re: .

It's a combination of several factors, many of which have already been named, but I think there are 2 main factors.

1. Game design was, in many ways, in its infancy. What's considered hard or unfair now was just accepted without much question because both developers and players didn't really know any better. (Admittedly, part of this "acceptance" was also that there simply wasn't as many games to play as there are now.)

2. Playtesting wasn't done nearly to the extent it is done now.

Let's look at Megaman 2 as a quick example of this. First, let's start with Quick Man's stage with the instant death lasers. They come out with no warning or foreshadowing for the player to anticipate them and they kill you in one hit. This would be seen as total BS by any modern player but I think most players just thought, "Wow! This is hard." And kept trying until they got it or realized they could use Flash Man's weapon to make it easier.

Another example is Heat Man's stage with the long sequence of disappearing / reappearing blocks at the end of the stage. About half way through this gauntlet if you miss a single jump you fall to instant death. Most people through trial and error (and frustration) eventually learned to just use the jet item to get past it but there is no hint that this is the best way to do this. This type of challenge wouldn't make it through play testing now days. Now days this would either be flat out told to the player or the challenge would be gated entirely until you had the right item to bypass it easily.

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So... Dark Souls?

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you dont lose anything for dying in dark souls either unless you are just careless.

unless they made a mode where you go back to the beginning of the game when u die?

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I guess I find the "flat out telling you" option really detracting at times...I prefer visual cues but even those are sometimes way too obvious.

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The problem is that rarely does either approach work. Either modern approach often has one of 2 outcomes: the player feels patronized or the player feels dumb for not realizing what the visual queue was telling them to begin with.

With nothing, you at least have the satisfaction of feeling like you really figured it out even if the developer intended / anticipated your solution all along. There is, of course, the chance the player will never figure it out and the game ends for them right there. It's a gamble, one I think most modern developers are simply unwilling to take.

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the player feels patronized or the player feels dumb for not realizing what the visual queue was telling them to begin with.

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I can appreciate being in that position and I understand that it's subjective to say what is the right balance with a visual cue, but I just prefer them to draw me the street and not the whole map. It also depends on the objective in mind. sometimes the reward is worth it, and feeling stupid is fine with me because it's always the satisfying "man, i'm such a dumbass"

for example in Metroid prime (because that's the series I've played most recently) you have to find the 12 keys hidden around the world, they give you a ballpark area to start and kind of briefly describe where in that area to find it, and because each room is so well designed you remember these areas you at least have a ballpark idea to start. so they combine telling you and showing you and the task is very manageable but not "frick this game" difficult.

I hate that it feels like it's either "nope, not giving you a damn thing" or "let me tell you precisely what you need to do"

though I agree with you, I like the former better...IF it is rewarding.

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There's a difference between tutorials that are literally, "press up on the analogue stick to move forward" and games that provide guidance on where and where not to go.

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Yes, I agree. "Rarely does either approach work" was probably too strong a statement but I will say that I find most modern games pretty unsatisfying from a standpoint of feeling like I actually figured something out myself.

For me, the mark of good game design is guiding the player while having them think they're coming up with the ideas themselves.

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For me, the mark of good game design is guiding the player while having them think they're coming up with the ideas themselves.

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it's so weird you say that. I started this whole thread because that's exactly what happened to me last night.

the game was leading me and I didn't know it. it lead me to the point I needed to go but I didn't have the upgrade to access anything beyond that...this was right after beating a boss for which I received an upgrade...so I figured I needed to use the new upgrade to get the next upgrade and kind of knew where that was. so I felt like a genius for not wasting any time figuring anything out

and then in bed it hit me that I had been tricked

Life before HTML formatted gamefaqs sucked. One giant 35,000 word text document.

yep. battletoads definitely belongs on that list.

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never played it. this wasn't really a list making exercise, I was just demonstrating the point that the games on the NES were hard as fricking balls

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Somebody made a good point earlier saying gameplay was all you had because you didn't have incredible graphics.

Nintendo still is a company focused on gameplay to this day.

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Yes, I agree. "Rarely does either approach work" was probably too strong a statement but I will say that I find most modern games pretty unsatisfying from a standpoint of feeling like I actually figured something out myself.

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That's why I love immersive puzzle games. Portal, AntiChamber, The Talos Principle, etc. They show you the rules and leave you to figure the rest.