• EA Exec: "Our games are too hard"
    128 replies, posted
If you think games today are even remotely hard try playing some of the old shit like Pirate's moon. Even exploiting AI glitches etc. wont guarantee you a win
By chance ive been playing doom and dat learning curve works like this: dont die, save frequently, make it to the exit Dodging enemies, gauging their strengths, its all intuitive, but the games are still really hard and unforgiving because they are ment to be
[QUOTE=froztshock;47087951]It's the funniest, strangest sinking feeling, to know that you're slowly slipping out of the "target audience" crosshair...[/QUOTE] The sudden realization that DarkSydePhil isn't exceptional, but the average.
[QUOTE=Raidyr;47088844]The sudden realization that DarkSydePhil isn't exceptional, but the average.[/QUOTE] Well, if EA's target audience is every human alive today, including people who never played so much as Pac-Man in their lives, that doesn't seem very far off actually.
[QUOTE=hexpunK;47088123]That's ridiculously optimistic and you're just setting yourself up for failure. You're basically restricting yourself to squeezing playtime out of a game to "make it feel worth it", as only a fraction of games on the market will provide anything close to $1/hour of gameplay. A game should be worth it if you enjoyed it, not based on how much you played it. I paid ~£18 for Transistor, it took me 5 hours to finish it. By your metric it wasn't worth £18, but the game was wonderful and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Don't use play time as an indicator of game quality or whatever, it's stupid. Well, unless the game is like an hour long and cost you $500.[/QUOTE] While I agree with your points on a personal level, so what if he takes a different way of judging what games are worth to him? If he believes the time spent playing the game should justify the money paid, so be it. It is not up to you to call it stupid and as you can see he never mentioned anything about judging the quality of the game.
Well, this thread is certainly conclusive evidence that people only read the title.
[QUOTE]"Our games are actually still too hard to learn," Hilleman said during during an on-stage interview with other developers. "The average player probably spends two hours to learn how to play the most basic game." "And asking for two hours of somebody's time--most of our customers, between their normal family lives...to find two contiguous hours to concentrate on learning how to play a video game is a big ask," he added.[/QUOTE] But learning how to play a game and getting better at it is part of the experience! It's not like learning the game means sitting down reading a manual, it means [I]playing the game[/I]. [QUOTE]"Every game is an RPG now," he said. "You wouldn't make a game without progression and levels and XP. And I think every game is going to be a social game...good ideas propagate."[/QUOTE] eugh
Even downloading a couple of emulators highlights how the difficulty of games has gotten easier over time
[QUOTE=_Axel;47088861]Well, if EA's target audience is every human alive today, including people who never played so much as Pac-Man in their lives, that doesn't seem very far off actually.[/QUOTE] That is the truth of our reality. DSP is the average person. He is the middle ground, the typical. Welcome to the nightmare of your new life I'm so sorry.
[QUOTE=Raidyr;47089084]That is the truth of our reality. DSP is the average person. He is the middle ground, the typical. Welcome to the nightmare of your new life I'm so sorry.[/QUOTE] One can remedy this (for ourselves at least) by not playing triple-A games that abide by this shit in the first place.
I love how most of the people in the thread don't bother to read the article and just decide to shit on EA I don't know where they got the two hours to learn a game statistic, but trying to get the learning curve lower is nothing but good, as long as they don't remove the need to learn by making a game that plays itself for you
[quote]"Every game is an RPG now," he said. "You wouldn't make a game without progression and levels and XP. [/quote] This is honestly the worst part to me.
Basically they want the Transformers of videogames, movies/games that don't care with establishing anything or demanding anything from the consumer.
[QUOTE=Marik Bentusi;47088261]Makes me wonder what that average player looks like. 'Cause I could completely understand that line of reasoning if they're trying to make the completely uninitiated play, say, a shooter with WASD, mouse controls and a reload key. I don't think my mom could even control the camera with the mouse until a few hours in.[/QUOTE] the thing is with averages is that it only takes one extreme to severely skew the results. see: DarkSydePhil
[QUOTE=abcpea;47089329]the thing is with averages is that it only takes one extreme to severely skew the results. see: DarkSydePhil[/QUOTE] Depends on how they "calculated" that average, maybe they just took the bellcurve.
