I wrote previously why you should not listen to the hype, when it comes to video games. Well, yet another excellent and rather infamous example has appeared recently: No Man's Sky.
Like with Evolve, this one was also highly anticipated and extremely hyped. However, No Man's Sky is arguably an even more blatant example because of all the broken promises made by the hype. At least with Evolve not many promises were made that were then broken or left out of the game; it simply turned out that what sounded like a great idea wasn't all that great after all; it just didn't work.
No Man's Sky, however, is more blatant than that. The pre-release material, teaser trailers and project leader interviews all promised a large bunch of features that were not in the final version of the game after all.
For example, teaser trailers were highly scripted animations that showed things that are not in the final game. These include things like the ability to fly above the surface of planets (in the actual game you can only land from orbit in a scripted sequence; you can't fly over the surface), gigantic space battles with factions and fleet warping in to join the fight (neither of which are in the actual game; moreover, the huge destroyer ships do not even move in the game), herd behavior including things like stampedes and animals felling down trees, sand planets with gigantic sandworms, and mysterious teleportation devices on the surface of some planets (again, none of which appear in the actual game).
Moreover, interviews with the project leader hinted at many features that, once again, do not appear in the game. Such as the game being a massively online multiplayer game, where people could encounter each other. Or having a wide variety of available space ships for different purposes. Or factions that the player can join, or fight against. It's not a multiplayer game, and people cannot encounter each other. And there is only one type of ship. And there are no factions.
And that's just scratching the surface. The game has been given the moniker "No Man's Lies" because of all that.
The amount and severity of broken promises and false advertisement was in fact so bad that several distributors (including Steam, Amazon and Sony) offered a special refund policy for this game.
Friday, September 16, 2016
Thursday, September 15, 2016
Difficulty levels in video games. Which one to choose?
While I have been playing video games since the early 1980's, the question of difficulty levels didn't really come up until I bought my first PC in the mid 90's. Many PC games from the time (one of the most notorious examples being Doom) had difficulty levels to choose from.
For a quite long time I had the principle that I would always, always play with the hardest difficulty. After all, I paid a hefty sum for a video game (especially since back then I was just a university student with a bugger-all income), which made it quite an expensive commodity, and I wanted it to last for as long as possible. I hated games that were too short, especially if they were full priced, or even nearly full priced.
With some games choosing the hardest difficulty actually made a lot of sense because it was not artificial difficulty. For example, some point&click games of the time had (usually two) "difficulty" levels, which meant in practice that on the "harder" level there were more puzzles, and some puzzles might be a bit more complex, or involved more steps. Which was absolutely perfect for me. I would have hated playing those games with less or easier puzzles.
Back in those days I was also more invested in beating games on the harder difficulty levels, even when they were at least approaching artificial difficulty. With some games it truly made them more challenging in an enjoyable manner. For example, I remember Midtown Madness having difficulty levels, and the harder levels meant that you were racing against different, more powerful cars, than the easier levels.
By the time I played Half-Life 2, I still had this mentality in full force, and I played it on its hardest difficulty. It was perhaps this one that finally made me lose that principle (or, at the very least, it was one of the last games I ever played on hardest difficulty due to wanting the game to last longer and be more challenging.) In this game the difficulty really is quite artificial, and borderline makes the game only frustrating rather than challenging.
My mindset has changed quite a lot from those times. I have become a huge consumer of video games, and I purchase tons of them. While I enjoy a very long game (those that take over 50 hours to play through) from time to time, if really well made, I prefer a video game to be enjoyable rather than it lasting as long as possible. I don't mind if a game lasts only 10 hours, if it's a really enjoyable experience (although, to be fair, that's already starting to be on the quite short side, especially if we are talking about a full-priced game; for a 20€ or cheaper game that's completely fine. I have played 2-hour games that have been absolutely marvelous, and the length has been completely fine.)
The drawback of buying so many games is, of course, that there are only so many hours of free time in my life to play them. Thus in many cases I actually prefer games to be shorter, so that I can get to play more of them. A game needs to be really epic and exceptionally well made for me to want to play more than about 30 hours of it. (There are examples of this of course. For example Steam reports that I have played Skyrim for 110 hours, which is quite unusually long. For Fallout: New Vegas it reports 60 hours.)
