I never realized Mario is a metaphor for real life.
I am slowly recognizing what I don’t like about modern gaming.
Is it the lack of people recognizing how great you are and how much money you have to spend?
How about every dollar you spend a twitch streamer will be forced to say your name?
You good now?
Okay? I was before, but I am now, too, thanks.
Nintendo is way ahead of these guys. The last few mario games let you pick a character that can’t be hurt or killed. And if that’s too hard for you, they’ll even show you exactly how to play the level.
I can at least support baby mode for, like, extremely small kids and maybe co-op with that one person who’s never touched a video game in their life but wants to play along with the other three. You know, the kids are over at grandpa’s, and he wants to feel like he’s playing and having fun with them instead of just setting and forgetting them on the magic dopamine box, but he’s no good at it, so he takes the invincible character. I think that’s reasonable, inclusive game design.
What I take issue with is when baby mode drags down the difficulty of the rest of the game modes. For example, you as a game designer benchmark “normal mode” against “being literally invulnerable”, and so you now have to play hard mode to even vaguely feel any sort of tension.
I agree completely. Idk why they do it. They got filthy rich off kids 5-10 playing the shit out of NES games.
The way it works is this: The people catch hold of something, and make magic. It makes a ton of money, because people can recognize magic. Then other people with investment money get involved. Gradually, the magic oriented people are outnumbered, the fun of their average working day declines, and they leave or simply get shouldered into some niche somewhere by the unimaginable torrent of motivated people who have something else on their mind.
No one involved in Mario, Zelda, Metroid, or Contra has been anywhere near the design team at Nintendo for decades. These guys own the rights to call it “Mario,” but if they weren’t making games where you can turn Mario into an elephant, they could be just as happy making sweat pants with writing on the ass. And the magic is off somewhere else, doing its thing.
Mario Wonder both had a “baby mode” mechanic and yet also had some genuinely interesting and challenging levels.
Celeste is extremely difficult yet also has a baby mode feature.
Many games have a “tell me a story” difficulty level which is more or less the same idea.
Games having an easy difficulty without detracting from the game’s main challenge and balance is not a problem IMO.
Don’t tell Soulslike players that. They think that even the slightest concession to accessibility makes the game unplayable garbage, even if you choose not to use it.
For the love of God Gen Z is gonna kill us with sighs
That would certainly give me a sense of pride and accomplishment.
“Green Mario” because the kind of people who have these ideas should fear his true name.
Gr8 b8 m8
I r8 8/8
I’d go as far as to even implement a 1-Up mushroom cash-shop, $1 for five 1-Ups
Anon invents arcade cabinets
streamlining
you mean instead of playing the game, i could pay you to not play the game i’m playing instead?
sign me up
Back in the day games were hard (often in unfair ways) to stretch out the game, because there was only like 4 levels and if it was easy you’d be finished in a single afternoon.
Now games are thousands of hours long and they hold your hand every step of the way to make sure you actually see all that content; and then the majority of players quit after completing only about 1/4th of the total game.
This is probably why I love Soulslikes so fucking much. I grew up with the first kind, and have suffered long enough with the latter kind. Soulslikes are the perfect blend of new and old school design philosophy (when done right). Tough, but also not short. They don’t hold your hand, but they don’t exactly keep you entirely in the dark on how to play. They reward community action not just in the game with the message systems, but also because it doesn’t spoon-feed you everything, certain deeper ideas are discovered more from talking to other players who found things you missed; which is something we did back in the day before the internet.
So many comments about how it is meant to artificially extend gameplay, or motivate the player to continue.
Could it not be as simple as the game cartridge only holds 1MB of game data max, and restarting the level from 0 when you die uses less valuable storage space?
ITT we don’t to know to program
I know OP is joking (at least I hope he is), but it reminded me of this thread about Soulslikes:
https://old.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/oc1w7g/separating_difficulty_from_drudgery_or_why/
Time-wasting respawns/progress loss seems like a very blunt tool with which to motivate the player to keep playing. It’s some 1988 arcade coin-op shit that we really ought to leave in the past.
I think soulslikes are appealing to a certain type of player. Personally I love Dark Souls it’s my favorite game.
But I like playing with stakes. I remember stumbling around in the forest, down to my last scrap of health, with no more heals, desperately trying to reach the next bonfire. That for me is fun. Is it frustrating to lose your progress? Sure. But the only “penalty” is you have to try again or change your approach and try something else. And really, is being forced to replay a section inherently punishing? If the game itself is fun, you should still be having fun fighting and exploring even if you aren’t progressing.
