Games for people who can't be bothered

[metalangel]

Why Ryse Is The Most Frustrating Game Of E3 | Kotaku Australia

When there are minimal consequences to the inputs you make, the rewards you do receive feel empty. The idea behind this design decision, claims Crytek, is that players coming home from a hard day’s work don’t want to deal with the pressures and stress of playing perfectly. Instead of rewarding players with a gory cinematic for hitting the QTE correctly, players simply acquire a greater amount of XP or currency.

In other words, we're back in 1995 with 'interactive movies' again, except now the hardware is capable of rendering everything in proper realtime 3D, except it might as well be streamed video like it's Dragon's Lair.

The writer has a really great point there: games are exciting when you have something at stake if you screw up. The moment when you're at risk is exciting, getting through it is satisfying. So long as you can see why you screwed up when you do, you'll want to try again and that's how it should work!

I remember when Forza 3 came out, and it added the 'rewind' function. A bit like quicksaving, you could use it to ensure you got every corner right, every overtake right, and basically could keep retrying everything until you had it perfect. My friend did this, and then when we raced online he crashed all the time. Why? Because he wasn't actually good at the game consistently, he'd just keep rewinding until he fluked it. When I told him he was only lying to himself by rewinding, he countered with Crytek's reasoning, that he didn't want to be frustrated.

In other words: I want to think I'm good at something without investing any effort.

I think having something at stake really affects your playstyle. Flying a transport full of valuable goods through lowsec in EvE Online is tense because you know you might get blown up by a pirate. Hardcore mode in Minecraft is tense because if you die, that's it. I was super cautious the last time I tried it, running and hiding whenever the sun went down or monsters were around in the caves. It was really exciting.

That I died several times to caching pauses (DAMMIT!) and I was really angry immediately afterwards has only somewhat dampened my enthusiasm for trying again.

What do you think? Is this the logical progression from recharging health?

 

[JMH]

lol. It sounds like Ryse isn't a great game. I dislike those "hit A Button" flashing during "cinematic" on certain games such as Call of Duty BOps, MW, etc... I think it's stupid. But that Ryse gave you no consequence of hit-a-button-cinematic - that's [censor]ed-up.