rumschlumpel@feddit.org 13 hours ago
The real easy mode is looking up stuff on the 'net. It might be subtle at first, maybe you just looked up something when you were genuinely stuck, but before you know it you’re just looking up stuff because you’re impatient or don’t want to take notes yourself.
Though I guess there’s games that are mostly about getting the timing right. Like I don’t think the internet helps much with beating the early Super Mario sidescrollers.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
Oh yeah.
Back in the (dial up) day, amongst the neighborhood kids?
If you looked up a GameFAQs guide to a game, if you had to do that, to beat it?
You were cheating.
Only possibly acceptable if it was a game with an onbnoxious amount of hidden collectable type items, and you were just now doing a full completionist run.
Nowadays, you’d have to basically make a whole lot of your game procedurally generated, to get back to that kind of a paradigm, (hence the existence of roguelites, i suppose) but yeah its absolutely totally normalized now that just looking up a guide or a playthrough is totally acceptable, whereas pre-mass-internet-adoption, doing that was largely seen as cheating.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 13 hours ago
Personally, I never cared about the cheating aspect, I was never particularly good at gaming and I’d definitely prefer cheating over not finishing a game or trying to bruteforce whatever I’m stuck on for 10 hours. The issue is that looking up stuff casually like many people (including me) do today has a high risk of reducing the fun for no real reason. And I feel like games today tend to be easier and less grindy than they used to be in the dial-up days, too, so there’s also less reason to look anything up in the first place.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 hours ago
Ah ok ok, yes, what you’ve said is all true as well, removing the sort of comepetive aspect and just focusing on a single person playing a game as an experience.
Absolutely yes, in general, nowadays, most single player games are simpler, easier, power fantasies, as opposed to legitimate challenges.
While I do not miss the bullshit ‘difficulty’ of grinding, healthbar sponges… I do miss the actual lower amount of tactical/technical complexity and risk/rewark of a lot of modern AAA games.
Its possible for gameplay itself to be actually complex and engaging, instead of having essentially a metagame of stat min maxxing wrapped around it, basically to compensate for the actual shallowness of the rest of the gameplay.
But, most people seem to prefer a dopamime stream, over a challenge of both intellect and dexterity.
And also yes, even without comparing your skill at or experience in a game to others… yeah, if looking at a game guide is basically the same as having substantial portions of a movie or book spoiled for you… yeah, that’s a problem for any kind of game with a narrative structure that weaves into its gameplay as well.
If you can’t be surprised in any real, impactful, shattering kind of way, its not a very compelling experience, at least in my opinion.