Todays rant is on the sissification of modern games. Problem 1: Achievements. Not that they exist, but that 8 out of 10 of them are awarded to you for completing normal game tasks, like a certain mission or section of the game, and 1 of the remaining 2 is often some reward for mindlessly repeating a task ad nauseum (Kill 1945315856 dust bunnies! Get 39596 headshots!). Your ability to play a game until you reach an arbitrary limit on whatever scoring mechanism is used does not equate to any real skill. How about an achievement for Big Boss rank in MGS4? Doesnt exist, but I wouldve earned it and I was willing to go through the game again to see that pop on my profile. Instead, you get trophies for completing chapters and beating the game... which anyone can do thanks to Problem 2: Auto save and checkpoints. Dont get me wrong, I dont miss the days of passwords and losing hours of data because you didnt save at that last point. I do, however, tire of trying to move into a new area and being told to wait XX seconds while the game saves. Its been 5 minutes since you last saved my progress game, I sorta prefer when I feel like dying is somewhat a penalty rather than par for the course. In fact, every new game should have an achievement for completing it without failing. Thats a challenge worth recognition. Its not often that games these days try to kill you as the player anyway thanks to Problem 3: Handholding. This is the single largest complaint I have about gaming right now. You really didnt need to pause the game to tell me to press A to jump, I couldve figured it out in real time. Developers seem to assume the player is a moron and write the story and tutorial to that effect, and it affects gameplay as well. Zelda 1: Cryptic metaphor leads to walking through a wall to find a hidden stash. You set a random bush on fire and find a hidden shop... or some dudes house, and he takes a good bit of your money. Skyward Sword: Giant doorway shaped cracks tell you where to bomb, and just in case you cant figure it out, they have someone to tell you to try blowing up the mysterious doorway shaped crack. Just... stop. Stop highlighting everything, stop making secrets obvious, stop pausing the game to tell me how the controls work (Hint: If you need to break the flow of action just to teach someone your controls, you should probably rethink your control scheme), stop saving every 10 seconds and stop rewarding people as though they accomplished something by turning the game on and having thumbs. Not every game has to be a challenge, but if youre going to give people this gamerscore to boast about, they should have to do something above and beyond expectation to earn it, just like real life. The blind guy who can play Abes Odyssey deserves 10000 gamer points. The guy who played through DeathStabber 2013s short and easy campaign on the lowest difficulty? He deserves 50. Dude jumps out of a plane, fires a rocket at an enemy plane, glides back into his plane and takes off, that kind of stuff should be rewarded. Guy kills 9x10^10^100 enemies, he just has a lot of time on his hands.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 14:03:14 +0000
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