There's a difference between being difficult and poorly designed, EA.
[QUOTE=Egevened;47088171][IMG]http://i.imgur.com/diuQfwk.jpg[/IMG][/QUOTE] While this has wrangled my jumbles all the way to hell and back, I kind of see a pattern of correlation between modern and retro games and their playerbases... Back when games were more linear purely because of tech limitations, developers added in hidden secrets, bonuses, easter eggs and such to make exploring the relatively limited scope of the game rewarding, which means a whole generation of gamers, such as me, grew up to be of the meticulous and surgically thorough kinds who sweep an area clean 100% before even thinking of moving on, whereas the not as meticulous neo-gamers who have been gracing the scene since the late 2000s have been more inclined to just let the story carry them, not caring too much for finding every nook and cranny (which pisses off so many people watching walkthroughs on YT it's funny). And I understand where they're coming from, even. Skulking around, trying to find every bit of hidden stuff may detract from the otherwise fluid progression of storytelling. But that people are now convinced my tendency to backtrack to make sure I didn't miss a secret stash or a reference/easter egg is considered a worrying sign of difficulty makes me sad. It's strange too... With the advent of truly huge, open-world environments, I find myself struggling to concentrate on enjoying the world, instead trying to segregate the region of the map I'm currently in as my "exploration zone", and trying to find everything in it. [QUOTE]Gotta activate all the quests, gotta unlock the level 85 container in the corner there (mental note: come back here once my lockpicking is level 85+), gotta defeat that currently overpowered camp of Deathclaws, gotta do this and that, oh FUCK, I forgot to check that door back there, gotta backtrack all the way![/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Fetret;47088980]While I agree with your points on a personal level, so what if he takes a different way of judging what games are worth to him? If he believes the time spent playing the game should justify the money paid, so be it. It is not up to you to call it stupid and as you can see he never mentioned anything about judging the quality of the game.[/QUOTE] I'm p. sure I'm allowed to call it stupid when I think it is a stupid metric of worth. Video games seem to be the only media where the consumers give a shit about how long they use it in relation to the cost. We don't do it for movies or music after all.
My favorite game, Morrowind, is my favorite partially because of how difficult it is. Once you master a game like that, you feel so accomplished. And you have tons of fun while learning it.
[QUOTE=Gmod4ever;47088766]Except that's not the case at all. I don't force myself to play games to "make them feel worth it." These hours I've put into games have just occurred naturally. Why the hell would I force myself to play games to "make them feel worth it"? If I have to force myself to play the game, then it obviously isn't that worth it. That's just a silly idea. I judge games on their entertainment value. That can be done in many ways - sandbox games like Farcry, Shadow of Mordor, and Fallout 3 just give a world to explore and do whatever you want, allowing for high play times. That is entertaining to me. Other games, like FTL and Killing Floor, have extreme replayability. That is entertaining to me. Does the narrative contribute? Of course it does. I paid $25 for Bioshock Infinite, and got 19 hours in it. Was it worth the $25 to me? Yes, because I really enjoyed the narrative. Would it have been worth $60 to me? Absolutely no way. I can in no way say that BSI would have been worth $60 to me. The issue with narrative is you can't quantify it. Note how I said "rule of thumb," not "Universal Law of the Worthiness of Games." It's a rough indicator. If I pay $60 for a game and could only tolerate to put 4 hours into over a span of 6 months, I can honestly say that the game was not worth the money to me. Likewise, if I paid $5 for a game, and put 16 hours into in one god-damn session (Terraria LAN with friends...), then I can say that the game was easily worth the money several times over. And similarly, I never said this is a metric of quality. Where did you get that from? I was talking about whether or not I regret spending the money on it. Whether or not I found it fun enough for the price I paid. Quality has nothing to do with that. I mean, look at Minecraft. It is far from a "quality" game in any sense of the word, yet I still have a few hundred hours in it. It entertained me immensely.[/QUOTE] To be honest if the game could only hold you for a fraction of the expected play time, it was probably not that great a game or just not your thing, so it's not going to be good value for money no matter how long you play it. Even with open world games I don't really think play time is anywhere near important in comparison to how much fun you have or how engaging it was. If the game is fun or interesting you'll naturally come to a higher play time, so the fun of the game was clearly more important to it being worth money than the time you were playing it. Sorry if it sounded like I was jumping on you for that, it wasn't meant to be an attack or anything, the wording just seemed off to me and felt like a point I disagreed with quite a bit that I see a lot.
