Zelda-Inspired Plucky Squire Shows What Happens When A Game Doesn't Trust Its Players
Zelda-Inspired Plucky Squire Shows What Happens When A Game Doesn't Trust Its Players
This charming adventure could afford to take a few steps back
I personally always dislike it, too.
There are two reasons you might want to do this as a dev, of course. One of them I feel kinda half-asses your design, if you don't want to get a threat or failure during gameplay to get into the way of your storypacing, just make a visual novel. Or at least something like SOMA, Amnesia or Still Wakes The Deep.
Or alternatively, if you want to make a game explicitly made for children that's okay, but then also do the marketing a bit more kid-centric IMO. I dunno, maybe this one is actually genuinely meant for children, but some of the humor and writing doesn't feel that way if I'm honest. Princess Peach does this more thoroughly: It is the same "handholding 100% of the time", but it's also very obviously meant to be played primarily by relatively small children!
Yeah this game is really annoying to play, which is a shame because it is cute as hell. It continually prompts you to do the thing. It's like playing Mario and having someone tell you to walk right and jump all through the game. What makes it much worse is that the game fully comes to a stop to do so. Everything just pauses and the game explains what to do. Even when there is a puzzle, the game basically gives you the answer.
The approach Astro Bot uses is much better. It let's you struggle for a bit and then gives an animation with the move you need and which button it is. Which is really handy because even if you know what move you want it's easy to forget the right button combination for it. It's very non intrusive and if you know the move the animation won't even pop up. An experienced player won't notice the mechanic at all. If you come back from not playing for a bit, the reminder about the buttons is useful. For kids who genuinely get stuck, the help prevents them from giving up.
Games that were infuriating with these kinds of mechanics were the new God of War games. At every fucking puzzle when you take 10 secs just to get oriented and look at what you need to do, some NPC (usually Boi of War) just tells you the answer. There is no way to turn this off and it made me turn off the game multiple times. If you want to put puzzles in the game, put puzzles in your game and let me figure it out. If you are going to give the answer, why are there puzzles to begin with? It doesn't help Atreus is one of the worse characters ever written especially in the last game.
All a game like this would need is the ability to disable the feature.
It's like developers are so obsessed and occupied with making it as accessible to everyone, that they seem to forget that there is also an entire playerbase out there not looking to be handheld through everything (including children). I'd get a bigger sense of achievement if I managed to do it on my own.
I remember playing Mario on the NES and it was completely unforgiving as a child, like insta-deaths, limited amount of lives, no save games, hidden secrets, etc. But it was pure bliss when I finally beat the game.
19 and still can't beat the original Mario bros 😭
It's not an easy game, that's ok. The reason most of us beat it in the 80's is because we only had one or two games at a time to play until Xmas/birthday every year.
That's fair these days, unless you're playing it on a CRT with original hardware or MiSTER, the latency will be through the roof compared to what the game was designed around.
Dude
I remember playing Legacy of Kain: Defiance for the first time when I was a kid.
I spent actual hours coming through the damn mansion level looking for the proper route and I was so frustrated. I finally broke down and looked it up on the computer (which I was grounded from at the time) so I could see if I could find a solution.
In the early 2000s you pirated nintendo games, had no manual ( or bought it legit but couldnt read it properly to understand) and just figured out the manuals.
Either a shit article or shit website. The article gives a summary of the game then says the developers don't trust their customers. That's it. No reasons given. Am I missing something?
There is a "continue reading" link buried several pages down, past a bunch of ads. Took me way to long to find it.
Looks like this:
I seen them but I seen a bunch of them and didn't know which one was for the article I was reading. Lol
There's a section under the "read more" split where it complains about over-tutorialization. The game hits you over the head with puzzle solutions and intended routes and leaves nothing for the player to figure out.
So trash website, got it.
How hard is it to have a tutorial on/off option at game start?
Then you have to make sure it's reasonably straightforward to figure everything out without the tutorial, so then why bother with the tutorial at all? As a player I'd hate to get stuck because I missed something that's clearly spelled out in a tutorial I skipped.
I like the game, but agree with the over-tutorialed complaints. They have two difficulty modes, I wish only story mode got all the handholding. I think there’s enough obvious indicators to get you through all the game mechanics.
This is less a sign of "the devs don't trust the player" and more just plain out bad game design. Maybe the game itself is very obvious (I don't know, i haven't played nor do I intend to), but this kind of thing is usually done when the game is obtuse and the developer wants a quickfix instead of actually reworking the entire thing. Then again, if your game is for little children and they can't figure out how to play it, then there's something fundamentally wrong with it and maybe you should go back to the drawing board.
I haven’t played Plucky yet, but this is what I liked about Tunic. It gives you a hint, and then trusts the player to experiment with the hint they’re given. It makes it feel like your own adventure.
It looks so cool but I can't play it if it's not challenging.
That’s kind of the definition of a video game: a game in which the rules are enforced by an unconsciously intelligent mechanism.
A normal game requires trusting the players; a video game does not.
Pretty sure you misunderstood the point being made.
Ah yes Kotaku, who's activist openly try to destroy games with Sweet Baby Inc. and their dogshit woke agenda.
This site needs to die, same as IGN aka Kotaku 2. Nobody wants them, nobody needs them and everything is run by worthless activist.
I would say that if you non-jokingly talk like that, you got bigger issues than any specific gaming sites or which consultants are brought in to work on which game.
Brother touch grass I beg of you
Yikes