Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement
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Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement
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Re: Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement
#2What an excellent way to explain this!
Re: Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement
#3A related (but from a developer point of view) blog post by Jeff Vogel: http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/11/make-your-game-easy-t...
It is really interesting to see these posts come out just days apart - I wonder if there is any cross pollination there.
Re: Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement
#4As a side note, I found this article really interesting in the context of the recently released Demon's Souls. Despite being a fringe title with essentially zero marketing, it's expected to sell 250,000 copies by the end of the year. Why is it so successful? It breaks the conventions set by most console RPGs in that leveling up only helps you a little bit, and you really need to gain skill to advance.
So it's much, much more difficult than just about any modern console game I've played, and yet it's hugely successful. This really seems to suggest that there's a hole in the market for games catering to mastery-oriented gamers.
Re: Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement
#5As a side note, I found this article really interesting in the context of the recently released Demon's Souls . Despite being a fringe title with essentially zero marketing, it's expected to sell 250,000 copies by the end of the year. Why is it so successful? It breaks the conventions set by most console RPGs in that leveling up only helps you a little bit, and you really need to gain skill to advance. So it's much,…
"Hugely Successful" -- compared to CoD MW2 at 13 million units, Demon's Souls is a drop in the bucket. I do agree that there is a niche for mastery-oriented gamers. MW2 allows a faux "leveling" that unlocks trivially different weapons, but the ranking in the individual play sessions is based on skill.
Re: Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement
#6I'm not sure how well genre maps to his argument, though I'd agree 'difficulty' as a distinct axis fits fairly well.
Yes, the Gygax/Arneson-style advancement system, when applied in CRPGs often becomes a dynamic difficulty-scaling mechanism. But one needn't look any further than this year's Most Important Game Ever (Call of Duty... 6?) to see similar systems in the most sacred of 'skill based' genres: online, multiplayer, first-person shooter. Put in the time, get power-ups.
Re: Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement
#7As a side note, I found this article really interesting in the context of the recently released Demon's Souls . Despite being a fringe title with essentially zero marketing, it's expected to sell 250,000 copies by the end of the year. Why is it so successful? It breaks the conventions set by most console RPGs in that leveling up only helps you a little bit, and you really need to gain skill to advance. So it's much,…
Isn't the entire multiplayer FPS market based on player skill? Maybe there's a hole in the RPG market, but not the overall game market.
Re: Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement
#8I'm not sure how well genre maps to his argument, though I'd agree 'difficulty' as a distinct axis fits fairly well. Yes, the Gygax/Arneson-style advancement system, when applied in CRPGs often becomes a dynamic difficulty-scaling mechanism. But one needn't look any further than this year's Most Important Game Ever (Call of Duty... 6?) to see similar systems in the most sacred of 'skill based' genres: online, multipl…
Yep, playing your best in COD and leveling up fast in COD are basically incompatible. To play well, you have to be fresh and sharp. To level up fast, you have to keep playing long past the point where you get groggy and start slowing down. More than a few times I forced myself to keep playing until 3am even when I was logging 5 kill / 15 death games, because I knew it would bring me closer to weapons like the PTRS sniper rifle.
Re: Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement
#9As a side note, I found this article really interesting in the context of the recently released Demon's Souls . Despite being a fringe title with essentially zero marketing, it's expected to sell 250,000 copies by the end of the year. Why is it so successful? It breaks the conventions set by most console RPGs in that leveling up only helps you a little bit, and you really need to gain skill to advance. So it's much,…
Isn't the entire multiplayer FPS market based on player skill? Maybe there's a hole in the RPG market, but not the overall game market.
Multiplayer FPS is based on social interaction, and skill is a close second for that.
Edit: Also, RTS is extremely skill-based
Re: Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement
#10Some types of RPGs do have another attraction, that appeals to the "Master" style: they give you a single system, and steadily tack options onto it. While your character does improve as a result of this, if the game is well-designed, the difficulty remains roughly constant or increases over the course of the game. This gives you the opportunity to master aspects of the system in more manageable chunks. That is, it takes a complex system that would normally require a tutorial, and spreads the tutorial out over the whole game.
FPS/RPG hybrids often have this, the most notable I can think of being Deus Ex (Bioshock is a passable example, but nowhere near as complex in the endgame). Action and strategy RPGs have this if played in a certain way, though most of them are just really easy to begin with. Roguelikes have this in spades. The combat in pen-and-paper dungeons and dragons can have this.
Console-style RPGs like the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series usually don't have this. MMORPGs usually don't have this as such; rather, they usually have two almost independent games (beginning-game and endgame).