In general, I thus nowadays prefer playing such games in their "normal" difficulty.
I have, in fact, noticed that the "normal" difficulty tends to be the most balanced one in most games. Sort of like the intended difficulty designed by the developers (as in that it feels like they designed the game from the ground up to be played on that difficulty, and then only in the very last stages added the other difficulty levels as an option.) Choosing a harder difficulty very often makes it feel artificially hard, as in the enemies being "unrealistically" hard to kill (if you can talk about "realism" in such video games; it may be more accurate to say that it starts breaking willing suspension of disbelief when enemies are too hard to kill.) These harder difficulty levels are often not as enjoyable, as they feel unbalanced and needlessly difficult. This, in fact, goes all the way back to Half-Life 2 (and probably beyond).
Some games, however, entice the player to choose the hardest difficulty level. I have sometimes been suckered into choosing it because of that, and regretted it later. As a recent example, Battlefield 4 has this to say about its hardest difficulty level:
Well, I'm quite an experienced player, so I decided to choose that difficulty level. I stopped playing the game somewhere around half-way through, out of sheer frustration, as enemies were way too hard to kill, and it was way too easy to die. I tried a bit of the beginning of the game with the normal difficulty, and it immediately felt a lot more balanced (enemies actually died from a moderate amount of gunfire instead of having to empty two clips into them). I might some day restart the game on this difficulty level and play it through like that.
A few games, however, are quite different from this, and "difficulty level" means something quite different. An interesting case is Alien: Isolation. While there are enemies to kill in this game, the main focus is the alien, which is unkillable (this is more a horror survival than a first-person shooter). Thus "difficulty level" means something else entirely than how hard enemies are to kill. In this case it affects the behavior of the alien, which is an interesting deviation from the standard formula.
Also this game entices the player to choose the hardest difficulty:
And here, too, it's not quite clear whether this really is the best way to play the game or not, regardless of what the developers are saying there. The reason, however, and perhaps obviously, is quite different from your ordinary first-person shooter like Battlefield 4.
In the "hard" difficulty level, in the levels where you are trying to hide from the alien, that's chasing you, the alien will constantly be in your vicinity. You don't have a moment to take a breath. The alien will always be there somewhere, ready to jump at you at any moment you make the tiniest of mistakes. It never wanders off too far. It's like it can constantly sense your presence in the vicinity and never goes too far away. Your tasks thus indeed become a lot more difficult, as you must watch for the alien much more closely, and time your movements much more precisely.
Many people report, however, that the game is actually best played on the "easy" difficulty level. That it's actually much scarier and has much more ambience to it. That's because now the alien isn't actually constantly in your vicinity but can wander off somewhere else, even to the opposite side of the level. What makes this scarier and more immersive is that now you truly don't know where the alien really is. It could be just around the corner, or it could be on the other extreme of the level. You can't know. And thus it becomes much more surprising, and terrifying, when the alien suddenly jumps at you when you least expect. In the hard difficulty level you just know that the alien is just a couple of corridors away at most, so there aren't many surprises. In the easy difficulty level the anxiety is much higher because now you really don't know where the alien is or when it might turn up.
I have yet to play the game through again (I very rarely play games twice), but if I ever do, I will most certainly try the easy difficulty.
For a quite long time I had the principle that I would always, always play with the hardest difficulty. After all, I paid a hefty sum for a video game (especially since back then I was just a university student with a bugger-all income), which made it quite an expensive commodity, and I wanted it to last for as long as possible. I hated games that were too short, especially if they were full priced, or even nearly full priced.
With some games choosing the hardest difficulty actually made a lot of sense because it was not artificial difficulty. For example, some point&click games of the time had (usually two) "difficulty" levels, which meant in practice that on the "harder" level there were more puzzles, and some puzzles might be a bit more complex, or involved more steps. Which was absolutely perfect for me. I would have hated playing those games with less or easier puzzles.
Back in those days I was also more invested in beating games on the harder difficulty levels, even when they were at least approaching artificial difficulty. With some games it truly made them more challenging in an enjoyable manner. For example, I remember Midtown Madness having difficulty levels, and the harder levels meant that you were racing against different, more powerful cars, than the easier levels.
