06-07-2011, 12:18 AM
(This post was last modified: 06-07-2011, 12:20 AM by DavidCaruso.)
See what I said before:
To elaborate more: yes, people who use the Super Guide as an excuse to be lazy are bad designers. No one is disputing that now. No one is disputing that people can play games whichever way they want to either. What's at stake is whether or not a new batch of gamers will notice any lazy design the developers of Super Guide games put in if they themselves are raised on a generation of said Super Guide games. (The Super Guide and features like it will most likely become more and more popular as time goes on, thanks to the increased revenue games with the feature will recieve due to "accessibility," so this discussion is not just limited in scope to just OoT3D and NSMBWii.) The next batch of gamers will be the ones who grow up to be future game critics and designers as well. In the worst case game criticism becomes even worse since the job of professional critics right now is to basically go through a huge amount of games in a very limited timespan and write necessarily basic reviews about them. With a Super Guide they now don't even have to play the games, they can just watch them and pretend to comment about the mechanics. Game design also suffers since a generation raised on Super Guide games might not know any better than to put extremely unfair or unbalanced sections and excuse it with the guide feature. Yes this is all worst case but I still see it is a possibility.
A lesser thing also at stake is how a new batch of gamers raised on Super Guide games will view past generations. Suddenly Super Mario 64 becomes a game for hardened veterans of the next age.
Quote:The problem I see there is that the Super Guide could be used by the developers as an acceptable excuse for lazy design in the future; "if you think this is completely counterintuitive then, well, we put a guide in." And of course the critics and journalists will all be using the Super Guide whenever they get stuck anyway (they have dozens of games to go through, and they need to "finish" as much of each as possible in a very limited timespan to write a review), so they probably won't tell us anything. (Not that they would anyway, in an industry where paid critics are expected to give fair reviews of the same games that are advertised on their websites, from the same publishers the websites keep hounding for exclusive scoops, but still.)
To elaborate more: yes, people who use the Super Guide as an excuse to be lazy are bad designers. No one is disputing that now. No one is disputing that people can play games whichever way they want to either. What's at stake is whether or not a new batch of gamers will notice any lazy design the developers of Super Guide games put in if they themselves are raised on a generation of said Super Guide games. (The Super Guide and features like it will most likely become more and more popular as time goes on, thanks to the increased revenue games with the feature will recieve due to "accessibility," so this discussion is not just limited in scope to just OoT3D and NSMBWii.) The next batch of gamers will be the ones who grow up to be future game critics and designers as well. In the worst case game criticism becomes even worse since the job of professional critics right now is to basically go through a huge amount of games in a very limited timespan and write necessarily basic reviews about them. With a Super Guide they now don't even have to play the games, they can just watch them and pretend to comment about the mechanics. Game design also suffers since a generation raised on Super Guide games might not know any better than to put extremely unfair or unbalanced sections and excuse it with the guide feature. Yes this is all worst case but I still see it is a possibility.
A lesser thing also at stake is how a new batch of gamers raised on Super Guide games will view past generations. Suddenly Super Mario 64 becomes a game for hardened veterans of the next age.