Nintendo planning friendlier approach to game difficulty

Well I saw this on another site, I wanted to see what you guys think about it.
I've never posted a thread in this section, so I am hoping I haven't ****ed up somewhere :D don't think anyone else had posted it yet.


http://videogames.yahoo.com/feature/nintendo-planning-friendlier-approach-to-game-difficulty/1278610


Personally I think it is ****ing stupid. I'm just going to copypaste what I wrote somewhere else in regards to it.

Maybe I am just odd but uhm, I actually find a game more boring if it is piss easy :/ I like a challenge, plus you get such a feeling of satisfaction when you complete something that is difficult that it makes it worth it.

Frustration is something that every gamer feels at one point or another, but if I am stuck on something I physically cannot just walk away, I have to solve it/beat it/complete it whatever.

Its nice that they wish to encourage the casual gamers who pick up a game every now and then, but they need to be careful that they don't end up pushing out the rest of the gaming community as a result.

Unless I majorly just misinterpreted what the above quote says (and if I did someone tell me xD; ) they basically want to have like a mini tutorial constantly on screen and the gamer just follows that? I actually like figuring things out on my own, besides, if you followed that, it wouldn't be you beating the game, it would be you just following what you are told to do.

Yay, that makes me a happy CtR


Really though :/ it isn't even helping the casual gamers, all it is doing is making it too easy for them. They wont be encouraged to try and they wont be encouraged to use their minds, they will just use the tutorials. If it is readily available then people would be tempted to use it the first time the get stuck even a teeny tiny bit.

 

This is stupid D:
I mean, I can understand that this would be good for younger players who get confused easily, but the majority of us like a challange D:

Also, even if you can turn it on and off when you want, that's still bad. As soon as you got to a part of the game you struggled on you'd give up immeadiatly and turn it on D:

 

Exactly :/ if you know it is there then you will be tempted to use it the second that you get stuck. Regardless of how much of a gamer you are.

 

This is going to boost the market for those casual gamers that have no patience for having to 'think', but is going to push aside a majority of gamers unless these options are merely turned off through options or the sort.

I feel that the problem is, and we are discussing this right now in my Video Game Theory class, is that gamers want to be challenged, the don't want to have the core game mechanic watered down or have their hand held while they try to solve a difficult puzzle. They want a risk/rewards system so that they can take something away from the game.

What Nintendo is planning on doing, at least in my opinion from reading this, is they are possibly trying to reach too diverse of a demographic and are shying away from their roots, in this sense, they are turning away gamers to other systems that can give them what they want. Otherwise, gamers are going to grokk everything Nintendo or whomever begins implimenting this and video games will suffer imo.

 

Hey Nintendo, can you go back to how you were before this generation of consoles? When you made good games? When you didn't suck the cock of every casual gamer everywhere? Please?

 

Man, this just sucks.. =.= Sometimes that challenge is good! And helps you too if you think about it. Like if it's a really hard puzzle on LoZ and you take hours to finally figure it out. You get that sense of accomplishment and your puzzle skills increase. xD

Nintendo is actually pretty smart to dive in to the casual gamer world for profits, but.....dang...it's gonna lose it's true fans.

 

Thats insanely stupid... Do the people who came up with this even play nintendo games? They probably suck at them...

Anyway I like the challenge too. The easier games I have get really boring quickly, but the more challenging ones actually mean something when you complete them. If it becomes suddenly much easier, the games won't have as much of a sense of accomplishment. And they'd just be easy games, not challenging games that require at least some effort and thinking, which parents probably wouldn't be as happy about?

But I'm probably being overdramatic, I doubt it'd affect all games, or thatall future Final Fantasy games and the like would suddenly get all this done to them. If it's just kids games, well that's fine to easily draw in the younger audience.

 

So basically Nintendo plan to dumb down games? Well that sucks, even my baby sister likes the challenge of games they have to offer at this point.

 

If it happens, it happens I guess. :/

I just hope they don screw up the Smash, LoZ, Metroid, Mario Kart, or Starfox series. <<

 

No, they'll be making them actually hard to beat. The games are already dumbed down at the moment.


If I remember correctly, the hint option was supposed to be completely optional. Alot of people grab themselves a game and its strategy guide before even opening it so this wont change for those people. And then there are the other people that prefer not to get any help at all, so they wont be affected either. Because if they didnt want help in any games before, I doubt they'd want it now. The help system isnt THAT useful though. It'll only show the most straightforward ways of getting though an area, meaning whoever uses it would only know the slowest, plain way of beating a puzzle. And if you do use the help, you cant save your game. This would help let developers actually make challenging games instead the super easy ones coming out nowadays. This would all depend on if they even get this product out though, since nintendo does make a crapload of things only to have them kinda fade off the radar or get drastically changed.

 

In 10 years, kids will be playing Leap Frog games instead of real games cause the real games will be too hard for them.

 

i hope not all games do this. especially the part where you can skim to whatever part of the game you want. the demonstration video, i don't really feel strongly about it because i know i probably wouldn't use them. but the skimming part, it kinda leaves the point of playing the game out because you can just get to the end right away.

 

The point of this is that it allows Nintendo to make their games as hard as they want, while still allowing the casual players to play the game without being frustrated. The way everything is now, you *can not* have both of those. If Nintendo wants a casual player to play a game, the game as a whole has to be dumbed down and simplified to the lowest common denominator, and the people who want difficulty suffer.

This is a solution to that. Nintendo can make the puzzles as hard as they want, the challenge as cranked up us they like, bosses that aren't formulaic, and make it genuinely enjoyable for the hardcore. If the casual player has trouble with it, then they can watch a "How the developers did it" to get by those tough spots and continue on with the game, and even then you still have to physically accomplish the task, even after knowing the how-to

Another part of this patent is the ability to play through a game like a scene-select DVD. It patents the ability to basically put 'save states" throughout your game, so that you can replay your favorite boss battle, your favorite cutscene, dungeon, etc. and helps people who love games for the story and not always so much for the fetch quests and escort missions.

The average play time of the Wii version of Okami is 18 hours. Okami is a 40 hour game. Around 18 hours into Okami is a particularly difficult dungeon and boss. The majority of Wii players have simply not picked up Okami again because they can't get past a roadblock in the game like that. People are passing up playing a wonderful game like Okami because they just can't get past one part, preventing them from seeing the rest of the adventure. With things like this patent, that won't have to happen anymore.

 

YES!!!

I would do that... It takes away form the fun of the game if you can't resist using teh interwebz or buying a guide unless you really need to. :(