By the time I played Half-Life 2, I still had this mentality in full force, and I played it on its hardest difficulty. It was perhaps this one that finally made me lose that principle (or, at the very least, it was one of the last games I ever played on hardest difficulty due to wanting the game to last longer and be more challenging.) In this game the difficulty really is quite artificial, and borderline makes the game only frustrating rather than challenging.
My mindset has changed quite a lot from those times. I have become a huge consumer of video games, and I purchase tons of them. While I enjoy a very long game (those that take over 50 hours to play through) from time to time, if really well made, I prefer a video game to be enjoyable rather than it lasting as long as possible. I don't mind if a game lasts only 10 hours, if it's a really enjoyable experience (although, to be fair, that's already starting to be on the quite short side, especially if we are talking about a full-priced game; for a 20€ or cheaper game that's completely fine. I have played 2-hour games that have been absolutely marvelous, and the length has been completely fine.)
The drawback of buying so many games is, of course, that there are only so many hours of free time in my life to play them. Thus in many cases I actually prefer games to be shorter, so that I can get to play more of them. A game needs to be really epic and exceptionally well made for me to want to play more than about 30 hours of it. (There are examples of this of course. For example Steam reports that I have played Skyrim for 110 hours, which is quite unusually long. For Fallout: New Vegas it reports 60 hours.)
In general, I thus nowadays prefer playing such games in their "normal" difficulty.
I have, in fact, noticed that the "normal" difficulty tends to be the most balanced one in most games. Sort of like the intended difficulty designed by the developers (as in that it feels like they designed the game from the ground up to be played on that difficulty, and then only in the very last stages added the other difficulty levels as an option.) Choosing a harder difficulty very often makes it feel artificially hard, as in the enemies being "unrealistically" hard to kill (if you can talk about "realism" in such video games; it may be more accurate to say that it starts breaking willing suspension of disbelief when enemies are too hard to kill.) These harder difficulty levels are often not as enjoyable, as they feel unbalanced and needlessly difficult. This, in fact, goes all the way back to Half-Life 2 (and probably beyond).
Some games, however, entice the player to choose the hardest difficulty level. I have sometimes been suckered into choosing it because of that, and regretted it later. As a recent example, Battlefield 4 has this to say about its hardest difficulty level:
Well, I'm quite an experienced player, so I decided to choose that difficulty level. I stopped playing the game somewhere around half-way through, out of sheer frustration, as enemies were way too hard to kill, and it was way too easy to die. I tried a bit of the beginning of the game with the normal difficulty, and it immediately felt a lot more balanced (enemies actually died from a moderate amount of gunfire instead of having to empty two clips into them). I might some day restart the game on this difficulty level and play it through like that.
A few games, however, are quite different from this, and "difficulty level" means something quite different. An interesting case is Alien: Isolation. While there are enemies to kill in this game, the main focus is the alien, which is unkillable (this is more a horror survival than a first-person shooter). Thus "difficulty level" means something else entirely than how hard enemies are to kill. In this case it affects the behavior of the alien, which is an interesting deviation from the standard formula.
Also this game entices the player to choose the hardest difficulty:
And here, too, it's not quite clear whether this really is the best way to play the game or not, regardless of what the developers are saying there. The reason, however, and perhaps obviously, is quite different from your ordinary first-person shooter like Battlefield 4.
In the "hard" difficulty level, in the levels where you are trying to hide from the alien, that's chasing you, the alien will constantly be in your vicinity. You don't have a moment to take a breath. The alien will always be there somewhere, ready to jump at you at any moment you make the tiniest of mistakes. It never wanders off too far. It's like it can constantly sense your presence in the vicinity and never goes too far away. Your tasks thus indeed become a lot more difficult, as you must watch for the alien much more closely, and time your movements much more precisely.
Many people report, however, that the game is actually best played on the "easy" difficulty level. That it's actually much scarier and has much more ambience to it. That's because now the alien isn't actually constantly in your vicinity but can wander off somewhere else, even to the opposite side of the level. What makes this scarier and more immersive is that now you truly don't know where the alien really is. It could be just around the corner, or it could be on the other extreme of the level. You can't know. And thus it becomes much more surprising, and terrifying, when the alien suddenly jumps at you when you least expect. In the hard difficulty level you just know that the alien is just a couple of corridors away at most, so there aren't many surprises. In the easy difficulty level the anxiety is much higher because now you really don't know where the alien is or when it might turn up.
