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Op Ed

[Sep 04, 2012, 09:35 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

Edge Magazine - Assassin's Creed III devs: "Easy mode often ruins games".
"It’s like if I picked up a book and it said, 'Do you want the easy version or the complicated version?' [Game designers] can simplify the language, you know; we can make it two syllables."

Kotaku - Easy Modes Can Ruin Games? Um, No. Thanks nin.
It' just baffling to see that, in the year 2012, there are still people in the video game industry who approach things as though this was the 1980s, and the only games on the market were there to test you. If I don't have to pass a test just to turn a page in a book, or reach the second act of a movie, I shouldn't have to in a story-rich video game either.

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18.

Re: Op Ed

Sep 4, 2012, 15:42

Scottish Martial Arts

I guess I just miss the days when beating a game was an actual accomplishment, rather than a preordained consequence of playing for 6-8 hours. Games are terrible at storytelling, probably because the people who write them generally aren't very literary -- Christ, look at David Gaider, or Chris Metzen -- so I have a hard time being sympathetic to the view that games need a Tell Me a Story Mode a la DXHR. What separates games from other media is gameplay, but gameplay is only engaging when there is a failure state. Would anyone watch a football game if your team was always guaranteed to win? Trying to remove failure states from gaming just spoils the whole experience, in my opinion. Furthermore, by making gameplay less engaging in favor of making it easy to see the end of a (terrible) story, developers are playing to the weakness of their medium rather than its strength. If adding an easy mode didn't affect the rest of the game design, I wouldn't have a problem with it -- people can skim chapters of novels that don't interest them too, although such a practice defeats the purpose of reading, but whatever -- but the reality is that designing a game around the inclusion of an easy mode generally alters the rest of the difficulty design as well. And that's why I can only support an easy mode with major caveats.

Subject

Comment [quote="Scottish Martial Arts"Sep 4, 2012, 15:42]I guess I just miss the days when beating a game was an actual accomplishment, rather than a preordained consequence of playing for 6-8 hours. Games are terrible at storytelling, probably because the people who write them generally aren't very literary -- Christ, look at David Gaider, or Chris Metzen -- so I have a hard time being sympathetic to the view that games need a Tell Me a Story Mode a la DXHR. What separates games from other media is gameplay, but gameplay is only engaging when there is a failure state. Would anyone watch a football game if your team was always guaranteed to win? Trying to remove failure states from gaming just spoils the whole experience, in my opinion. Furthermore, by making gameplay less engaging in favor of making it easy to see the end of a (terrible) story, developers are playing to the weakness of their medium rather than its strength. If adding an easy mode didn't affect the rest of the game design, I wouldn't have a problem with it -- people can skim chapters of novels that don't interest them too, although such a practice defeats the purpose of reading, but whatever -- but the reality is that designing a game around the inclusion of an easy mode generally alters the rest of the difficulty design as well. And that's why I can only support an easy mode with major caveats. [/quote]

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