Pet peeves and false assumptions about videogames.

   @NoelVeiga said:

Great point, great new perspective.   There's a bunch of new researchers (some of them way older than you may assume) that are actually starting to dip their toes into the field in the areas that are really interesting about videogames, but too much of the research money is still coming towards "does videogame violence harm children" stuff and ending up in researchers that don't understand the field they are studying. It does seem a waste (especially when it's done with taxpayer money) when the edgy new people are looking at using game design concept to make people follow basic rules, help them get better at stuff or just make better games and, in turn, improve the quality of an art form and culture in general. "

 games are just emperically  easier than they used to be. In New Super Mario Brothers, Mario has 3 hits to die instead of 2. In Zelda Link has quarter hearts instead of half hearts. In Hard Corps Rising, the characters take damage instead of having one hit kills. Almost every game on the shelf allows you to save after every level and usually many times in between. Heck, Nintendo has an option to play the game for you if you can't pass an obstacle. FPS games now let you just stand still in order to recover health instead of having to manage it. Final Fantasy allows you to spec your characters however you like and almost every single one of them is capable of both offensive and defensive capabilities. 
 
 These aren't "better game design" options, they were decisions that were made to keep gamers from losing because the focus of games has changed from challenge to "experience".
 
  Games don't evolve, but trends in game design do. It's simply counter productive for gamers to lose when a developer is trying to sell a "cinematic experience". It kills the pacing, it kills the tension, it kills the atmosphere, it makes the gamer pay attention to all the stuff they're not supposed to be paying attention to. It's like the ride breaking down in the middle of space mountain. "

"Hey, nice discussion going here. I like it. Thanks for being assertive but respectful and disagreeing politely, guys.  
 
OK, I can't answer to everything everybody said, so let me just quickly address the common things people are saying. 
 
"These things are just opinions you have". 
 
Well, sure, but then that's true of everything you think is true or false. I mean, whether or not women and men should be equal is a matter of opinion, but that doesn't mean both opinions are equally right. I was going for opinions that the Internet assumes as known facts that are indisputable but aren't really based on fact. 
 
"Games WERE harder, WTF are you talking about" 
 
Ok, that's the one that got to most people, so let me clarify what I'm saying here. 
 
Games were certainly harder to *play* more often than not, but they weren't designed to be harder to provide a higher level of challenge. Yes, we were kids and that made Buster's Hidden Treasure and Aladdin feel much harder than they really are (I bring them up because I played both recently on a nostalgic binge and... yeah, those games aren't difficult at all), and not every game was Contra or Megaman, but that's not the core of my argument here. 
  
What I'm saying is that there was never a concerted effort to make games challenge the player with unparalleled difficulty and there isn't an effort to make games stupidly easy. In fact, people with nostalgic views about this that think games were harder and more willingly challenging before have gone out and made games that are ridiculously hard like Super Meat Boy or Demon's Souls... and then proceeded to not put in all the coping mechanisms of old games, like cheats and easy early stages. 
 
A misconception is that all old games were harder, which is just not true. A misconception is that all games were harder on purpose, which is not true, many were just poorly designed or trying to hide a shamefully low amount of content. A misconception is that modern games are easier, which is not true, they are just more accessible, which is a different thing. A misconception is that modern hard games are channelling old games, which is not true, they are producing difficulty in different ways with different coping mechanisms and paths to improve, most of the time (Megaman 9 and 10 are exceptions to this, of course). 
 
 On this, there is one thing I want to address directly: 
 
@JazGalaxy said: 

well, again, I disagree with what you're saying.  I don't even think that this a thing that has multiple sides. As I've mentioned before and can do all night long, games are just emperically  easier than they used to be. In New Super Mario Brothers, Mario has 3 hits to die instead of 2. In Zelda Link has quarter hearts instead of half hearts. In Hard Corps Rising, the characters take damage instead of having one hit kills. Almost every game on the shelf allows you to save after every level and usually many times in between. Heck, Nintendo has an option to play the game for you if you can't pass an obstacle. FPS games now let you just stand still in order to recover health instead of having to manage it. Final Fantasy allows you to spec your characters however you like and almost every single one of them is capable of both offensive and defensive capabilities.  These aren't "better game design" options, they were decisions that were made to keep gamers from losing because the focus of games has changed from challenge to "experience".    

