was from a video about the new Shinobi showing how a bunch of the enemies are unequipped to actually make you fight them outside of the forced encounters; you can just run through a bunch of them because their attacks are slow and there's no contact damage
and tbf, the video was intentionally flippant and snarky as a sort of teaser to a more thorough Shinobi video and the whole "game that gives you a ton of mechanics but doesn't bother to present you with basic challenge" is something worth talking about but also good fucking lord man that's a word
honestly though I think in general us old-school arcade fan gamers kinda assume it's self-evident why a game allowing you to opt out of its systems is bad instead of making an actual case for why "just don't play in a boring way" isn't enough of a rebuttal... idk
like, 99% of the people who pick up Shinobi: Art of Vengeance will beat the tar out of most or all of the enemies because there's good gamer feedback juice slathered all over it. does it really matter that much that the game won't kill you if you don't? that question's not rhetorical. I don't know.
Friction and engagement are two sides of the same coin. If you smooth out the gameplay to the point that the game virtually plays itself, the player won't have the experience of playing it themselves. It's good to minimize the frustration of things you don't want the player dwelling on,
e.g. "menu tax" in action games, but not the things your game is supposed to be "about", because a game is there to be grappled with and if no part of it offers resistance they will have nothing solid to grasp. This was the tragedy of the Ubisoft open world game design strategy.
I'd suggest not giving a fuck what the average player wants or is experiencing and focus on your own experience and how it's made worse by this kind of design. Ur not a hired rep speaking on behalf of the masses. Besides the problem is self evident to ppl, thats why they shame others out of doing it
If I criticized Stardew Valley for being relaxing and not giving me an arcade experience, the response would be "duh, are you stupid?" If someone criticizes bullet hells for having hard-to-read patterns, the response is "duh, are you stupid?" It's only with cheese that u get this sorta peer pressure
but my experience isn't made worse by this kind of design. I've enjoyed plenty of games that are either likely or definitely easy to play in a way that isn't so fun. and I think it's worth figuring out a way to communicate what's so interesting about a game that does put your nose to the grindstone
Again I don't think this is a real dilemma, most of these people complaining & shaming others for "not engaging" understand why it's a problem. Otherwise they'd just say "yeah that's part of the fun" or some variant of that. Ur not working with naive ignorance, it's something else entirely
just don't run past the guy 4head
Ironically Shinobi has a scoring system which rewards kills but since players are conditioned into that cope-response most aren't bringing that up 💀
jokes aside I think this whole "everyone is against this correct and true thing" attitude is exactly why I think this sect of gamers are unable to communicate in ways that aren't obnoxious and terrible. I personally want to do better even if none of y'all don't
Just gotta add more qualifiers & sound apologetic enough about holding your own values, that's what people want and that's what will convince them surely
Then again judging by what you said, games aren't actually made worse to you if you can skip everything, so I'm not even sure what you're trying to convince people of here. That people who ARE bothered by it exist and are valid?
I wouldn't consider "talking like a well-adjusted human being instead of a shitflinging 4channer or obnoxious 'retvrn' nazi" to be "apologetic" but hey if being friendly while communicating ideas is losing then I'm a born loser
I think at some point you need to ask yourself whether everyone else is being obnoxious and terrible, or you've got a standard for communication that flat out doesn't allow for the language necessary to discuss the issues you're talking about in a substantive way.
There's a tradeoff between how much you couch your language in soft qualifiers for the sake of being some standard of polite or nonjudgmental, and your ability to effectively make your argument. Having standards and holding games to them isn't corrosive, it's just the nature of making this argument
like, obviously a lot of the games I want to make are gonna be arcade-influenced challenge stuff. but I think there's a better way to communicate why these things matter than being a cynical old fart, and I'd like to find it
I believe some gamers are collaborative with the developer, and some games are competitive, The Elder Scrolls or Dark Souls is collaborative, DoDonPachi or Ninja Gaiden II is competitive,
when you are, on an aesthetic, marketing, and historical level making a game that appears to be in the lineage of a competitive with the player game, I think it would be fair to say that you have fundamentally misunderstood the assignment if enemies dont really do anything
likewise though if the elder scrolls started forcing you to master spacing and funfamentals to get anywhere in combat it would be equally a fair assessment someone to go man just let me spreadsheet my way out of this
I feel this distinction is not talked about enough and it's more important than the usual distinctions like console vs pc, or western vs japanese
haven't looked a lot into shinobi but the additional wrinkle that these kinds of reactive behavior checks imply to me (and you're seeing this with LSA rn as well) is that you can bait and whiff punish enemies a lot easier than in a more proactive behavior model
I think plenty of people are def happy playing a game where they can work over a bunch of enemies with great feedback but if a skilled player can engage with it and trivially orchestrate enemy behavior that's going to put a damper on the quality even when approached in good faith
This feels adjacent to another thought I’ve had that may be something I’m imagining/projecting but there seems to be a certain mindset that greatly devalues any strategic options the player has that they aren’t basically forced to use to make the credits roll, and like…
I can kinda see where that’s coming from, but it also seems really myopic and reductive to me? Maybe it’s just a mode of engaging with games different from how I usually do, but I find the existence of a variety of meaningfully-different options to be fun kinda for its own sake, in a way.