It can be the only way to punish people in certain games.
If there’s no punishment for failure, there’s no reason to respect any dangers the game presents.
In Minecraft, what should happen if you walk north for an hour and die? If you respawn with your inventory, why not just do that again and die as a quick way to get back? Why even bother with equipment or food at that point? Suddenly, half the game mechanics have lost their meaning, and there’s a lot less to do for the player.If the punishment for failure is wasting time, then I’m just going to play something else.
Games are supposed to be enjoyable.
For millions of people, having to try again when you die IS enjoyable. Many people don’t like being treated like a baby and have everything handed to them, they want to earn it.
Being sent back to try again is not wasting time, its giving the player the opportunity to learn and grow.
Video games are the only medium where someone can be denied progress based on their skill. That is their major draw. If you don’t like this, you probably don’t like video games and I recommend you try movies and books instead of trying to turn video games into them.
Being sent back to try again is not wasting time, its giving the player the opportunity to learn and grow.
I think a large part of why so many people think that some games punish the player by wasting their time is because for lower skilled players (like myself), getting hit is a death sentence, and so we focus our efforts on not getting hit. But then, because we’re focusing more on not getting hit than we are hitting the enemy, the fight takes an eternity. And because the fight takes an eternity, the enemy has that many more opportunities to get a couple hits in, and now that 20 minutes that I’ve just spent dodging Lady Maria’s attacks have been wasted. I didn’t learn anything in that attempt, because I was busy trying not to get hit. It’s basically impossible to break out of that mindset on your own, because by default the game trains you to avoid getting hurt at all costs.
This is also why I love Sekiro so much. That instinct to not get hit can be expressed through deflecting. Deflections move the fight along just as much as attacks, and also I’m sitting right next to the boss so I’m able to get attacks in more easily without putting myself at risk. Altogether, this means boss fights don’t take an eternity.
Video games are the only medium where someone can be denied progress based on their skill. That is their major draw. If you don’t like this, you probably don’t like video games and I recommend you try movies and books instead of trying to turn video games into them.
This is an incredibly Fromsoft Fan attitude. There’s a reason you never hear people make these complaints about games like Dying Light or Mass Effect. Are most games just too movie-like for you?
It’s not quite the same though, souls still keeps the items you dropped, its just up to you to retrieve them.
You can’t claim you climbed a mountain, if each time you fell you just resumed from where you lost grip. Falling and reclimbing with renewed tenacity means that when you finally conquer the mountain, the view is all the more sweeter for the huge experience you’ve gained along the way.
You can’t claim you climbed a mountain, if each time you fell you just resumed from where you lost grip.
Well, good thing games are better than real life. Or they would be worthless.
You can’t claim you climbed a mountain, if each time you fell you just resumed from where you lost grip.
Sure you can; it’s called redpointing.
Time-wasting respawns/progress loss seems like a very blunt tool with which to motivate the player to keep playing.
Tried playing a game of tennis with my friends. 0, 15, 30, 40, Point. Then if you’re two scores ahead the game resets. Wtf! Why did the game reset? I was 30-40 and now I’m back to 0? I should be allowed to keep my 30 into the next game.
Now I’m being induced into playing more tennis! I hate this.
And tennis has so few maps! Almost everywhere I go is concrete. Very luck to find a clay court anywhere. You need to buy the DLC to find grass, and only if you’re really lucky.
Its repetitive. Its exhausting. The rules barely make sense. And the match-making is completely fucked. I’m either playing people I trounce or getting my ass handed to me almost every time I go to a court.
I think I’m going to try and pick up chess instead. Does anyone know how I can upgrade my pawns to queens, though?
It’s a very funny comment but also tennis is only the gameplay of tennis. People don’t play tennis because they Iike the story so much lmao
People don’t play dark souls for the story either. We are there for the gameplay.
Speak for yourself. I think many soulslikes have fascinating stories, and they’re wasted on players who don’t pay attention to them.
A game is something that has a goal within certain bounds/rules. You accept that when you play and tedium isn’t relivent except as maybe a thing you don’t like, just like you might not like how a piece feels or character looks or a particular rule.
A toy is something you play with for “fun”.
I think people that want a toy accidentally start playing a game then get upset that it isnt a toy.
Why can’t/shouldn’t a game be both? Plenty of games have easy modes and cheat consoles.
They CAN be, but they are not obligated to be.