Those are all in fact game design decisions driven by how each successive game has changed. New SMB is actually a very hard game, with more going on and more opportunities to make a mistake than in World, let alone the first SMB, for instance. There can be multiple players onscreen, Koopas sometimes stop to dance and throw off your timing, you can now triple jump and backflip and do all sorts of new things that are required to make it past the stages. In many games, the added complexity ends up requiring more room for any one of them to go wrong and players still being able to make it to the end of the stage. 
 
It's different with rebounding health in FPSs. Health management was a bad design choice. It didn't let designers know how hard the encounters they were designing were going to be, because they never could know if the player was going into the fight with 100 health or 10, so they couldn't design the challenge to fit the situation. Is this fight going to be harder or easier than the next? Who knows, it depends on how much health they have! All they could do to control this is drop a bunch of medikits before a hard section to make sure you went in at full health, but that kills the suspense, because we all know that when you get tons of health something big is going to happen. Rebounding shields let designers control the pace of a game and design better situations more accurately. FPSs are not easier. I'm replaying Doom now and with modern FPS controls on a 360 that game is actually surprisingly easy. You can dodge enemy bullets. I mean, literally walk around them. You don't need to reload, so it's easy to just keep shooting at people with no tactics in mind. I'm playing on the second hardest level there and let me tell you, I'm dying less than on Halo on veteran. And I have save slots whenever I want, so I can do my own checkpoints whenever I want. 
 
@JazGalaxy said:

  Games don't evolve, but trends in game design do. It's simply counter productive for gamers to lose when a developer is trying to sell a "cinematic experience". It kills the pacing, it kills the tension, it kills the atmosphere, it makes the gamer pay attention to all the stuff they're not supposed to be paying attention to. It's like the ride breaking down in the middle of space mountain. "

That was also true back then. Games that were trying to sell a cinematic experience usually managed failure differently. In adventure games you often couldn't die, just get stuck. PC games would let you save at any point just by tapping a "quicksave" key, so in things like Half Life when you died you could reappear wherever you wanted and retry right away to keep the game going. The techniques designers that want an immersive experience that isn't too challenging use have changed sometimes, but that doesn't mean games have gotten easier as a general trend or that there weren't coping mechanisms provided for gamers in older design patterns. "

 - Long is good. Most players don't finish their games. Shorter games like Portal or Limbo prove that short games are a good thing, particularly if you have a big stack of unplayed or unfinished games, a wife, a dog, a job or something to do with your time other than grind the middle bits of yet another JRPG.     

@NoelVeiga: 
 
Also, if we're going to continue, I feel like we have to decide what constitutes a hard game. To say that Sup New Super Mario Brothers is hard makes me wonder what on earth you're talking about. I find that game to be almost unfailable and in no way in line with the difficulty of any of it's predecessors. 
 
My brother and I played it this christmas and I eneded up failing only a handfull of times. And, tehre's unlimited ocntinues with no penalty if THOSE aren't enough for you. 
 
The same christmas we were playing Legend of The Mystical Ninja for the SNES and finally beat it after TWENTY YEARS.

" I challenge you to go find me a 6 hour PSX game. "

Well, yet again, I compeltely disagree. To suggest that old gameplay styles are abandoned because they're inferior is just not getting game design.   

 
 
 
@JazGalaxy

let's take the Legend of Zelda for example since it's one fo my favorite games.  In TLOZ, Link will frequently take hits and die. Therefore, it is necessary for link to purchase items that will allow him to live longer. Shield, hearts, potions, etc. In order to buy things, he has to have money. This encourages him to solve puzzles, explore dungeons, and engage monsters in order to make money to buy things with. This encourages interaction wtih teh gaem world and play.In later TLOZ games, link is much less likely to take damage, and when he defeats an enemy, he is reqarded with more health htan he can carry.This means he no longer has to buy health powerups to keep going. This means he no longer has to sovle puzzles, explore orengage enemies to make money. This means eh interacts less with the gameworld and the player has less of a reason to play the game. This isn't better game design, it's broken game design.  

In response to your comment about recharging health and fps games, managing health was NOT bad game design. It's game design that isn't trendy. It will come back into fashion soon enough because developers will realize everything they threw away when they got rid of the system.   