I have yet to play the game through again (I very rarely play games twice), but if I ever do, I will most certainly try the easy difficulty.
Saturday, September 3, 2016
The downside of single+multiplayer combo games
Many games, especially big-budget first-person shooters, often have two completely separate modes of play: A single player "campaign", and online multiplayer (which is very often some kind of "arena shooter", either in a free-for-all mode or in teams.) Quite often these two modes are so separate, so distinct, and so independent of each other, that you could just as well consider them two different games bundled into one package. They might use the same engine, assets and game mechanics, but otherwise they have usually nothing to do with each other, and often do not even interact with each other in any way (eg. by having things unlocked in one mode becoming available in the other.)
(In fact, with some games the two modes are so separate that you even have to launch them separately, often from a launch startup menu dialog.)
I assume that most companies produce these "two games in one" combos in order to appeal to the widest possible audience, ie. to those who buy such games primarily for the single-player campaign, and those who are mostly or even exclusively interested in the online multiplayer mode.
There are downsides to this, however.
One is that making two games is more expensive than making one. Sure, it's not nearly as expensive as making two completely independent games (because the same core engine and assets can be used in both playing modes, which probably cuts down development time and costs quite a lot, compared to having to make two entirely separate games), but it's also certainly more expensive than making just one of the modes. Perhaps for this reason in recent years more and more examples of single-player-only and multiplayer-only games have been published. Rather than split resources into making essentially two games, they put all their resources into just one of them. (Of course by doing this they are cutting a chunk of their target audience out, but it may still be profitable to do so.)
Another problem is that almost universally, publications and reviewers will give only one score for the entire game, rather than scoring the two sub-modes separately. (Even if some publications do give two scores, which is rare but not unheard of, aggregate scoring services will only show one score, such as the average of the two.) Since the two modes are often completely independent of each other, and do not affect each other, it would be fairest, and most useful for the potential buyer, to know the reviewers' scores for each mode separately. But this basically is never the case, and instead you get only one score for the combo.
This means that if eg. the single-player mode is excellent, but the multiplayer mode is absolute rubbish, the latter will drag the overall score down. However, for a player who is only interested in the single-player mode (like me), it would be much more informative and beneficial to know the review scores for that mode only. If there is a great disparity between the two modes, that muddles things.
I really wish that such games were actually considered two separate games, in terms of reviews and review scores, even if they come packaged in the same product.
(In fact, with some games the two modes are so separate that you even have to launch them separately, often from a launch startup menu dialog.)
I assume that most companies produce these "two games in one" combos in order to appeal to the widest possible audience, ie. to those who buy such games primarily for the single-player campaign, and those who are mostly or even exclusively interested in the online multiplayer mode.
There are downsides to this, however.
One is that making two games is more expensive than making one. Sure, it's not nearly as expensive as making two completely independent games (because the same core engine and assets can be used in both playing modes, which probably cuts down development time and costs quite a lot, compared to having to make two entirely separate games), but it's also certainly more expensive than making just one of the modes. Perhaps for this reason in recent years more and more examples of single-player-only and multiplayer-only games have been published. Rather than split resources into making essentially two games, they put all their resources into just one of them. (Of course by doing this they are cutting a chunk of their target audience out, but it may still be profitable to do so.)
Another problem is that almost universally, publications and reviewers will give only one score for the entire game, rather than scoring the two sub-modes separately. (Even if some publications do give two scores, which is rare but not unheard of, aggregate scoring services will only show one score, such as the average of the two.) Since the two modes are often completely independent of each other, and do not affect each other, it would be fairest, and most useful for the potential buyer, to know the reviewers' scores for each mode separately. But this basically is never the case, and instead you get only one score for the combo.
This means that if eg. the single-player mode is excellent, but the multiplayer mode is absolute rubbish, the latter will drag the overall score down. However, for a player who is only interested in the single-player mode (like me), it would be much more informative and beneficial to know the review scores for that mode only. If there is a great disparity between the two modes, that muddles things.
I really wish that such games were actually considered two separate games, in terms of reviews and review scores, even if they come packaged in the same product.
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