[QUOTE=Amiga OS;47089440]Well done, that boiled my piss.[/QUOTE] Boiled? My piss is ionized.
My GOTY 2014 took 15 hours to beat and I paid $45 for it. Meanwhile I have 500 hours in F2P Warframe and regret every minute of it.
[QUOTE=Wizards Court;47088069]only thing that annoys me about this trend, is that it might end up polarizing gaming between both too little difficulty and too much, since on one side of the spectrum you got "SOCIAL GAMING IS THE FUTURE! :downs:" and the other you have folks who think "fun is not necessary :downs:" why can't companies use difficulty settings, its not like they're something new ffs.[/QUOTE] difficulty settings rarely do all that much, if a game is supposed to be hard, it has to be designed from the ground up right from the beginning to be that way and have all it's gameplay mechanics centered around this trait. Usually the difference in difficulty settings is broken or unpolished, due to the game being designed with only one difficulty mode in mind.
[QUOTE=Raidyr;47089690]My GOTY 2014 took 15 hours to beat and I paid $45 for it. Meanwhile I have 500 hours in F2P Warframe and regret every minute of it.[/QUOTE] "This game sucks but i keep playing it for some reason"
[QUOTE=Code3Response;47089740]"This game sucks but i keep playing it for some reason"[/QUOTE] "for some reason" it's free and I have friends???
[QUOTE=Raidyr;47089690]My GOTY 2014 took 15 hours to beat and I paid $45 for it. Meanwhile I have 500 hours in F2P Warframe and regret every minute of it.[/QUOTE] I totally know that feeling, I think most asset-reusal games are really terrible, they cause me to think "this is a waste of time" despite the fact that all video gaming isn't really productive. I guess other games just never made me think this. (but then again a life with absolutely no "time wasted" entertainment is usually bad)
[QUOTE=Greenen72;47089131]I love how most of the people in the thread don't bother to read the article and just decide to shit on EA I don't know where they got the two hours to learn a game statistic, but trying to get the learning curve lower is nothing but good, as long as they don't remove the need to learn by making a game that plays itself for you[/QUOTE] Well it kinda depends on what they mean by "learning the game". But no matter how smooth the learning curve is, it's going to take some time to learn. That's how learning work, you can't absorb everything you need to know in ten minutes. I don't see how that time could be significantly lowered without either making the game more shallow. The time it takes to learn a game isn't a matter of learning curve, it's a matter of skill ceiling.
Baffles me how these people get up in the morning, go to work, make games and so on, yet they [I]have no fucking clue whatsoever[/I] about what their audience wants.
Well what do they mean by learn? Like learn the controls? If so games like Mass Effect are already pretty simple. If they mean learn how to play a game in the best way it can possibly be played, then why would they want that? Part of the fun of a game should be in learning how to be good at it.
[QUOTE=just-a-boy;47089602]While this has wrangled my jumbles all the way to hell and back, I kind of see a pattern of correlation between modern and retro games and their playerbases... Back when games were more linear purely because of tech limitations, developers added in hidden secrets, bonuses, easter eggs and such to make exploring the relatively limited scope of the game rewarding, which means a whole generation of gamers, such as me, grew up to be of the meticulous and surgically thorough kinds who sweep an area clean 100% before even thinking of moving on, whereas the not as meticulous neo-gamers who have been gracing the scene since the late 2000s have been more inclined to just let the story carry them, not caring too much for finding every nook and cranny (which pisses off so many people watching walkthroughs on YT it's funny). And I understand where they're coming from, even. Skulking around, trying to find every bit of hidden stuff may detract from the otherwise fluid progression of storytelling. But that people are now convinced my tendency to backtrack to make sure I didn't miss a secret stash or a reference/easter egg is considered a worrying sign of difficulty makes me sad. It's strange too... With the advent of truly huge, open-world environments, I find myself struggling to concentrate on enjoying the world, instead trying to segregate the region of the map I'm currently in as my "exploration zone", and trying to find everything in it.[/QUOTE] what really saddens me, assuming this is real, is how he was insulted for being clever. :downs:
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