"

@NoelVeiga: 
 
Also, if we're going to continue, I feel like we have to decide what constitutes a hard game. To say that Sup New Super Mario Brothers is hard makes me wonder what on earth you're talking about. I find that game to be almost unfailable and in no way in line with the difficulty of any of it's predecessors. 
 
My brother and I played it this christmas and I eneded up failing only a handfull of times. And, tehre's unlimited ocntinues with no penalty if THOSE aren't enough for you. 
 
The same christmas we were playing Legend of The Mystical Ninja for the SNES and finally beat it after TWENTY YEARS.

"

Old Sonic was worth full price for the music alone.

 - Games are shorter now.

 Monkey Island is two hours long, Sonic games were what? One hour?

 - Long is good.

  - Games are easier now. Yeah... no. Lucasarts games had no death.

 games came with cheats on them.

 but for every Megaman

Hard is good. I've always wondered where this comes from. 

Console games are "dumbed down" when compared to PC games. 

(against Microsoft's best efforts. I mean, no default wireless support? Really?) 

Huh? I am using my wireless Xbox360 controller on PC just fine.

Keyboard and mouse beats controllers for FPSs. No they don't.

When it comes to precision, the mouse beats a gamepad any time. Its not even much of an argument, it can be pretty much proven by a quick look at the technical specs. Keyboard on the other side loses against a gamepad almost any time, as it lacks analog triggers, analog sticks, comfortable button placement, etc. It has more keys then a gamepad, but thats the only advantage it has. 
 
But of course precision isn't everything, I prefer comfortably leaned back gameplay any day of the week over mouse/keyboard, that doesn't stop mouse/keyboard being clearly superior in high speed FPS like Quake.

Maybe you're just bad at videogames? Also, yes, It has A LOT to do with nostalgia.

" @NoelVeiga said: 

 - Games are shorter now.

Shorter then their predecessors. An FPS with four hour single player campaign wouldn't have gained much friends back in the day.    

You will beat neither of those games in that time without a walkthrough or without plenty of prior training. 

Nobody is really saying "long is good", what people are complaining about are inconclusive, cliffhanger endings to unsatisfying single player campaigns. A game doesn't need to be long to feel complete, but an game that feels incomplete will certainly fall short.  

Yeah, except back when LucasArts started with that it was something new, a heck of a lot of other adventure games had death. Today? You have no death in all adventure games. Instead of nine verbs, you have one. Your inventory never contains more then five items and if that isn't enough there is a build in hint system. Old adventure where far harder then any modern one and of course you didn't have the Internet to just download a walk through.  

Simple truth, take good PC flightsim and find me anything that even gets close on consoles.  

When it comes to precision, the mouse beats a gamepad any time. Its not even much of an argument, it can be pretty much proven by a quick look at the technical specs. Keyboard on the other side loses against a gamepad almost any time, as it lacks analog triggers, analog sticks, comfortable button placement, etc. It has more keys then a gamepad, but thats the only advantage it has. 
 
But of course precision isn't everything, I prefer comfortably leaned back gameplay any day of the week over mouse/keyboard, that doesn't stop mouse/keyboard being clearly superior in high speed FPS like Quake. 

" @Icemael: Second, yes, I'm comparing them to other games, but once the score is set, shouldn't it be set for future games that remain the same? After all, if Mega Man X2 is the same as Mega Man X (I love a game that comes programmed with variables in it), then shouldn't Mega Man X2 hover around the same score as Mega Man X? Granted, opinions are subjective, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't treat them in objective ways. To me, it just seems off to say that a game is bad because it's exactly the same as a game you'll admit to loving. "

 Yeah, but we did have walkthroughs, didn't we? At worst the month after release, on the next issue of all magazines, and the Internet isn't that new, I had access to online FAQs as early as 96.      

 Come on. Not only did I already acknowledge that there are genres that PCs are better suited for due to their control scheme, but also flight simulators are all but dead in the water on the PC, too.

 Only bundles that include a special wireless receiver can be used on PCs. Why this is not included with all controllers and why controllers don't just use bluetooth is beyond me. 

