Posted by hakkikonu 3 days ago
Please never do this. This deceptively looks smart to a game designer, but actual players read this like a book and then it feels cheap and massively unrewarding for them.
But then I noticed that the loot was entirely dynamic. I forget the exact items, but if you only use one grenade it will only generate one refill hidden around the next area. If you use all your resources though, the upcoming loot gets massively increased and you can usually get almost all of it back right away. I learned this partway through and completely changed my playstyle and really broke the immersion to see the game difficulty change in realtime. I reloaded a save and played differently, and the next area was filled with loot instead of empty. But when asking my friends what they thought, none of them noticed that the game was doing this, and they all thought it was well balanced.
On the other hand, some Mario games now will essentially have a "you are dying a lot, here is a star power up to help you out, or heres luigi to play the level for you" mechanic. For a super casual game, such a mechanic is great. Its optional. If you want to lock-in and beat the hard level, you can just not grab the powerup, or say no to the prompt. But if you are getting frustrated, you can skip the hard parts and fly through to the next level and get right back to having fun.
PvP involves sandbagging and a variety of fragile gimmick strategies. (Oh, and cheating. For slow enough turn-based games, players can cheat with a separate physical device, which can't be detected.)
The system can't measure skill level accurately against a player base that's actively antagonistic to such measurement, so of course it can't match players well on that basis.
Even abstract games of perfect information, like chess and Go, have this problem online.
You'd get the one guy on your server who was just in another league compared to everyone else, and it was so satisfying to get the kill on him. And sometimes, it would be you pubstomping.
Then again, back then I don't think people cared as much about winning and losing.
But what if you're a bottom 10% player? How non-sweaty is non-SBMM then? Is it not-sweaty to get absolutely demolished all the time even at your best?
Games and leagues where you're expected to try hard are entirely different. I'd say custom tiered PUG queues are much better than common huge pools, this way top players can filter people they're training and playing with. In the end I think I rather agree with the grandparent than not, communities typically feel more lively and diverse than blind ladders.
That's just a different way of saying some people like to play games where their opponent has no chance. So your "relaxation" comes entirely at the expense of others.
Single player campaigns are a better way to accomplish this because then you can do whatever you want as far as difficulty goes.
Or even blocks them, in games that have dynamic leveling. Oblivion is the ur-example, but I've ran across at least two more:
1. Been playing Tyranny and there are mentions in the faqs/forums that you should disable leveling of skills you don't use if you do the new game+ thing where there are no level caps.
2. And one that happened to me personally a year or two ago: was playing Grim Dawn and hit my character's incompetence ceiling. This is a gear based ARPG/Diablo clone so the solution is to get better gear. But you can't go back to an easier area to improve your gear because they're all auto scaled and every map is the same - too hard now - difficulty. So there goes the uninstall and the lost DLC sales...
Casual players giving up was a problem that no amount of shaming managed to fix ("haha skill issue, sucks to suck").
Worse though, if your game is deemed 'unfair' rather than just 'hard', then even the hardcore gamers will avoid it. That's enough to kill the business before you even start the next game.
Some studios pick the 'hardcore' market, especially once they've built a reputation and a following, but everyone else needs a more general appeal in order to stay in business.
City builders do this a lot where you often have lots of difficulty settings you can adjust to tailor the game to your preferred playstyle.
I’ll also say this: if you’re making a game and you add in a mechanic or mini-game that is not typical of the genre, make it optional or provide a way to skip it. Few things things in gaming piss me off more than a memory or Simon Says puzzle in an MMO or similar. If I wanted to play puzzle games, I’d be playing a puzzle game, not your game.
Trails games are even worse because there's tons of them who feel like they never gotten properly play tested. Killing a level 120 boss with a level 60 squad because you can delay the opponent's turn just isn't satisfying, especially when the boss is meant to be (narration-wise) so much stronger than you.
Seeing a massive stream of games that all surround the same 12 or so mechanics has been eye opening. The games range in duration from ~2 hours all the way to several days of content, although most premises seem to get old at around 4-6 hours.
At first I was doing research for my own game ideas, now I'm kind of mesmerized by the variety and the general relaxed atmosphere of these idle games.
Normal varies so much.
As a "cozy" gamer, I want the standard setting to be something I can play without having to switch my context to to the internet for help or a guide. This was one of many triumps of Baldur's Gate 3: the difficulty settings make sense in how they translate to gameplay, and the default is fun.
I think I disagree with your basic point, though what you say about normal vs. hard is funny. I'm fortunate enough to work with a UI/UX pro, and these things have right answers; they're incredibly obvious after they've been explained to you.
However, this article reminded me of this meme
Multiplayer FPS, strategy games, and sport games are still very enjoyable without these mechanisms.
i know there are problems with this approach, but games without a difficulty setting “feel” more like a game to me for whatever reason