Should all games have an "easy" mode?

[UleTheVee]

1 hour ago, The Blackangel said:

Then isn't that just exclusionary, possibly even prejudice? That only players that the game developer views worthy gets to play their game? Sounds a bit like Nazism to me.

That's the stupidest connection I have ever heard in my entire life.

How the hell is that supposed to be any form of supremacy? Just how?!

Look dude, the fact is that no matter where you go, you won't be able to please everyone in any way. You are going to find players that are certainly not going to enjoy the game you're making for them. Catering to them at the expense of the player base that's already loyal to you will not only never really turn the heads of those who didn't want to play the game iun the first place, but it will also turn those who already enjoyed the game for what it was away.

And seriously, I am known for saying that things are linked to politics and such.. But this was the most vague and stupid connection I have ever heard. To the point where I am not even comparing you to the left, I just think you're entirely delusional.

[Executor Akamia]

I don't think all, or even most, games really need an easy mode. Accessibility is one thing, but difficulty is another matter entirely. Some games – particularly those that are played for their competitive multiplayer – can, in fact, be negatively impacted by both.

To illustrate, I want to talk about a game series that I greatly enjoy: StarCraft

For those who don't know, StarCraft is a series of sci-fi RTS games created and published by Blizzard. There are presently 2 games in this series: StarCraft, released in 1998, with an expansion (StarCraft: Brood War) being released later that year. Its full sequel, StarCraft II, was released in 2010 with the title StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, with 2 expansions releasing in 2013 (StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm) and 2015. (StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void)

StarCraft is one of the earliest examples of esports in gaming history, predating the first MOBAs by several years. Fighting games like Street Fighter might be even earlier. StarCraft, however, is on a different level entirely; it's particularly popular in Korea, where it may as well be considered the national sport.

I myself am a StarCraft player, particularly a StarCraft II player. I'm not particularly good at it; on the ranked ladder, my highest finish was top Silver League, which is really, really low. Part of the problem is my computer having mouselag with the game, which hinders my accuracy and speed significantly, but in all honesty, the lion's share of my problems are that I'm just bad. Period. I can improve, and will if I keep at it enough; perhaps even overcoming that particular limitation, but I don't have that kind of patience. I prefer to lose on my own terms, not because of bad hardware. Or maybe it's my OS that's the problem... The mouselag wasn't a thing before I upgraded to macOS Sierra a couple of years ago...

Anyway. There is a faction within the playerbase – a few, actually – who believe StarCraft II overall was watered down from what the StarCraft: Brood War experience was. Not just in the campaign, but in the gameplay itself. After having some lengthy discussions with some of these people in my spare time, I can see where they're coming from for certain. I don't like Brood War myself, and a lot of the reasons I like StarCraft II are a few of the reasons these people hate it, because these are things they believe lowered the skill ceiling for the game compared to what it was in Brood War.

First, let's talk about the campaign. In StarCraft: Brood War, the campaign was more or less designed to teach you how to play the game. How each unit works, and when you need to use them. Except for hero units, every unit you play with in the campaign can be used in the multiplayer, and they work pretty much the exact same way in both modes. That said, the campaign is very difficult for those not used to the (in my experience) very restrictive UI, and in some cases, very difficult even for those who are. More on that later.

In StarCraft II's campaign, this is a whole different ballgame. While the game does teach you the very basics of how to play, it doesn't teach you how the units work the same way Brood War did, and in fact, the units in the multiplayer can end up playing completely different roles than they did in the campaign due to balance changes completely overturning the metagame. Sure, you'll learn how units work in that campaign, but those units don't necessarily work the same way in the multiplayer, and some of those campaign units – Terran Goliaths, Protoss Dark Archons, Zerg Guardians, for example – don't even exist in that mode. Conversely, some multiplayer units don't exist in the campaign. Blizzard even added a completely different mode at some point that was intended to aid in the transition from campaign play to multiplayer play because the disconnect was so big. This mode was called "Training". In addition, multiplayer is played at a faster speed than most campaign difficulties, the exception being Brutal difficulty, which is played at multiplayer speed. I didn't spend enough time with Brood War to notice a speed difference between the modes; I doubt there is one. Speed is an important factor to consider here, because it affects timings. But that's getting into gameplay...

... which is the next thing I want to talk about. In StarCraft: Brood War, you're only allowed to select either 1 building at a time, or up to 16 units at a time. While commonly attributed to hardware or software limitations of the time, I'm... having a hard time buying that excuse, as it's the only RTS game I've ever played that had that limitation. Granted, I haven't played any other RTS games from the 90s or earlier, so for all I know, this could be completely true. I'll have to ask some fans of early Age of Empires or Command & Conquer games later. Anyway, regardless of the technical reasons for this being the case, the effect was that players had to be smarter about unit management. It was excruciatingly difficult to send what are called "death balls" over to the enemy base and roll over them because of a combination of this and less-than-stellar unit pathing algorithms, the latter of which affected the Terran Goliath and the Protoss Dragoon the most of any other unit in the game, or so I'm told. In addition to this, worker units had to be specifically ordered to gather resources, even when rallied to them from the primary base structure, or they would do nothing at all.

StarCraft II? You can select as many units at one time as you want, and even have more than one building in your selection. This streamlined several things, but it also made it painfully easy to build those death balls I talked about in the previous paragraph. In the Protoss arsenal in particular, there's a unit that rather annoyingly enables and borderline encourages death ball play: The Mothership. As a Protoss player myself, I personally avoid building this thing on principle, though it does usually fall off in the upper echelons of play as death balls do anyway, at least in current versions of the game. Early on in the game's lifetime, though? Death balls were everywhere. This has frustrated quite a handful of series veterans enough to write the game off entirely.

All of this because of an effort to make the game more accessible. It worked, but it came at a price. I'm not gonna deny there's some elitism at play; there totally is. However, it doesn't change the fact that these seemingly innocuous quality-of-life changes have altered the game in such a way that it very nearly took the "strategy" out of the real-time strategy game. I'm sure there might have been a better way to make the game more accessible to new players without alienating the old ones, but in the end, as much as I like StarCraft II over StarCraft: Brood War, I don't think this was it.

[kingpotato]

The game was made to be difficult, if its to hard for some gamers then they should just not play it. Thats why I have hesitate to play any soul games because I know for sure I'm not going to get past the first levels xD

[StaceyPowers]

6 hours ago, UleTheVee said:

Believe it or not, reducing a skill gap or making a game easier to beat (Even if it's a separate difficulty mode) is going to have negative repercussions. Especially because it undermines the achievements that other players have made. Look at the recent Resident Evil 2 "All-Unlock" DLC. Now players are able to purchase the stuff many players have worked so hard for, destrfoying their achievements and making fun of them for playing the goddamned game to begin with.

So yeah, EASE comes with a price. No matter what game it is.

I can empathise a bit with where you're coming from with this, but this too seems like an example of irrational thinking (not by you, but by the players you are talking about). Players who mock others for playing for achievements or content that they have paid for simply have a different value system. They do not see the hard work as an achievement, thus they do not pursue it. But this does not in any real sense undermine the achievements of hard-working players who do value struggle. Those players need to learn to assert their own definitions of achievement, rather than allow themselves to feel their accomplishments are reduced because others do not share their ambitions. I guess I feel like they are ultimately undermining themselves.

[Executor Akamia]

7 minutes ago, StaceyPowers said:

I can empathise a bit with where you're coming from with this, but this too seems like an example of irrational thinking (not by you, but by the players you are talking about). Players who mock others for playing for achievements or content that they have paid for simply have a different value system. They do not see the hard work as an achievement, thus they do not pursue it. But this does not in any real sense undermine the achievements of hard-working players who do value struggle. Those players need to learn to assert their own definitions of achievement, rather than allow themselves to feel their accomplishments are reduced because others do not share their ambitions. I guess I feel like they are ultimately undermining themselves.