" @Icemael: Second, if you gave the first Tekken five stars, I'm going to assume that you didn't really find any major flaws in it "

" I'd acknowledge that the second game is better, but isn't it preferable to give it a better score, rather than lower the score of the other game?"

" @Icemael:   Wait, why should my opinion of another game directly affect my opinion of the first, at least in the way you're describing it? I'd acknowledge that the second game is better, but isn't it preferable to give it a better score, rather than lower the score of the other game?

Again, I looked up a video playthrough of Quake 2 online to see if your statement is right. You know how long that is? 2 hours. 2 hours of video. Granted, with no backtracking and no loading screens and the guy is very good. But still, go do Halo in two hours, or Call of Duty. In fact, I found one for MW2 and it was almost three times longer (no loading screens, but the guy is far worse at it. Still, 6 hours is what it takes).
 

based on the OP the author must be about 16 years old because i wouldn't call any of those misconceptions.

" @NoelVeiga said:

Again, I looked up a video playthrough of Quake 2 online to see if your statement is right. You know how long that is? 2 hours. 2 hours of video. Granted, with no backtracking and no loading screens and the guy is very good. But still, go do Halo in two hours, or Call of Duty. In fact, I found one for MW2 and it was almost three times longer (no loading screens, but the guy is far worse at it. Still, 6 hours is what it takes).
 

Quick nitpick here. online video play-throughs are a very poor indicator of how long it takes for someone to get finish a game the first time through. On the slower side, you can find a casual, laid back, let's play blank. On the other hand, you can find a speed-run put together by many, very dedicated fans of a game who have spent hundreds of hours finding weird ways to get through a campaign as quickly as possible.  I played through Quake 2 again about six months ago, and while I didn't measure the time it took, it's not anywhere near a two hour experience. I'd say I got at least a good eight to ten hours out of it, and I'm not a slouch when it comes to PC first person shooters. "

@Grumbel:  I think that I may have explained that away in my other response. However, for the aging thing, I'll just say that people were ignoring flaws that were present in those games in the first place (Earthbound Zero had too much grinding, exploring Zebes in Metroid was pretty much trial and error, etc.). "

" based on the OP the author must be about 16 years old because i wouldn't call any of those misconceptions. "

" @NoelVeiga said:    

 Yeah, but we did have walkthroughs, didn't we? At worst the month after release, on the next issue of all magazines, and the Internet isn't that new, I had access to online FAQs as early as 96.      

Yeah, a "month after release", which is quite a different thing then 30 seconds after typing the game name into Google. Today you can finish almost all games without Internet help in like three days, back then you often couldn't even beat it after having a month of trial and error. Remember all those rumors about "Shen Long" and whatever? Those managed to spread and survive for a long time because nobody really knew the answer to the question, there was no Youtube and GameFAQs that would tell you the last secret of game. Iif you had bad luck, you might have missed the magazine with the walkthrough or they might have never printed one for a less popular game.

Yes, but they used to be a regular PC game genre, not some exotic niche thing that has almost died out, which is kind of the point, todays PC games are mainly console games that got ported to the PC, not PC games developed for PC audiences. Real PC games still happen, Stalker, DCS Black Shark (thats a flightsim), ArmA II, The Void and whatever, they happen to be mostly developed by Eastern European developers and they are frequently far more complicated then anything you'll find on consoles.
 
How many PC games can you name that moved over to consoles and got more complex in the process? Probably not many, but there are counterless examples of games that got drastically simplified when making the switch to consoles.  
 
All that said, one could argue that the simplification of PC games began quite some years prior to consoles becoming so dominant.  

" @Video_Game_King said:

@Grumbel:  I think that I may have explained that away in my other response. However, for the aging thing, I'll just say that people were ignoring flaws that were present in those games in the first place (Earthbound Zero had too much grinding, exploring Zebes in Metroid was pretty much trial and error, etc.). "

Yes, but you don't know that its a flaw until you have seen it done a better way, which in some cases can take many many years. I am sure many of todays highly polished AAA games will look like baby toys when we have smell-o-vision, 3D helmets, motion control and full body force feedback. "

No thanks for smell-o-vision...   Because what we'll be smelling the most is blood of all kinds. "

I dont know if this is really a pet peeve, but people who assume games like Final Fantasy and other JRPG's are liked by everyone and if you dont like them, you shouldnt play videogames

" @JazGalaxy said:

Well, yet again, I compeltely disagree. To suggest that old gameplay styles are abandoned because they're inferior is just not getting game design.   

