Do you think that "games appealing to the masses" were a mistake by game developers?

[Afrospinach]

Then they are no longer niche.

You should read the sentence I am responding to more carefully

[Rennadrel]

No they don't force you to use them. It's exactly what you're thinking, a guy who is complaining there is easy options for less experienced gamers.

He completely neglects the fact SM3DW is probably the hardest mario game on the market to 100%. Even the "I Win" powerup can't get you through the end game levels which are mostly platforming challenges and it doesn't save you from fall deaths, only prevents enemy damage.

If you can't beat the endgame levels when you have 99 lives when you get there, there is no hope for anyone. I cleared that game 100% and resold it because there was no challenge. Honestly, I find retro games to be more of a challenge as an adult than the newer games, and you'd think after 31 years, they'd find ways to make a platform game more challenging. User created content in Mario Maker is far more absurd and challenging than anything Nintendo has been concocting the last decade.

[kasuke06]

Yes and no. Some good has come of it(solid NPE designs, streamlined control schemes, improved designs in some areas) along with some bad(severe homogenization, which is starting to fade out as the indie scene grows, over-coddling of players, mechanics designed to mitigate skill in MP games)

What bothers me is when things get changed for some extreme minority that in all likelihood won't even get the game, especially when such complaints are contradictory(Dragon's Crown: The relatively conservatively dressed witch with a chest bigger than her head is sooo sexist! But they ignored the male dwarf who wears nothing but a thong and a helmet, and has abs you could grind stone on.)

[Tech614]

If you can't beat the endgame levels when you have 99 lives when you get there, there is no hope for anyone. I cleared that game 100% and resold it because there was no challenge. Honestly, I find retro games to be more of a challenge as an adult than the newer games, and you'd think after 31 years, they'd find ways to make a platform game more challenging. User created content in Mario Maker is far more absurd and challenging than anything Nintendo has been concocting the last decade.

No challenge my ass, your ass never went past cat bowser if you're claiming that shit. Pretty much everyone who played the end game levels thinks it's the hardest Mario game. Shit ain't even close to the joke that was SM64 which I managed to 100% as an ADHD pre teen let alone the 2D Marios before it which we're only hard before saving was a thing(SMW on are definitely not known for being hard games)

Then you have to nerve to point out troll MM levels are harder then anything Nintendo makes? Gee golly you trying to win an award for being captain obvious? They're also harder then anything in Super Meat Boy and DKCTF but I guess those are easy games now

You're not as good at games as you think if you have to use "other people beat it on easy mode!" as an excuse for why games aren't hard.

[Baconeggcheese]

This pretty much sums it up for me:



In my experience when you try to make something for everyone in the way many games have you end up making a game that's divided into a bunch of segments for different players and everyone gets their mini-game that they *can* play the other parts of but those parts aren't necessarily designed for them.

For instance as someone raiding mythic I've consistently ended up in the situation where whenever new content comes out it just isn't for me unless its the next raid because what I have is already beyond the new content. I end up not having much game outside of raiding because of that, and the same thing happens for others coming at the game from many different angles.

It ends up feeling like you have very little game to play for each person and its *because* of the other people that you have so little to play. "If only they didn't cater to Y and Z there'd be more X!"

I'd like for games to be unabashedly themselves for different audiences. But business is business, so I can't realistically expect that.

[breadisfunny]

it also caused the death of crpg's.

[Alvito]

Yes. Everything made for the masses gets worse

And make a ton of money along the way.

[Queen of Hamsters]

There's a wide range of games available on the market, there's room for every style these days.

And no, from a business perspective, it's not a mistake.

[pateuvasiliu]

From a business perspective, no.

From my perspective? Fuck yes.

Just look at how many people are playing on WoW private servers. Gummy's TBC server made it into mainstream gaming news like IGN and Gamespot.

People WANT the hardcore back, but Blizzard doesn't bring it because they know their casual players would get demolished by Vanilla/TBC.

[Deleted]

Hello champions, good to see you.

So, many of you are video-game veterans, that played Atari, NES, SNES, PS1 and so on. You all remember that, 20 years ago, games weren't always designed for the average dummy that didn't knew how to play a video-game. Either you conquered the game, or you didn't.

This doesn't mean that older games are more complex - but you can all agree that nowadays, most games aren't designed just for gamers. This is good, because everybody deserves to play games, but in some ways, games were dumbed down in the process, not respecting the intelligence of the average gamer. This means that everything, and I mean, EVERYTHING must be explained, controls must be simplified, and much more.

Do you think that "games appealing to the masses" were a mistake by game developers?

Do you think it was a mistake of society that people like you have forums to discuss these delusions? Come on, if games didn't appeal to masses, most people wouldn't game, simple as that. We would have something else to distract ourselves but it wouldn't necessary result in better games. No idea why I try to explain this to you, should never argue with idiots ---

[Queen of Hamsters]

This pretty much sums it up for me:



In my experience when you try to make something for everyone in the way many games have you end up making a game that's divided into a bunch of segments for different players and everyone gets their mini-game that they *can* play the other parts of but those parts aren't necessarily designed for them.