I think this is a worthwhile point to consider. It reminds me of people who play buster-only runs of Mega Man games, or Nuzlockes in Pokémon. The achievements of people who succeed these are not undermined by the presence of Special Weapons or the ability to keep your mons even if they faint, respectively. These self-imposed challenges are not denied, discouraged, or encouraged by the game itself. People just... do them.

However, most of these games don't have an "easy" mode. Or any other mode beyond the default, for that matter. Mega Man 2 had a "Normal" mode that was only put into the international release, but the only difficulty in the original Rockman 2 was the Hard one. To the best of my knowledge, mainstream Pokémon games have never had difficulty settings.

[StaceyPowers]

3 minutes ago, Executor Akamia said:

I think this is a worthwhile point to consider. It reminds me of people who play buster-only runs of Mega Man games, or Nuzlockes in Pokémon. The achievements of people who succeed these are not undermined by the presence of Special Weapons or the ability to keep your mons even if they faint, respectively. These self-imposed challenges are not denied, discouraged, or encouraged by the game itself. People just... do them.

However, most of these games don't have an "easy" mode. Or any other mode beyond the default, for that matter. Mega Man 2 had a "Normal" mode that was only put into the international release, but the only difficulty in the original Rockman 2 was the Hard one. To the best of my knowledge, mainstream Pokémon games have never had difficulty settings.

Good points. I also enjoyed your detailed analysis of Starcraft. I think that with multiplayer games, this is an entirely different (and more problematic) issue than it is with single player games. I suppose that's kind of my point, ultimately. A single player game is essentially a single-person experience--if we let what other people are doing bother us, that is our problem, because that is within our control. A multiplayer experience is shared, so adjustments in these areas impact everyone.

[The Blackangel]

22 hours ago, UleTheVee said:

That's the stupidest connection I have ever heard in my entire life.

How the hell is that supposed to be any form of supremacy? Just how?!

Look dude, the fact is that no matter where you go, you won't be able to please everyone in any way. You are going to find players that are certainly not going to enjoy the game you're making for them. Catering to them at the expense of the player base that's already loyal to you will not only never really turn the heads of those who didn't want to play the game iun the first place, but it will also turn those who already enjoyed the game for what it was away.

And seriously, I am known for saying that things are linked to politics and such.. But this was the most vague and stupid connection I have ever heard. To the point where I am not even comparing you to the left, I just think you're entirely delusional.

Yet you're so fucking high and mighty that you flip out if someone says something you don't like. You must BE a Nazi or you wouldn't have taken such offense to my comment. If you would just take your head out of your ass for a few minutes and get off your high horse, maybe you could learn what a fucking METAPHOR is.

[skyfire]

Most of the puzzle and the physics based games are designed to be difficult. But not all of them have to be that way. Some of the time you have to warm the gamer up for the harder challenges by throwing some of the easy ones. And once those things starts to happen slowly it can be easier then to work around with the difficult as one starts practicing. 

[UleTheVee]

3 hours ago, The Blackangel said:

Yet you're so fucking high and mighty that you flip out if someone says something you don't like. You must BE a Nazi or you wouldn't have taken such offense to my comment. If you would just take your head out of your ass for a few minutes and get off your high horse, maybe you could learn what a fucking METAPHOR is.

Everyone I showed this to agrees that you're a mental case at this point.

And I'm pretty sure we don't need to be metaphorical for that.

[UleTheVee]

3 hours ago, The Blackangel said:

Yet you're so fucking high and mighty that you flip out if someone says something you don't like. You must BE a Nazi or you wouldn't have taken such offense to my comment. If you would just take your head out of your ass for a few minutes and get off your high horse, maybe you could learn what a fucking METAPHOR is.

On that subject... I didn't take offense to your analysis. I'm just saying it's dumb as hell XD

[DylanC]

23 hours ago, Executor Akamia said:

I don't think all, or even most, games really need an easy mode. Accessibility is one thing, but difficulty is another matter entirely. Some games – particularly those that are played for their competitive multiplayer – can, in fact, be negatively impacted by both.