 
Yet that is not what I'm arguing. I'm arguing that old gameplay styles changed as the content changed. We had three lives and three continues because we were working from the framework of a coin-operated industry. That wasn't bad design, it was appropriate to the context and the content, but as the environment changed and games became endlessly replayable for a flat fee, so did the way to control failure and the concept of lives and continues fell by the wayside. 
 
That is different than being popular or trendy, though. You are right, WWII games are not trendy right now, but that doesn't make Company of Heroes worse. The fact that Warcraft 1 wouldn't let you select multiple units but Warcraft 2 did, though, is a design change based on improvements on technology and gameplay design. Does that mean that Warcraft 1 was a better game because it was harder to put together an attack?

 
 
 
@JazGalaxy

said:

let's take the Legend of Zelda for example since it's one fo my favorite games.  In TLOZ, Link will frequently take hits and die. Therefore, it is necessary for link to purchase items that will allow him to live longer. Shield, hearts, potions, etc. In order to buy things, he has to have money. This encourages him to solve puzzles, explore dungeons, and engage monsters in order to make money to buy things with. This encourages interaction wtih teh gaem world and play.In later TLOZ games, link is much less likely to take damage, and when he defeats an enemy, he is reqarded with more health htan he can carry.This means he no longer has to buy health powerups to keep going. This means he no longer has to sovle puzzles, explore orengage enemies to make money. This means eh interacts less with the gameworld and the player has less of a reason to play the game. This isn't better game design, it's broken game design.  

 
Ok, yeah, that's a great example, let's go with it. Why did TLOZ need to cause more damage and restrict health? What was it addressing with that? 
 
Well, size, obviously. It was a game with a very small map 
 
http://www.zelda-infinite.com/games/zelda1/overworld.gif 
 
Compare that with A Link to the Past, let alone Wind Waker or any other 3D Zeldas:  
 
http://www.playthenes.com/images/random/zelda3_overworld.jpg  
and the dark world 
 http://zs.ffshrine.org/link-to-the-past/maps/dark_world.png 
 
I've looked up speedruns. If you know what to do in TLOZ apparently you can breeze through it in 35 minutes. Ocarina of Time was 100 minutes (LTTP is unreliable, because it can be glitched to completion, so you get speedruns of five minutes out there). 
 
That's three times shorter. Sure, it could take you longer to do TLOZ on the first run than Ocarina of Time. There's a good reason for that. The design of LTTP is reacting to the memory limitations of the NES by extending its limited assets for longer. I have a hard time arguing that games were better because they needed to fit in two megs, or that repetition and multiple deaths (or mulitple runs to the shop to buy health) make a game better than more assets, video, audio, a larger expanse of ground or more detailed environments. I don't like the argument that because gamers had a harder time finding their way around the game they were more engaged, either, especially when the game was certifiably shorter, smaller and less complex.  
 
The money issue is a different thing, though. Zelda games have always had a problem with their reward structure there. Money is grindable in Zelda (already in TLOZ, if I remember correctly), which means it's devaluated as a reward because you can grind it when you need it and it can max out, so it can become disposable. If anything, that's a legacy issue with games rewarding you with "score" not carrying over well to the RPG environment where you use money to buy stuff.  
 
Modern RPGs have better economy, so money rolls out at a reasonable pace to let you buy some stuff or decide between putting all your cash towards an expensive good item or save it for multiple weaker things to keep all your party on the same level. It's not like modern games have gotten worse at managing that at all.
 
@JazGalaxy said:

In response to your comment about recharging health and fps games, managing health was NOT bad game design. It's game design that isn't trendy. It will come back into fashion soon enough because developers will realize everything they threw away when they got rid of the system.   

