From Tateru Nino’s blog:
Sorry, Portal. For nearly a half hour, you asked for wit and ingenuity. Then right near the end you started asking for reflexes. Sorry, I don’t actually have any of those.
Guess I won’t be able to finish the story. A shame.
Switching metaphor or required skillset half-way through a game (or story, or application, or whatever media experience imho) seems like an excellent way to loose audience.
Oh, I disagree totally. Portal asks for the same thing throughout: that you learn its rules. To begin with, that looks like wit and ingenuity; by the end, when it demands reflexes, they should be reflexes that you’ve exercised to get to that point. It’s telling that it’s a game made of 19 tutorial levels, and then an extended outro which requires you put skills to use outside said tutorial levels.
I know it’s not for everybody, but I think Portal’s a game that builds “developing a skilleet throughout” into it remarkably well. The developers’ commentaries on how they made sure every room taught new skills - but only ever required _one_ new skill at a time - is really illustrative of this. It’s a shame Tateru didn’t get on with it, but I don’t think it’s a good example of something that has a sea-change at all.
One telling thing about Portal: it teaches you the mechanics specific to its gameworld very well. But it doesn’t do much to teach you twinstick/mouselook control; if you can’t do that, the things it’s teaching you are harder. The crazy-reflex-jump-puzzle towards the end demands little ingenuity but maximum reflex skill, and is perhaps the specific room Tateru failed on. I can sympathize with the control-demands of the genre, but not Portal uniquely.
That’s a great example of how much today’s players REQUIRE games that area easy to play.
If I think to the ol’ generation of games, they were HARD. Really hard. Quite impossible, in some situations. But still, they were played. And FUN. “Hard” was *part* of the game: you *have to* grow skills to get past some situations.
Sometimes I wonder if the cause is in the game industry or in the growing number of people playing it. I bet on the second.
Also, I see myself today, with no too much time to play: I usually choose games that I’m already proficient with or games that doesn’t require much thought. Sure, I don’t play them for long (30 min max) but still… I’ll try to avoid “hardness frustration”.
For me it was a change in skillset. For the first 17 test chambers I didn’t need speed, or reflexes - except for one jump.
I was able to observe, assess, think and stroll leisurely through each chamber, up until the last part of chamber 18 - at which point I needed reflexes that the game had not required of me up to that point.
If it *had* required them of me earlier, I’d have had to bail on it earlier - I’m simply not able to respond with speed and precision - which is why I liked HL2, CS, and Bioshock - I could always substitute my brains for my wayward muscles. No reflexes at all required to do well - if you’re using the old noodle.
I suppose it’s largely my own fault for perceiving the game as a 3D Puzzler. I’m just a bit disappointed at getting most of the way through before I realized my mistake, and that I won’t be able to finish it.
And yes, I *like* hard games. The harder they make me observe, assess, think and plan the better I like it. What my body lacks is speed, and no amount of practice, unfortunately, is going to fix that.
Brains, not fingers. :)
I’m not saying that the number of games for the finger-jockeys should be reduced - everyone wants something different out of their gaming - but it’s nice to know in advance if I need better than my granny fingers to finish it. :)
I think that there are different types of hardness. :P
For example, a Godlike Unreal Tournament duel for me is “mind free”, while for others is “wtf? I can barely see him! let’s try…”. I like that kind of hardness in that kind of game…
In other moments, I like strategic sims… i just finished Warhammer on the DS, a turn based strategy game. And I love playing Civilization. I like that kind of hardness too.
But, for example, give me a XBox, a Pad and a FPS, and I’m frustrated, since I’m unable to move well without a mouse in an FPS. Another kind of hardness, related to the learning process.
That’s an interesting point.
Now you got me thinking how many games I know that have some kind of in-game style change.
The first example is arcade mode games, where multiple games approaches are stuffed inside a “single” game. That’s quite common on some coinups. I remember a Star Wars game here that was first a space starfighter sim, then a lightsaber fight, then an FPS… aaargh.
But also, I think about Wario Smooth Moves for Wii, and I think that in those context the switching hardness must be softened with simpler games.
But… now I HAVE to play Portal to understand what you’re saying Tateru Nino and to think about it. :P
What an interesting and stimulating conversation we had here, and what a lousy bloglord I am for not having participated in it :-/
Anyway, my point here was very much in the direction that Folletto explored in the last comment: I agree with Tateru when he says that it is nice to know in advance “what’ll be expected of you” during the game.
It’s much like a novel: when the narration starts a contract is made with the reader - you trust me, I’ll take you to a nice journey.
At first I thought this to be a problem of genre: I for example love games like FPS, Tetris, space combat simulators and all massive multiplayer games; on the other hand I don’t like turn based, strategy and platform games. But here the problem is subtler.
Now I actually believe the skillset issue Tateru’s talking about is more understandable if compared not to the genre of a novel, but to the language it is written into: language (together with sheer length and plot) is the main gauge of a book’s complexity. To fully enjoy a novel it must be written in a language I can master: I, for example, even enjoying philosophy in general, if confronted with an essay written in XIII’s century Italian may be able to read it, but would be really painful and hardly enjoyable because of a) the form of the language, so different from contemporary Italian and b) the topic and cultural background, since I’m not familiar at all with dark ages philosophy; it just requires skills that I don’t have and that are too far out of my reach.