To illustrate, I want to talk about a game series that I greatly enjoy: StarCraft

For those who don't know, StarCraft is a series of sci-fi RTS games created and published by Blizzard. There are presently 2 games in this series: StarCraft, released in 1998, with an expansion (StarCraft: Brood War) being released later that year. Its full sequel, StarCraft II, was released in 2010 with the title StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, with 2 expansions releasing in 2013 (StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm) and 2015. (StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void)

StarCraft is one of the earliest examples of esports in gaming history, predating the first MOBAs by several years. Fighting games like Street Fighter might be even earlier. StarCraft, however, is on a different level entirely; it's particularly popular in Korea, where it may as well be considered the national sport.

I myself am a StarCraft player, particularly a StarCraft II player. I'm not particularly good at it; on the ranked ladder, my highest finish was top Silver League, which is really, really low. Part of the problem is my computer having mouselag with the game, which hinders my accuracy and speed significantly, but in all honesty, the lion's share of my problems are that I'm just bad. Period. I can improve, and will if I keep at it enough; perhaps even overcoming that particular limitation, but I don't have that kind of patience. I prefer to lose on my own terms, not because of bad hardware. Or maybe it's my OS that's the problem... The mouselag wasn't a thing before I upgraded to macOS Sierra a couple of years ago...

Anyway. There is a faction within the playerbase – a few, actually – who believe StarCraft II overall was watered down from what the StarCraft: Brood War experience was. Not just in the campaign, but in the gameplay itself. After having some lengthy discussions with some of these people in my spare time, I can see where they're coming from for certain. I don't like Brood War myself, and a lot of the reasons I like StarCraft II are a few of the reasons these people hate it, because these are things they believe lowered the skill ceiling for the game compared to what it was in Brood War.

First, let's talk about the campaign. In StarCraft: Brood War, the campaign was more or less designed to teach you how to play the game. How each unit works, and when you need to use them. Except for hero units, every unit you play with in the campaign can be used in the multiplayer, and they work pretty much the exact same way in both modes. That said, the campaign is very difficult for those not used to the (in my experience) very restrictive UI, and in some cases, very difficult even for those who are. More on that later.

In StarCraft II's campaign, this is a whole different ballgame. While the game does teach you the very basics of how to play, it doesn't teach you how the units work the same way Brood War did, and in fact, the units in the multiplayer can end up playing completely different roles than they did in the campaign due to balance changes completely overturning the metagame. Sure, you'll learn how units work in that campaign, but those units don't necessarily work the same way in the multiplayer, and some of those campaign units – Terran Goliaths, Protoss Dark Archons, Zerg Guardians, for example – don't even exist in that mode. Conversely, some multiplayer units don't exist in the campaign. Blizzard even added a completely different mode at some point that was intended to aid in the transition from campaign play to multiplayer play because the disconnect was so big. This mode was called "Training". In addition, multiplayer is played at a faster speed than most campaign difficulties, the exception being Brutal difficulty, which is played at multiplayer speed. I didn't spend enough time with Brood War to notice a speed difference between the modes; I doubt there is one. Speed is an important factor to consider here, because it affects timings. But that's getting into gameplay...

... which is the next thing I want to talk about. In StarCraft: Brood War, you're only allowed to select either 1 building at a time, or up to 16 units at a time. While commonly attributed to hardware or software limitations of the time, I'm... having a hard time buying that excuse, as it's the only RTS game I've ever played that had that limitation. Granted, I haven't played any other RTS games from the 90s or earlier, so for all I know, this could be completely true. I'll have to ask some fans of early Age of Empires or Command & Conquer games later. Anyway, regardless of the technical reasons for this being the case, the effect was that players had to be smarter about unit management. It was excruciatingly difficult to send what are called "death balls" over to the enemy base and roll over them because of a combination of this and less-than-stellar unit pathing algorithms, the latter of which affected the Terran Goliath and the Protoss Dragoon the most of any other unit in the game, or so I'm told. In addition to this, worker units had to be specifically ordered to gather resources, even when rallied to them from the primary base structure, or they would do nothing at all.