Sorry, but you'll have to explain this better. How was it not bad game design? I've put forth my reasons for why it was: it meant the difficulty was unpredictable, so games couldn't be properly paced and balanced. It meant that you needed to drop tons of health before hard parts, so players knew the set pieces were coming when they saw all the medikits. It meant that barely making it past a tough section (which is fun and exhilarating, because it feels like you've accomplished something hard) often was worthless because you didn't have enough health to make it past the next easy section. It meant that quicksaving was a must, which went too far in the other direction and turned games into failure-less trial and error.  So what's the argument then? What are the advantages that trump those disadvantages? How are those disadvantages not disadvantages?   I mean, I feel the onus on proving this is on you, here. I'm siding with the way most FPS designers think. It's not the only way to do it (Left 4 Dead, for instance, doesn't control your health level, but it controls your medikit drops and the amount of enemies, so it has its own clever tools to control pacing) but it's a good way to do it, and if the choice is between Doom's plain scripted health pickups versus rebounding health, I'd argue that one option works better and offers more design options than the other. "

what your saying makes absolutely no sense.  The way you're talking about these games makes me think you've never really played them, which makes me think you're young.  If that's the case, then just listen: There's a thing here you're missing. Everyone else has commented on it and I'm commenting on it. It's probably something you'll never understand the way I'll never really understand what it was like to sit next to a radio and hear a radio drama. I can try and listen to one now, but without the context I'll just never understand.  You can't go back and look up a speed run and make sense out of these games because what was fun about them can't be communicated though a speed run, and what is lost from games nowadays can't be communicated in a youtube video. "

" @NoelVeiga: Then what you're saying is utterly baffling.  When you make comments like "the reason games made the decisions they made is because they were influenced by arcades" or "games used money as a substitute for score" makes it sound like your knowledge of games of that era isn't all that high...  The games industry is just as, if not more, influenced by pen and paper role playing games and fantasy novels than it is by arcade units. WHen Richard Garriot was in his room as a teenager banging out Alkalabeth, he wasn't looking at coin op arcade units to see what decisions to make, he was looking at Gary Gygax and Dungeons and Dragons. And Gygax was looking at strategy war games and war games were looking at board games.  See, "gaming" is a concept that has existed for hundreds if not thousands of years.   I honestly suggest you read this book    http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-History-Video-Games-Pokemon--/dp/0761536434/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1300493621&sr=8-2  it's an incredibly fun read that is exhaustive in it's information about the origins of the game industry and why things are the way they are. Frequently the stories are related from the actual creators of the games themselves. I sat down to read it between classes in my college library and wound up reading the entire thing in one hours long sitting.  "

I hate it when people say "my pet- peeve is this", as if anyone gives a shit. 
 
And pet-peeve as a word sounds fucking retarded.

  I'll give you this, though. If you bought a lesser known game and there was no walkthrough you were screwed. 

 I used to have an analogue stick with two buttons on it for flight sims, and I would brag about it and secretly consider it a bit of a waste of money, which doesn't reek of complexity from where I stand.

 And games getting simplified across platforms... again, hard to measure.

We are going a bit in circles here. Smaller circles, but still.  

@Grumbel said:

Yeah, and thats kind of the point. Back then failure was an option, beating a game was an accomplishment, not guaranteed. Today on the other side success is a near certainty and games provide plenty of savepoints and checkpoints, infinite continues and rechargable health to make sure of that.   

 I find it hard to argue against that modern games are a lot easier then older stuff in their default difficulty setting. 

There is hardly ever any real thinking required. Puzzles have become extremely basic if they exist at all and there is really no need for planing or acting carefully. Now thats not to say every old game required you to be a genius, but even a simple games such as Doom required you to look at a map to figure out where you have to go.

Not really, just look at game series that got ported over. Is Oblivion more complex then Morrowind? Dragon Age then Baldurs Gate? Fallout 3 then Fallout 2? Invisible War then DeusEx?

" Tons, like "if a series is staying the same, then it's getting worse" or...no, that's the big one. "

Whoa, whoa. Who said anything about "default difficulty setting"? How is that a factor? You're telling me that difficulty settings don't count?   

Doom only required a map because it was very poorly designed (half the maps were symmetrical) and it only had a few textures to work with, so everything looked identical. Modern games often have just as complex layouts, if not a completely open world, they just have more recognizable landmarks that you can use to find your way around the place.  

 I just keep finding that your claims are not factual.       

This? This kind of "games were harder when I was a kid and they are all casual crap now and they are all dumbed down consolified shite"? It's hurting gaming. I'd like it to stop.