For instance as someone raiding mythic I've consistently ended up in the situation where whenever new content comes out it just isn't for me unless its the next raid because what I have is already beyond the new content. I end up not having much game outside of raiding because of that, and the same thing happens for others coming at the game from many different angles.

It ends up feeling like you have very little game to play for each person and its *because* of the other people that you have so little to play. "If only they didn't cater to Y and Z there'd be more X!"

I'd like for games to be unabashedly themselves for different audiences. But business is business, so I can't realistically expect that.

That whole "but if there's something for everyone, then there's nothing special for anyone"-trope is cute and all, but in reality it's just down to "I want myself catered to and fuck the rest"-mentality.

The problem is with you people only wanting your own needs catered for, never paying heed to having reasons for a wide range of people to play. Them taking this direction in Legion gave me more content, not less, whereas WoD was all about raiding at max level and znoozing through old content for transmog/mounts...

It's very much being "unabashedly itself", and I hope to god that this will be the model going forward despite the crowd being angered when they're "forced to play" because "there's too much to do that I don't wanna do"-kind of complaints... They've been rife through this expansion.

It's like the idiots claiming that "Classic WoW needs to make a return, it's hardcore!"... Um, no it was casual even for MMORPG's of its time. People never having played it, enter private servers, snooze through and never touch it again since it doesn't have nearly enough reasons to play and the "hardcore" bits didn't come down to skill requirements but rather just time investments. Wildstar tried catering to this crowd hankering for "Classic WoW!", and it fell flat.

When people want hardcore these days, they want challenge. And modern games cater to that crowd as well as to the people just wanting to potter around in a game when they feel like it. To be hardcore and skilled at gaming today, you need to fulfill a bit higher standards than "I spent 9 hours every day 5 days in a row inside 1 area farming bear asses for a reputation"...

- - - Updated - - -

But that IS the type of game WoW is. It's "unabashedly being itself" when it has all those things besides mythic raiding.

This entire complaint really falls flat on it's face if you actually look at the gaming community as a whole. There's an absolute metric fuckton of games that are "just themselves" and not "something for everyone". It feels like people barely actually play anything and then just listen to some memes about "how gaming really is" and then repeat it.

Exactly, you're 100% correct.

People, as usual, confuse "I don't wanna do this content" for "there is no content for me". If you raid Mythic, you're still part of a pretty exclusive club, one way more exclusive than what raiding tends to be on Private servers...

And players qualifiying as "hardcore" these days, fulfill a bit higher standards than "Lol I got to max level and almost got to see a raid boss"...

[Baconeggcheese]

That whole "but if there's something for everyone, then there's nothing special for anyone"-trope is cute and all, but in reality it's just down to "I want myself catered to and fuck the rest"-mentality.

The entire point of said sentiment is that by trying to cater to everyone you cater to no one. Everyone is left with a weaker experience instead of some amount of people having a phenomenal one.

Personally I'd much rather the gaming world have game A that works for people who want X experience and game B for people who want Y experience as opposed to game C and D that both give the exact same watered down experience for both.

The problem is with you people only wanting your own needs catered for, never paying heed to having reasons for a wide range of people to play. Them taking this direction in Legion gave me more content, not less, whereas WoD was all about raiding at max level and znoozing through old content for transmog/mounts...

I'll never understand people who think wod was catered to raiding.

There was 2 tiers man, 2 tiers. They poured all their resources and tied all the open world content into garrisons and somehow people took that as a focus on raiding when there was 0 additional focus put into raiding and we lost a raid tier.

You'll notice we've already had more raid content half way through legion than we did in wod and yet by some miracle there's also a shit ton more outdoor and dungeon content as well. They fucked up the non-raid content structure in wod, it had literally nothing to do with raiding.

I mean holy shit, you literally just made my point from my first post.

It's very much being "unabashedly itself", and I hope to god that this will be the model going forward despite the crowd being angered when they're "forced to play" because "there's too much to do that I don't wanna do"-kind of complaints... They've been rife through this expansion.

My issue as I described in the previous post is that I end up not having anything to do personally because the new content that comes out isn't made for me and is already below where I'm at in the game as soon as it comes out.

When people want hardcore these days, they want challenge. And modern games cater to that crowd as well as to the people just wanting to potter around in a game when they feel like it.

To some degree, which is my point. I have a section of wow for said challenge, and that's pretty much just raiding historically and then dungeons this xpac. Any content I do outside of those 2 things is completely devoid of challenge.

The mage tower challenges were loads of fun, I'd love if the game was littered with such things and focused around that level of challenge. But it doesn't, its very few and far between.

[Rennadrel]

But that IS the type of game WoW is. It's "unabashedly being itself" when it has all those things besides mythic raiding.

This entire complaint really falls flat on it's face if you actually look at the gaming community as a whole. There's an absolute metric fuckton of games that are "just themselves" and not "something for everyone". It feels like people barely actually play anything and then just listen to some memes about "how gaming really is" and then repeat it.

