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.
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