I figured this would be notable enough to show here.
DSP showed that no player input is needed to complete Wolverine’s first motorcycle section. Considering he’s the sort of guy this level of difficulty is made for, even he’s baffled that he didn’t need to do anything to clear the section.
The people who say the game is far too easy may have a point.
People will play this like “Fucking hey! I aced that bike segment first time!” all proud of their gaming skills when the reality is you did absolutely nothing, my brother.
One way of thinking says maybe that’s okay. Maybe people just want to have a chill time and win and not struggle. Maybe that’s fine.
But on the other hand, it’s utterly deceptive.
To me, this is a reflection of the entirety of modern capitalism. Appeal to everyone. Don’t exclude anyone. Provide an illusion of choice while giving everyone the exact same homogenised experience. Provide the appearance of agency while removing all actual control.
I don’t like it.
Many video games have a lot of tricks to make the player feel skilled, despite cards being stacked heavily in their favour. Take Uncharted: enemies in those games can’t shoot you for a second after you poke out of cover, so you can take a few shots without being immediately gunned down. The player is never informed of this. Or in the new Doom games, the lower end of the health bar is worth more than the upper end, so you’ll feel like you’re barely holding on even though you’ve still got some buffer room.
Doesn’t mean taking things to this level of absurdity is great or anything, but being “utterly deceptive” is what makes a lot of games fun.
Of course :)
Games by their very nature are not real and even the ones which don’t directly adapt to your success or failure will certainly make concessions to reality and intentional design decisions which make the game more fun.
Personally I think game design is an intriguing subject and some of the ideas developers come up with are absolute genius, like the doom health bar you mentioned. It ramps up the tension, but yet it’s still finite, and if you play terribly you will die.
That to me is the difference. Tell white lies to the player to boost their fun, yes, but don’t remove all consequence with fake infinite health, a bike that steers itself, and QTEs that auto-succeed no matter what you do.
A game you can only win is a game with no agency, and that’s hardly a game at all.
I noticed that straight away in Doom Eternal, really irritated me. What’s the point of having full health if 20% HP is actually 80% hp? Made the tension feel artificial because I knew I was never actually low HP, it was an illusion
I remember a little indie game predicated on this once. You were shown upcoming game state the player was in, and had to make choices so they’d get the maximum score without doing anything. I was a like Columns or Tetris like game, so you’d have to arrange the board so if they just dropped the pieces they’d get a combo.
Weirdly fun, interesting commentary.
I wonder if actually trying makes it more difficult. Does it actually let you crash into stuff and miss jumps, or does it just override your mistakes even harder?
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