Does anyone remember when video games catered to the mediocre gamer as well as the "hard core" gamer? When you had different difficulty settings, and when you chose one you still got the full game "experience"? Examples that comes to mind are Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro, both action/adventure games for the Playstation. You chose your difficulty and played, not missing a single bit of content. The difficulty changed the damage you dealt and received, and that was pretty much it. Other forms of how different difficulty was handled were things like how the A.I. of enemies were dealt with; an easier difficulty setting meant that enemies were, generally, dumber. You could sneak up on them more easily, for instance (even if the game in question wasn't strictly a stealth-based game), or could fool them more easily, or you could watch as the enemy blundered into a problem, or whatever else.
It seems to me that this sort of allowance for the differing skill in players started to end when the Grand Theft Auto series was introduced to the Playstation 2, starting with Grand Theft Auto III. When it came out, the notion of different forms of difficulty in game-play was handled in a rather new manner--just racing through the storyline was comparably easier than doing what it took to get the secret items, things like the "hidden packages". To be sure, the difference in difficulty between running around, getting secret packages, and the main storyline was a marginal one, and at the time it was seen as little more than somewhat intriguing.
However, that has led to the way modern games handle such things--which is to say, not at all. Modern games rarely allow for the mediocre players, instead seeming to cater to the players who grasp concepts instantaneously, who can remember complex button combinations with ease. Let us take a look into the history of another genre of games, the R.P.G. genre which has as its arguable most famous example the Final Fantasy series. As a quick overview of the genre, the player ran around, killing things or completing quests and earning experience points. Once a certain number of experience points were accumulated, one gained a level. Typically, gaining levels also meant gaining points in certain "stats", such as strength, speed, and so on.
Early on, almost anything could be met if one were of sufficient "level"; if you couldn't beat this-or-that enemy, then you would wait a while, earn a lot of experience points, and then come back and try again. Once you reached the fabled "maximum level" (usually, but not always, level ninety-nine), you could rampage through most of the game without much fear of meeting an enemy who could stop you.
Then things started to change. Instead of having to merely wait a while and gain levels, you would have to also master certain skills (usually by putting some form of points into them, earned in similar fashions as one earned experience points); if you didn't know such-and-such skill, you couldn't defeat an enemy who was only weak to that skill, no matter your "level". You could be maximum level, but if you didn't have a specific skill, that level, and all it enhanced on your character(s), was nearly useless.
This was also seen as little more than somewhat intriguing. After all, all a player needed was, really, time, and they could have the skill mastered. Really, about all it did at first was add on more time to the playability of a game, which wasn't seen as a bad thing.
Things started to change further, however. In addition to needing to know what skill was going to be useful, one needed to have a sense of tactics. It was no longer a matter of having the patience to gain levels and master skills. R.P.G. games were evolving to need the player to have a sense of what skill to use, when, and for how long. It was no longer enough to know that <this> enemy was weak against <that> skill; now <this> enemy was weak to <that> skill, but only in certain circumstances--and what those circumstances were was often the result of specific things the player needed to do.
Another result in this change of perception toward difficulty is a change of perception. Where, once, games had said you did a good job and suggested that, next time, you might wish to try playing on a higher difficulty setting, now they seemingly taunt players. I refer to the rare game that even has a difficulty selection; these games usually have the easiest setting called "kid mode" or some similar, implying that the sort of player who needs this is little better than a small child. Early games that used this sort of label managed to get away with it--and at the same time, to insult players--by "suggesting" that the setting was best for young children, and/or those inexperienced in the game's genre (or video games in general).
Look at modern games, and you will see that it is the very, very rare video game that has a difficulty setting and allows a player, no matter the setting, full access to the "full experience". Look at the modern games, and you will find that the mediocre player is all but laughed at. After completing some video games, players who played on easier settings will be taunted and told that, if they wish to "prove themselves", they need to play on a higher setting.
Further, in the games that "hide" things--items, messages, whatever--upon completion they will be told that they didn't really get the "full experience" because they didn't get such-and-such items. It is becoming increasingly difficult, however, to obtain these items; many times, lately, some items can only be obtained once, in an all-or-nothing situation--and I for one increasingly find that items are hidden in such a way where you nearly literally have to know how to obtain them beforehand in order to obtain them.
In another post, I will mention the possible effects this sort of thing has on creating a "gaming community", but for now let me keep to the effect it has on the mediocre gamers. It makes the mediocre gamers feel like they are, somehow, inexplicably "less" of a gamer for not being able to obtain the "secrets", and what kind of a message does that send? Not a very good one, I say.
I think there needs to be a return to allowance for the mediocre gamers. I think that, while games catering to the "hard core" gamers are just fine, there also needs to be a selection of video games for the mediocre gamers that doesn't make those players feel insulted. Mediocre players shouldn't have to be relegated to the hand-held systems' effectively "dumbed-down" games because the "main" games were designed to be too difficult (and there is a major difference between "difficulty" and a "challenge", which I'll get to in another post).
That, I think, will only help the makers of video games. If they did that, if they published games that allowed for a scale of player skill, I believe that they would enjoy more of a following of players. As it stands right now, with all of the negative news about the various consoles, the mediocre gamers don't have much incentive to wade through the console-side nonsense. For every video game that offered a "full experience", no matter the player's skill, I believe that the publishers would find players in fact wading through the nonsense to play those games.
Unfortunately, however, I do not foresee such a thing in the near future. I can, however, hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment