets of tasks and get their rewards. Trophy/achievment-oriented gamers. Focused more on their profile than the particular game. Not to be confused with Trophy hunters, who tend to target harder or popular games for achievements.

by drw85 2y ago

an_ko 2y ago

Has that really changed recently? Different people have always enjoyed different things, and some don't like puzzles. That was as true a hundred years ago as now.

drw85 2y ago
Yes and No, i think modern games lead more people to be like this. Because quest markers and gps navigations and hints and creative/story modes. Also a heavy emphasis on the rewards rather than the quest. I notice this myself when going back to older games like Final Fantasy 7 or 8 and misremembering how complex and complicated the UI, Menus and systems are. You just get used to these things, but i also think they are a bit immersion breaking and shift the focus a lot on the destination and not the journey.
- Cyberdog 2y ago
  Don't forget the Yellow Paint Epidemic. Some game devs don't even want to risk the chance that players might have to stop and explore a little bit before they find the right path to continue the game.
  - Bjartr 2y ago
    That's not the fear. The fear is that the player will get stuck and simply stop playing because it's frustrating instead of fun. The way that devs determine where the line is for "most people that play get frustrated and give up" and "most people figure it out and keep playing" It's certainly possible to design a game where the intuition of the player matches a less contrived looking world, bit it's a lot harder. On the other hand, having a convention that climbable surfaces will be blazed yellow, and teaching it early in the game is comparatively easy. There's also aspects of pacing and focus to consider. A game that ebbs and flows in it's intensity often feels better to play than one that's high intensity all the time. So if your game is mostly about combat, you'll want to break up big fights with lower energy experiences. But those lower energy experiences really aren't "the game" in a sense, they're a kind of filler that makes the high energy experiences feel more fun. It can't be completely boring, but it should be easier than the primary gameplay experience and also have lower stakes. That's a big reason why do many actiony games have blatantly obvious climbing and puzzles. It keeps the player lightly engaged while letting them catch their breath before the next set piece. It's not the only way to build games by any means, but it is a generally effective, and consistently reliable, template.
    - drw85 2y ago
      But this is exactly one of the problems of today. Everything uses UX metrics to base their design around. It makes the end result boring and predictable and the opposite of immersive. I agree that there needs to be pacing, but there are great ways to do that. GTA and RDR are great examples. You drive somewhere and get a funny conversation, or something happens on the way to the objective that pretty naturally distracts you in a way that makes sense to the world the game is playing in. Ubisoft games are basically full of these boring filler activities. What point does a huge open world have, if it's just the same 5 things copy and pasted all over the place? I'd much rather condense those 590 busy work tasks to 5 really nice side quests like in The Witcher 3. At least they give you an experience and not some UX concept of "the user needs to go climb a tree now".
xnorswap 2y ago
I don't know about "recently", but things have certainly changed. Even when there was information available in the past, it wasn't always easy to access or understand, and more critically, the willingness and pace of shared knowledge has increased tremendously. If we look back, admittedly through the lens of nostalgia, at games like WoW:BC, then strategies took weeks or even months to bed in and disseminate from the top guilds to the wider public. RPGs, even in the gamefaqs era, took weeks or months to feel "solved". Whereas now games are released and are often "solved" in beta before their official release. Game knowledge is spread so much faster now. Even when we had early youtube back then, and we had IRC and gamefaqs, the knowledge just wasn't spread as fast. It's hard to know if that's just the sheer numbers of people involved now, or a greater willingness to share that knowledge.
rickdeckard 2y ago
Yes. But modern games also evolved to appeal to people who don't like to be challenged and look for a casual rewarding experience. It becomes quite obvious when you play a game of the early 90s and compare it to gameplay of today. If you couldn't identify(!) and solve the puzzle in a LucasArts Adventure Game, you were stuck, if you repeatedly died in Super Mario / Sonic the Hedgehog you had to restart from Level 1.
- anotherhue 2y ago
  I'm sorry to tell you this, but if you Game Over in SMB you can resume from the same world by pressing A and Start. This is one of three things I would time travel to tell my childhood self.
  - rickdeckard 2y ago
    No need to feel sorry. I never had a NES, I was actually thinking of Super Mario Land on GameBoy when I wrote this, but ultimately wrote it a bit more generic... I do however have a vivid memory of LucasArts' Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where I got stuck in a cave under a Venice Cafe for days, because I didn't know that I need to talk a guest out of his Wine-bottle using specific sentences, and use the wine to soften the mud of a lever in a wall... But I guess that's too specific for anyone to relate to...