StarCraft II? You can select as many units at one time as you want, and even have more than one building in your selection. This streamlined several things, but it also made it painfully easy to build those death balls I talked about in the previous paragraph. In the Protoss arsenal in particular, there's a unit that rather annoyingly enables and borderline encourages death ball play: The Mothership. As a Protoss player myself, I personally avoid building this thing on principle, though it does usually fall off in the upper echelons of play as death balls do anyway, at least in current versions of the game. Early on in the game's lifetime, though? Death balls were everywhere. This has frustrated quite a handful of series veterans enough to write the game off entirely.

All of this because of an effort to make the game more accessible. It worked, but it came at a price. I'm not gonna deny there's some elitism at play; there totally is. However, it doesn't change the fact that these seemingly innocuous quality-of-life changes have altered the game in such a way that it very nearly took the "strategy" out of the real-time strategy game. I'm sure there might have been a better way to make the game more accessible to new players without alienating the old ones, but in the end, as much as I like StarCraft II over StarCraft: Brood War, I don't think this was it.

That was one of the most eloquent and enlightening comments I’ve read in ages. Really illustrates your point perfectly. Nice job.

[StaceyPowers]

3 hours ago, skyfire said:

Most of the puzzle and the physics based games are designed to be difficult. But not all of them have to be that way. Some of the time you have to warm the gamer up for the harder challenges by throwing some of the easy ones. And once those things starts to happen slowly it can be easier then to work around with the difficult as one starts practicing. 

This reminds me of an old DOS game which I played as a kid which I thought handled difficulty in a great way. It was a puzzle game called Heaven and Earth. I think it had like ... thousands of puzzles in it in a number of innovative categories. They started out absurdly easy, and then gradually increased in difficulty in every category until they were ludicrously hard.

I never did beat the game because you had to beat every puzzle to do it, but it never angered me because:

1-I could do the puzzles in literally any order I wished, at any time I wanted.

2-The learning curve was gradual and logical. 

3-Rather than having to puzzle out what the puzzles actually were, they had clear tutorials, and most of them were designed to help improve particular skills (i.e. there was a whole set involving motor skills with mirror movement, where your mouse would behave as if it were flipped).

Even though beating it would be quite challenging, I really felt like it offered something at every skill level. And this is coming from a person who usually detests puzzles in video games.

[UleTheVee]

1 hour ago, DylanC said:

That was one of the most eloquent and enlightening comments I’ve read in ages. Really illustrates your point perfectly. Nice job.

That's my friend for ya. He's an extremely tough cookie.

[UleTheVee]

On 4/9/2019 at 2:12 PM, Executor Akamia said:

I don't think all, or even most, games really need an easy mode. Accessibility is one thing, but difficulty is another matter entirely. Some games – particularly those that are played for their competitive multiplayer – can, in fact, be negatively impacted by both.

To illustrate, I want to talk about a game series that I greatly enjoy: StarCraft

For those who don't know, StarCraft is a series of sci-fi RTS games created and published by Blizzard. There are presently 2 games in this series: StarCraft, released in 1998, with an expansion (StarCraft: Brood War) being released later that year. Its full sequel, StarCraft II, was released in 2010 with the title StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, with 2 expansions releasing in 2013 (StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm) and 2015. (StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void)

StarCraft is one of the earliest examples of esports in gaming history, predating the first MOBAs by several years. Fighting games like Street Fighter might be even earlier. StarCraft, however, is on a different level entirely; it's particularly popular in Korea, where it may as well be considered the national sport.

I myself am a StarCraft player, particularly a StarCraft II player. I'm not particularly good at it; on the ranked ladder, my highest finish was top Silver League, which is really, really low. Part of the problem is my computer having mouselag with the game, which hinders my accuracy and speed significantly, but in all honesty, the lion's share of my problems are that I'm just bad. Period. I can improve, and will if I keep at it enough; perhaps even overcoming that particular limitation, but I don't have that kind of patience. I prefer to lose on my own terms, not because of bad hardware. Or maybe it's my OS that's the problem... The mouselag wasn't a thing before I upgraded to macOS Sierra a couple of years ago...

