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.
“Gameover is a failure of the game designer.”
I saw VideoganeDunkey’s video where supposedly you can press any of the buttons during QuickTime events, even wrong ones and they complete anyway.
At this point I can’t tell if that was a gag or for real
Probably for real considering you literally cannot fail those QTEs. Much like the motorcycle scene you can just put the controller down and the QTE completes on its own.
“I love it, ship it!”
Winning DMC2 by walking vibes XD
There could be a couple of reasons why this is the way it is:
- Lazy game design. Failure states have to be written, balancing has to be tested, if you did this right.
- Appealing to the broadest player base. If anyone can win, no one is excluded by skill issues (like game journalists who aren’t skilled)
- Crunch. Balancing and failure were supposed to be included but were cut due to releasing too easily.
With a popular IP like Wolverine I expect it to be appealing to the broadest player base which leads to lazy game design. Ultimately I think it’s a game that would rather be a movie.
Something I realized pertains to the first car crash.
It’s likely a LOT easier to animate if the devs don’t need to account for exactly how fast the player is slashing up tires. Plus, they don’t need magic tricks to account for a 1…N long stretch of road that accounts for however long the player needs to chase them down (eg, Uncharted 2’s fantastic train level)
So you can definitely see that laziness and a rushed development timeline would just shove out something that looks okay but has no actual gameplay because it’s a cinematic moment playing itself.
What’s a DSP?
Digital Signal Processing of course.
A self-absorbed streamer who sucks at every game he plays. Nearly all of the “This is how you don’t play” compilations are about him. The TIHYDP videos of his MGS playthroughs are particularly famous.
What about the 15 minute game unboxing video that has a fire alarm going off the entire time where he never even actually unboxes the game
Here’s the same from a not shit person:
These about DSP are recommend:
https://youtu.be/cKG7EXgOoTg
https://youtu.be/6dgOUqXqvLo
https://youtu.be/So7wLuuDiHA(In order of video age and length, newer and longer at the top).
Converted to Invidious links, plus added title and so on. No I’m not a bot, lol:
Flats tests if you can die in the motorcycle scene in Wolverine (3:53 mins) by Flats Clips on 17 Sep, 2026
These about DSP are recommend:
- The Eternal Downfall of DarksydePhil (Full Documentary) (3:41:59 hours) by Joon The King on 21 Sep, 2024
- DarkSydePhil: A Decade of Failure (2:10:11 hours) by Turkey Tom on 11 Nov, 2023
- DarksydePhil | Down the Rabbit Hole (30:52 mins) by Fredrik Knudsen on 5 June, 2017
Honestly, 30 minutes is all the time DSP really deserves.
No, that is honestly still too much time spent on DSP. If you don’t know who he is, I wouldn’t recommend wasting that time, you can’t get it refunded.
Thank you! I was, and still am, not in a good enough head space to take the time to do all that. You’ve done good, I appreciate you <3
You know, when people said “Modern games are like movies that you can play,” I don’t think they meant to emphasize the optional meaning of the word “can.”
Now the real challenge - try failing the segment while controlling him.
I wonder if you could just turn around and go the opposite way?
I don’t think that is rendered as one complete map, probably there is only a short buffer behind the MC.
Maybe, but why wouldn’t it be a whole map? I could see assets and entities despawning a certain distance behind the player, but tbh I’d have a hard time believing the entire level just unloads as you go through it.
I am not a dev and mine are only guesses, but once you have assets and entities disappearing, and the action doesn’t make use of any shortcut strategy, isn’t it simpler to turn the whole thing in a scripted sequence of some kind, like a QTE sequence?
The encounters also seem to be very “episodic” in nature, so the moments in between could serve as loading/deloading moments.
And it would prevent people from turning around and making the necessary design more complex.
I am one of the people who stubbornly select the hardest difficulty on any game after getting the basics out of the way. I still can see the value of offering a “difficulty level” that lets you simply enjoy the story without being bothered by anything that is considered “hardcore gaming”, such as the God Mode in the Hades games or similar things. That’s valid! Not everyone is playing games since their childhood.
But this is simply garbage. If it finishes without me using any input, then i could just watch it on youtube and not pay $$$ for it. It is a deceptive tactic to get you to pay for something that should be inherently interactive, while your decisions don’t matter in the slightest. It is like selling a movie as a game - a movie is fine if i want it, but gaming as a medium lives from the interactivity.
There’s hard mode, and then there’s hard mode.
Does hard mode uncap the enemy AI so that it can use all of its moves, and allow it to attack from offscreen so that you need to be more aware of positioning, like Ninja Gaiden? Does hard mode add additional objectives so that you need to interact with the levels more, like the Thief series? Does hard mode increase certain kinds of damage, so that you have to engage with the systems more, like alchemy in the Witcher series? These are ‘good’ hard modes, that make the game much more interesting.