moduspol 2y ago

> I like exploring and discovering and figuring things out. I understand this is very common, but for me: "discovering and figuring things out" in games often becomes: "guess what the game devs want me to do." Oh, is there something on the other side of that hill? Meh, not really. What about at the top of that cliff? Oh I can only sort of climb it? Should I keep trying or am I just going to hit an invisible wall? Is this enemy way too tough for me with my current equipment, or do I just need to get better? Am I doing things in the wrong order and just making things way tougher? Some games are better about it than others, but I already know I'm playing a game. I don't get much enjoyment from "finding" something that was put there for me to find. I like stories, characters, and world-building. I don't need a giant yellow HUD arrow, but there's nothing fun about wandering aimlessly in hopes of finding something mildly interesting. I already know there are N mildly interesting things on the map, each within a focus-tested ~30 second distance from each other. So for me at least, I'll take the map markers.

sfn42 2y ago
For me, this is mostly about what kind of information a player expects to find in a game. For example in Overwatch 2, there are no numbers on abilities. It's just something like "fires a rocket at the enemy" - how much damage does the rocket do? How long is the cooldown? Can it crit if it hits an enemy in the head? In other games there might be items or talents with tooltips like "increases your damage" - how much? Is it additive or multiplicative with other modifiers? I like games where this kind of information is easily available. I won't look up how to complete a quest or something unless I'm completely stuck on it, but I will look up numbers so I can make informed decisions instead of just guessing what might be good.
- lmm 2y ago
  > I like games where this kind of information is easily available. I won't look up how to complete a quest or something unless I'm completely stuck on it, but I will look up numbers so I can make informed decisions instead of just guessing what might be good. Isn't that even more immersion- and game-breaking? Figuring out what kind of attacks have what kind of effect on what kind of enemy is generally part of the game.

michaelt 2y ago

> There are many players that don't want to be challenged or explore That might be true in some cases, sure. But in recent years I've noticed a lot of games adding things like crafting and alchemy mechanics that are pretty grind-heavy to puzzle out on your own. If I've got to brute-force recipes? Or if there are hard-won ingredients and they might get wasted or produce something useless? Or if the developers, not wanting to risk breaking the game balance, made the craftable items weak or highly situational? Can easily be Not Fun.

IgorPartola 2y ago
But is this because there is going to be a wiki explaining exactly what to do, something not done before?
2muchcoffeeman 2y ago
Z:BotW and Z:TotK got the open world crafting balance right. Ingredients are plentiful, experimentation is low risk, and you exploring new places really seems like exploring.
Yawrehto 2y ago
>crafting an alchemy...that are pretty grind-heavy to puzzle out on your own Or it could be you have a minor goal (eg, 'what would X + Y be') but first you need to GET x and y. You're not spoiling what you're doing. The other day I was playing Infinite Craft and wanted to test something (what WOULD freedom + fries be; for those wondering, freedom + french fries is America), but first I needed french fries. I'm not too interested in figuring out how to get them on my own, so I looked that up. In open ended games, wikis can be used to help accomplish goals you set for yourself, since they tend to have minimal direction. They take the place of, eg, hints on where to go next. Some games have official wikis (like Little Alchemy/Little Alchemy 2), even!

WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago

Perhaps your friends don't like video games and are just wanting to kill time out of boredom Expecting that all games should become like this because that's how "you" like them is selfish and dangerous There is room for all kind of games

neilv 2y ago

> There are many players that don't want to be challenged or explore, they want to complete tasks and get rewards. Some of them don't really care that much about the actual gameplay, as long as there is a quick way to complete sets of tasks and get their rewards. Exactly. This was noticeable in Subnautica, in which most of the game is figuring out what you do next. The PS4 shows you how rare it is to achieve each progress trophy for a game, among people who started the game, and... the completion level looked suspiciously high. (Especially for a game that was given away free at one point, so you don't have only people who paid money for the game, starting it.) I did have to "Zoomer" the game once, when I was stuck over the course of calendar weeks, knowing which specific linking piece I was missing, but unable to figure it out. So eventually I cheated, by Web searching how you get this one missing link. But otherwise, I figured it out with the in-game hints, and some not-too-hard exploring, mapping, note-taking, deducing, planning, survival resource tactics-ing, and grinding. If this were a real-world business problem, not a game, I would've gotten help sooner. But I also would've been able to apply skills to solving the problem more effectively, than if I'd only ever learned how to copy&paste Stack Overflow or LLM robo-plagiarism.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

> Some of them don't really care that much about the actual gameplay, as long as there is a quick way to complete sets of tasks and get their rewards. Trophy/achievment-oriented gamers. Focused more on their profile than the particular game. Not to be confused with Trophy hunters, who tend to target harder or popular games for achievements.