Anyway. There is a faction within the playerbase – a few, actually – who believe StarCraft II overall was watered down from what the StarCraft: Brood War experience was. Not just in the campaign, but in the gameplay itself. After having some lengthy discussions with some of these people in my spare time, I can see where they're coming from for certain. I don't like Brood War myself, and a lot of the reasons I like StarCraft II are a few of the reasons these people hate it, because these are things they believe lowered the skill ceiling for the game compared to what it was in Brood War.

First, let's talk about the campaign. In StarCraft: Brood War, the campaign was more or less designed to teach you how to play the game. How each unit works, and when you need to use them. Except for hero units, every unit you play with in the campaign can be used in the multiplayer, and they work pretty much the exact same way in both modes. That said, the campaign is very difficult for those not used to the (in my experience) very restrictive UI, and in some cases, very difficult even for those who are. More on that later.

In StarCraft II's campaign, this is a whole different ballgame. While the game does teach you the very basics of how to play, it doesn't teach you how the units work the same way Brood War did, and in fact, the units in the multiplayer can end up playing completely different roles than they did in the campaign due to balance changes completely overturning the metagame. Sure, you'll learn how units work in that campaign, but those units don't necessarily work the same way in the multiplayer, and some of those campaign units – Terran Goliaths, Protoss Dark Archons, Zerg Guardians, for example – don't even exist in that mode. Conversely, some multiplayer units don't exist in the campaign. Blizzard even added a completely different mode at some point that was intended to aid in the transition from campaign play to multiplayer play because the disconnect was so big. This mode was called "Training". In addition, multiplayer is played at a faster speed than most campaign difficulties, the exception being Brutal difficulty, which is played at multiplayer speed. I didn't spend enough time with Brood War to notice a speed difference between the modes; I doubt there is one. Speed is an important factor to consider here, because it affects timings. But that's getting into gameplay...

... which is the next thing I want to talk about. In StarCraft: Brood War, you're only allowed to select either 1 building at a time, or up to 16 units at a time. While commonly attributed to hardware or software limitations of the time, I'm... having a hard time buying that excuse, as it's the only RTS game I've ever played that had that limitation. Granted, I haven't played any other RTS games from the 90s or earlier, so for all I know, this could be completely true. I'll have to ask some fans of early Age of Empires or Command & Conquer games later. Anyway, regardless of the technical reasons for this being the case, the effect was that players had to be smarter about unit management. It was excruciatingly difficult to send what are called "death balls" over to the enemy base and roll over them because of a combination of this and less-than-stellar unit pathing algorithms, the latter of which affected the Terran Goliath and the Protoss Dragoon the most of any other unit in the game, or so I'm told. In addition to this, worker units had to be specifically ordered to gather resources, even when rallied to them from the primary base structure, or they would do nothing at all.

StarCraft II? You can select as many units at one time as you want, and even have more than one building in your selection. This streamlined several things, but it also made it painfully easy to build those death balls I talked about in the previous paragraph. In the Protoss arsenal in particular, there's a unit that rather annoyingly enables and borderline encourages death ball play: The Mothership. As a Protoss player myself, I personally avoid building this thing on principle, though it does usually fall off in the upper echelons of play as death balls do anyway, at least in current versions of the game. Early on in the game's lifetime, though? Death balls were everywhere. This has frustrated quite a handful of series veterans enough to write the game off entirely.

All of this because of an effort to make the game more accessible. It worked, but it came at a price. I'm not gonna deny there's some elitism at play; there totally is. However, it doesn't change the fact that these seemingly innocuous quality-of-life changes have altered the game in such a way that it very nearly took the "strategy" out of the real-time strategy game. I'm sure there might have been a better way to make the game more accessible to new players without alienating the old ones, but in the end, as much as I like StarCraft II over StarCraft: Brood War, I don't think this was it.

You're still a massive SC nerd though,.

[Executor Akamia]

4 hours ago, UleTheVee said:

You're still a massive SC nerd though,.

You’re goddamned right.