I actively LIKE doing things like… I guess they could count as a flavor of self-imposed challenge in games like Fire Emblem where I don’t use the crutch characters but do try to train up weaker or mediocre characters I just subjectively like despite that there’s “no [practical] reason” to do that.
I guess I MIGHT phrase it like… “gameplay as a space to play around in” as opposed to “gameplay as a challenge to find the correct answer to and succeed at”, if that conveys the distinction adequately. These aren’t mutually-exclusive necessarily and neither inherently implies any difficulty level…
…it’s just a thought, I guess.
completely agree and feel similar to your own stance cause i also find myself trying to play games in a way i find engaging rather than waiting on the game to make itself engaging to me. incentivizing to do more is always a good thing but i dont really always view it as a fault if a game doesn’t
i’m not gonna pretend like i havent had my fair share of games i’ve disliked for being very unengaging and having said games making it far too easy to not play around its mechanics because theres no point to. but i also don’t feel like a child who needs to be commanded on what to do to enjoy myself
There's something to be said for needing feedback to make players interact with the mechanics. I remember playing Have a Nice Death and realizing that the lack of rewards from killing mobs & level design that easily allowed me to avoid them, made the game feel more empty to me.
However, there were rooms that closed off and made me fight. And its a roguelite, so maybe the ability to flee was made easier because something to do with the way tiles were slotted together.
But regardless, a gulf was drawn between optional combat and the combat rooms/bosses. I still loved the world, and the bosses were fun, but the spaces in-between the characters & bosses felt like fluff because the lack of pushback. This is prolly more of a me issue, and only one example.
Pretty sure it was possible to get through Revenge of Shinobi by skipping some enemies anyway. Same with Shinobi III. Weird complaints on their end, IDK.
yeah but you couldn't literally run through an entire screen of them just by holding right and be completely unharmed. you had to interact on at least a slightly more conscious level than that
Ah, fair enough. But I agree about the way they're complaining about it. Sorry, I may have parsed what you said wrong. (Last thing I want to do is seem like I'm just outright attacking or some shit lol.)
i feel like a possible reason for this is simply that the devs are probably working off the assumption that if you're not playing with livesplit open and running, that you're simply just not going to think about running past them, because why would you *not* engage with the game that you bought
it is a lil frustrating that the best answer i've got is simply "ways to make you engage possibly just slipped their minds entirely" but, there we are
I suppose... it depends? Hard question. Like for SRPGs like Fire Emblem 8 that give me a unit good enough to solo the game with level 1 (Seth) I can just not use him and im still engaging with the games core mechanics even if im not doing it optimally In the case of Shinobi... if theres 0 incentive
To fight the enemies then your not really engaging with the games mechanics at all unless its by choice or when it forces you with boss fights. So in the FE8 case someone can optimize the fun out of the game and thus its on them but in Shinobi you can optimize the game out of the game? Which is on
The developers who made a game you barely have to play. And at the end of the day if it *is* fun to play it by choosing to engage even if the game doesnt make you then people who choose to engage are still going to get something out of it and find it fun? But that doesnt mean its good? I guess? Hmm
so in the case of Shinobi there is incentive to fight the enemies, but it's a currency that you can use to unlock more combat abilities, and those end up being kind of unnecessary if you're not really doing much combat in the first place the game does have platforming and some other stuff tbf, but-
like yeah it's a legitimately tough thing to think about and decide. idk.
It feels immediately like a bad thing in the broader social effect of people being dismissive of that older game design and seeing it as kuso and basically being ready to dismiss critical games history because it doesn't play like what we expect nowadays,
but idk off the top of my head how to connect that to like. The substantive positive case you want to make for that more focused design. I think "meaning" is probably the most consistent theme of my impressions with this thing.
Like Kirby Super Star doesn't need kick you in the balls difficulty and confrontation because that's not the "meaning" of the game. It kind of has been in the most highly regarded action games, which I think is why gamers raise gripes about the new shinobi.
And then also I have the biggest bias in the world against final fantasy legend 3 because one option in each category so obsoletes all the other choices that it feels meaningless to have that gear and spend money on it.
Mostly thinking about this in terms of like, the hater response to bubsy 4d is that there's basically no meaning to the shmoovement if there's no level you have to actually play, vs speedrunning is supposed to look impressive because of the contrast to what's normally "possible".
Another thing that comes to mind is shmups and rhythm games being two of the hardest genres and learning a shmup feeling remarkably similar to learning a piece of music, like that is a difficult thing that is obviously worth it for developing muscles and expression youtu.be/GtRu2moK_kQ
Sor2 knife galsias feel good because forcing you to watch your ass and not get trapped stretches muscles that none of the enemy waves in shredder's revenge really do and those muscles feel good. It feels good to be able to talk with chess, etc.
I feel like this is a really interesting line, where in a game that *is* very constrained in terms of player options and has a linear or at least pseudolinear structure not being made to engage with things in specific ways is definitely just like, well now the game isn't there, but also with more-
sandboxy/sim-y games I tend to feel a lot more strongly that it's not the games fault you played it in a boring and unfun but very efficient way, FF8 comes to mind immediately for me, but it's just kinda an issue with a lot of people just not caring about exploring the design space if they find-
something that works consistently, even if that thing *fucking sucks to do*