It's pretty hard to please everyone, I think that is the biggest failure of designing a game to appeal to everyone. Part and parcel to that is the actual lack of effort by developers to making their product do various things for different styles of players, and Blizzard is a prime example of that. No one seems to be able to make a game that does everything its target audiences like while doing it well. It always feels half assed.

[Zeta333]

Hello champions, good to see you.

So, many of you are video-game veterans, that played Atari, NES, SNES, PS1 and so on. You all remember that, 20 years ago, games weren't always designed for the average dummy that didn't knew how to play a video-game. Either you conquered the game, or you didn't.

This doesn't mean that older games are more complex - but you can all agree that nowadays, most games aren't designed just for gamers. This is good, because everybody deserves to play games, but in some ways, games were dumbed down in the process, not respecting the intelligence of the average gamer. This means that everything, and I mean, EVERYTHING must be explained, controls must be simplified, and much more.

Do you think that "games appealing to the masses" were a mistake by game developers?

look at wow, since they started catering to casuals thier population has divebombed.

[Jtbrig7390]

look at wow, since they started catering to casuals thier population has divebombed.

You realize they have catered to casuals since release right? There is a reason its was called Everquest Lite.

Also the population divebombing started at the start of Cata, You know that time where they DIDN'T cater to casuals. Trying to pin point a main reason why there is a sub loss is dumb.

Blizzard games have always catered to casuals, blizzards stance on games is Easy to Play Hard To Master. They have been this day since day 1 and will stay this way until there doors close.

[Pull My Finger]

I don't even think there's this big divide. Everyone likes crap like Witcher 3 etc. I don't know what the big difference between a "gamer" and the broad audience is supposed to be - other than the former being a nerdy faggot who goes out of his way to identify as something silly and probably has bigger priority issues.

I think overall, games are what they are today. I don't like it, but everyone else seems to. I could stand there and tell myself that everything used to be better when games were made for "true" people like me, but then the country was invaded by immigrants and they took our jobs, but that would be a classic self-validation narrative and completely silly.

Also, games were always, always a mass medium. Nobody ever made a video game hoping to not sell too many copies. It's just that thanks to the economic and technological possibilites of today, the industry has become better at reaching bigger masses.

I would agree that there is way less depth to game design overall. But that's just a sign of the times. We live in a society that absolutely does not know or understand depth, subtext or subtlety.

[Zeta333]

You realize they have catered to casuals since release right? There is a reason its was called Everquest Lite.

Also the population divebombing started at the start of Cata, You know that time where they DIDN'T cater to casuals. Trying to pin point a main reason why there is a sub loss is dumb.

Blizzard games have always catered to casuals, blizzards stance on games is Easy to Play Hard To Master. They have been this day since day 1 and will stay this way until there doors close.

oh im very well aware cata was the begining of the end, i understand the game was always more casual than everquest, but when they took steps to literally put this game on rails, more specifically shit like LFR, the dumbed down skill tree, also shit like removing personal realm firsts, Non raiders getting raid gear. the list goes on is why i left.

[Mahourai]

I would agree that there is way less depth to game design overall.

There is, objectively, more "depth" in the design of modern games. Where is the depth in Pong? The primary threatening mechanic of Space Invaders - the aliens moving faster as more of them are destroyed - was accidental, a flaw in the programming enabling the game to move them quicker because less resources were being spent as they were destroyed. Meanwhile even the shittiest modern game is designed with intricate systems that make the classics of the genre look like a child's scribbles.

This does not, of course, mean that they're better, just that they have more shit.

The most interesting thing about your post is that you are seemingly aware that nostalgia for gaming's past is simply the prelapsarian fallacy - that the Time Before was good and we live in a fallen world, which has been believed by all generations of humankind. But you then engage in the same fallacy when talking about why things are different now.

[Noomz]

Hello champions, good to see you.

So, many of you are video-game veterans, that played Atari, NES, SNES, PS1 and so on. You all remember that, 20 years ago, games weren't always designed for the average dummy that didn't knew how to play a video-game. Either you conquered the game, or you didn't.

This doesn't mean that older games are more complex - but you can all agree that nowadays, most games aren't designed just for gamers. This is good, because everybody deserves to play games, but in some ways, games were dumbed down in the process, not respecting the intelligence of the average gamer. This means that everything, and I mean, EVERYTHING must be explained, controls must be simplified, and much more.

Do you think that "games appealing to the masses" were a mistake by game developers?

If it's what they want to do, they should make it. It's their games, their creativity, their vision.

There's always games appealing to ones demographic, wether they're casual or hardcore or anything else.

[Sky High]

one of the main reasons older games were harder is because otherwise you would beat them in less than an hour... and no hard games ARE still popular if you look for games that aren't made by certain publishers and even then your'e bound to find a few that fit that criteria. the problem isn't game developers it's game PUBLISHERS, they care about making money waaaaaaaaaaay more than they do making a quality game regardless of difficulty. I mean... look at any big name publisher and tell me I'm wrong.