Does hard mode simply make all the enemies spongier, so that everything just takes longer? Well, that’s a lot less interesting. Might as well play those games on ‘normal’.
A great example of spongier enemies with little additional difficulty is basically any Bethesda game, which is particularly bad with Oblivion and Fallout 3 since those two already have spongier enemies on average.
Also you should add AI just outright cheating to this as well, it’s not as common as the previous two but it’s still there with some games namely strategy games of the paradox variety. I particularly hate it with EU4 cause luvky nations can go die in a fucking hole, I want the achievements if I’m gonna do an ironman run but I don’t want the already busted great powers to be even more busted.
A lot of people have very intense opinions about game difficulty in every direction, but I think all of us would agree with that
I personally like my games being hard, making me think and make deliberate decisions between positives and negatives. But I would never invalidate someones experience by shitting on them for using a game mode that allows them to experience the story of the game without any barriers.
This garbage media offers the illusion of being a game. I wouldn’t be against it, if it were sold as such - there are a lot of FMV games out there that are worth their money. But if what you do doesn’t matter, it’s not a game anymore. It’s a glorified youtube video, and should be priced as such.
These devs clearly played the train mission in San Andreas and were left emotionally scarred.
I don’t understand why anyone would be scarred by that. All we had to do was follow the damn train.
Excellent exampl🤣
It wasn’t even that difficult! That meme had been circulating for years, but it only took me like three tries.
I figure it’s always a meme because half the people here were like six years old when they played it.
It wasnt necessarily the difficulty that got to people it was how daft it was. The train leaves your line of sight for like 3 seconds and its mission failed. Its a fucking train, its not going to turn down an alley or something.
The RC plane was by far the hardest part of that game.
strong agree
It wasn’t that it was difficult. It was that it was just random. And no, driving further to the right alone wasn’t the solution either.
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.
But on the other hand, it’s utterly deceptive.
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
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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?
Who or what is DSP and what game is this?
DarkSydePhil and the game is literally just “Wolverine”. DSP is notorious for being kind of a miserable person who, in the nearly 20 years he’s been making gaming content, has never learned how to play a video game.
DSP is notorious for being kind of a miserable person who, in the nearly 20 years he’s been making gaming content, has never learned how to play a video game.
I’ve never heard of him either but this is clearly false since he’s displaying full mastery of a game in the video we’re commenting on.
Thank you.
feels like we’ve shifted the opposite way of how games used to be. you used to not be able to beat a game on easy difficulty (twisted metal for example) now the games are so easy they beat themselves for the most part
There should be both, no? If some casual wants to play with his Marvel toys on the screen, they should be able to.
Ok, to be fair, this is one way-too-easy game in a general release cycle of really good hard ones. Let’s not stretch one bad point out to a huge trend.
This is what happens when you design games by quantifying everything into a number for a spreadsheet so a manager can read a report. Bet they did a playtest with their “target” audience aka non-gamers Sony wants to convince to buy a PlayStation for this game remember execs and shareholders only care about growing the player base. And some manager looked at the playstest numbers, noticed that many people couldn’t finish the section. And then ordered the team to make sure 90% of non-gamer playtesters can finish the game.
Did this start because of the Cuphead gaming journalist memes, where the person literally couldn’t even finish the tutorial because their hand-eye-coordination was just absolute shit and they couldn’t jump over literally the first obstacle?
Could’ve sworn there was an even earlier example of something similar with Doom 2016 where they played like they were just introduced to the concept of a video game. Like I know I play brutal doom and boomer shooters in general like an over hyped crackhead, I beat Boltgun at max difficulty with the clown vomit shader but that video was on the opposite side of the spectrum where they played like a toddler and got pissy about it.
execs and shareholders only care about growing the player
If this was true, the base version of the 6 year old console wouldn’t cost 650 and the pro 900 USD.
You should see the driving in 007 First Light. You just hold the accelerator and when you’re about to hit something “steer assist active” comes up on the screen and it just steers away from it automatically.
Wow, I didn’t know that. Those sections are just supposed to be moments that feel cool and stitch together other parts of the game, so they help pacing, but that game’s use of vehicles in general was pretty underwhelming.
spoiler
Like how they build up the entire game that you get to use this really fancy car in Q branch, and then it’s only used for a glorified turret sequence. It smelled a whole lot like the scene they wanted to make wouldn’t run well and had to be cut.
I don’t know what part of driving from point a to point b is cool but to each their own I guess. It just feels like filler to make the game feel longer than it actually is.
That game also had QTEs that auto complete and and decisions that don’t matter.
There was a car interstitial that was throwaway, but the parts I was talking about were one where you chased a plane and one where you ran a garbage truck through an alley like a tank, both of which are pretty on-brand.
Right, I remember those. I still don’t think that being on rails like that is fun or has any real value in a game other than to pad runtime. If there’s no need for player input, eats the point.
