Play your PUPPY class!

Jeff's "Play your fucking class!" talk in regards to the class system in Evolve got me thinking about games with high skill ceilings. What do you do when a game's design is based on a player's ability to actually be good to fully enjoy an experience? Lots of people have tried the Souls series, but dropped due to their inability or refusal to learn the game's flow.

People like Jeff hate class based games because they force the player to play in a specific way. He's said that he doesn't like Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 for this reason.

Do games really have to be accessible to be good? Can't they require a high skill ceiling and demand more from the player in order to deliver a truly great experience?

I think Jeff's comment was more about multiplayer games and not something in regards to single player or difficulty leanings. Example, in Battlefield 4 if people playing Assault actually bothered to revive people...they are playing their class. If Snipers are up in people's grills, they are not playing their class. Basically, if you aren't worried about teamwork in a team based game then you need to go and play something else and stop ruining it for other people. I don't think skill or accessibility has anything to do with it.

In class based games like Dota 2 and Left 4 Dead a single person can ruin the game for the entire team if they don't play their class. You can't casually go in and mess around unless you're playing with your friends. Those games require a high skill ceiling and a huge amount of team work. It's not the type of thing you can pick up in a few hours of playtime.

It's the same thing with the Souls series. You can't go in blind and become a master of its mechanics in a few hours. To truly enjoy the game you need a whole lot of hours of playtime with your own build before you understand.

@golguin: You keep referring to Left 4 Dead as class based, but it isn't. All the human characters differences are is the skins and voice packs, I suppose the enemies can be slightly differently class based, but you are randomly selected as one whenever you spawn and no one expects you to be a team player when your are playing as them anyways.
Now I will agree people expect you to be a team player when on the human side, if you are abandoning the group or activating events before everyone is ready you'll be treated like a jerk. But it's not 'class' based as it were.
As far as your question goes, of course games don't have to be accessible to be good, but those that aren't will just obviously lose/not be for a certain segment of people.
But I don't see Valve or EA crying over the sales numbers of series like TF2 or Battlefield.

I have to admit, back in the day my self and a friend of mine would deliberately grief in L4D. It only took the two of us mot co-operating to ensure mission failure every time. Usually by blowing up fuel canisters, things like that. Not playing as a team in that game would generally lead to failure.

Aww, I thought this was going to be a thread where we picked what class of puppy we'd be.

Personally, in multiplayer games I prefer to feel I have a different skillset than some players, but in reality, this is just to compensate for the fact that I rarely excel when it comes to the primary skillset. Nevertheless, I think the answer lies in there somewhere. The key to making a multiplayer game that most people will enjoy is in making multiple ways for people to be good at it. People will generally only do things they can succeed at, and this allows the majority of people to feel skillful in some way or another.

WoW (or most MMOs) is a great example of this. There are great healers, great tanks, great DPSers, great crafters, and even great raid leaders. This allows that members of a group to each feel important and skillful without having the context of other players to compare against. Nevertheless, I agree with Jeff to the extent that not having flexibility to do what you feel like at a given time is what makes the difference between work and a game. The flip side of this coin is that if you make a game that allows everyone to feel adequate to their task, the very best at their role will actually become bored.

To sum it all up, nothing you do will please everyone, so there's no point in trying.

I don't think the point Jeff was getting at was to suggest there being anything wrong with the game. He was saying that the ideal way to play that game demands a social situation that doesn't fit his life very well. Just playing with random people is frequently going to be unsatisfying, what you really want is a regular group of like-minded people and he was saying he's not sure he'll find that. Sort of the opposite of what they're saying about couch co-op/competitive games. I think Crawl and Samurai Gunn and other such games look super cool, but I don't know 3 other people who would want to sit down and play stuff like that so there's no point getting them.

I hate people like that...

There are no classes in L4D.

Don't you really mean a high skill floor? A ceiling would be the limit to how well you could potentially play, a floor is the minimum required to play adequately.

I think accessibility really helps for commercial viability, it isn't a prerequisite for being good though. I'd call some masocore games good (like N), but man does that difficulty hurt their chances to sell well. I don't think necessarily Dark Souls is hard, it just requires patience and a willingness to learn. I

As for as the class stuff I think that's a different stylistic preference. I like class/role based systems but not everybody does. I actually feel like classes lower the skill floor in a game because it gives multiple ways a player can be good and can contribute.

it makes it less fun and more of a chore, especially when you have a bunch of internet anoms crying for your blood when you're just trying to play and enjoy yourself.

I can't tell if he was joking about the "play your fucking class" thing or not. The GB guys said in the past that they're never gonna act like that, so I assume it was a joke?

Yup! Grew out of it. IT was fun fora little while though.

@starvinggamer@zolroyce I'm talking about the infected vs humans. If you didn't know how to play your infected and how it worked in any given situation (infected matchup and stage position) then you would be a detriment to the team. There is no debating that. Hell, it used to cause huge arguments in the "mics vs no mics" debate with the general consensus being that randoms deserved to be kicked 100% of the time if they didn't have a mic.

@golguin: Sure, I'm just 99.9% sure that the reason Jeff doesn't like L4D has nothing to do with playing as the infected.

I was in the same boat as other people about L4D not being a class game, but I totally forgot there's an Infected vs Humans game mode. Barely played that mode.

I haven't listened to the Bombcast yet but I love class based games. I don't think having classes limits your playstyle very much - in fact I would say it's the opposite, you need a large selection of different classes for something like this to work, so you have a ton of choices in which playstyle you want to use. If you are not enjoying a certain style then change classes. It is quite a rigid design but defines the gameplay and structure more than a military shooter where you can run just around with an assault rifle or stand still with a sniper rifle. It's really satisfying to have all these different components coming together to win a game.

Not sure how having classes tie into the accessibility of a game though, there are many class based games which are very accessible. Using TF2 as an example, you have very clearly defined class roles, the names are descriptive and a new player will understand what kind of role they need to take to be successful. A soldier can shoot rockets and is a basic kind of infantry class - anyone will understand this. Moving into a more advanced level of play though, you have buffs that can help the team and rocket jumping to access higher areas, while at the highest level, rocket jumping can be used to cover huge distances quickly and ambush people.

I think there needs to be a balance between accessibility and high level tactics for any multiplayer game to be successful.

Then it's the zombies? What about Team Fortress 2?

It's the playing with other people part.

I don't remember Jeff being against playing with people. I remember when L4D came out he was just sick of zombies in games and he didn't like being forced to play in a specific way when he was on the Infected side.

In that very podcast he says something like, "If you're someone who has a group of friends that can set aside a block of time to play together great, but that's not me." That's the gist of it anyways.