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[Christian223]

Big budget games need to be casual (because casual games make more money) or else they will loose money (unwise investment), but with this mentality games with more depth and difficulty are left behind, meaning that in the coming years as budget rises, we will see even more casualising of games and less deep and well thought hardcore games (games like rainbow six 1, deus ex 1 or system shock 1&2).

So, here is a nice question, how develop big budget games that appeal to both crowds of players?.

[Shawny]

Care to explain what you refer to as casual gaming?

Because it sounds to me like you just seem to only care for stories and are completely unaware of the innovation and gameplay styles we've been introduced to in recent years. The gaming industry is built off innovative new ways of creating and playing games, not just deep stories and realistic graphics.

[s0]

 "Easy to learn, hard to master" games like Starcraft 2 are probably the best compromise, or at least a good one. Also, as far as the singleplayer realm is concerned, it looks like Fallout New Vegas is trying to appeal to both crowds with its optional hardcore mode. How successful that'll be remains to be seen.

Also @Shawny: I don't wanna speak for Christian here but I'm not sure how you got the "story & graphics" angle from his post. I think he was talking about gameplay. Most new age AAA titles are incredibly shallow compared to the games he listed.

[iffi]

"Easy to learn, hard to master" games like Starcraft 2 are probably the best compromise, or at least a good one.

In a single-player game, different difficulty levels can also help make an otherwise difficult game appeal to more casual players, or an easier game appeal to more hardcore players, though it doesn't actually make the gameplay deeper, just harder.

[Christian223]

To avoid further confusion, I was talking about game mechanics/gameplay.

And yes, the innovations we are seeing are interesting, but we also a decrease in games where you have to think carefully, games that are hard to master, and as iffi said, it's not just about making a game harder.

[s0]

The problem is that a lot of games include difficulty levels as an afterthought. Most of the time, playing on a higher-than-normal difficulty just amounts to more and/or tougher enemies which often makes the game feel unbalanced and frustrating. This is actually  another reason I'm interested in New Vegas. Obsidian's intent seems to be crafting a separate experience for hardcore gamers who want a deep and challenging game while letting the more "casual" crowd have their handholding and low difficulty.

Also, on a related note, I think in way by making a game harder you're automatically making it deeper as well. You're giving the player an incentive to really master the mechanics and use them intelligently instead of letting them "get away" with mashing the attack button.

Take Demon's Souls, one of my favorite games of the last couple years, for instance. If they reduced the difficulty, it'd become a simple cookie-cutter hack'n'slash. You could play through the game merrily swinging away with the biggest sword in your posession without ever paying heed to the complex equipment system, combat tactics, different weapon behaviors etc. Sure these things would still exist as "optional" gameplay elements, but it's not satisfying to master skills you don't need to apply.

[gimymblert]

supposing the game is deep to begin with. Making it harder does not do that however. If the mechanics does not support nuance you only get tedium.

[SirNiko]

Bionic Commando Rearmed follows Sinclair's "Depth and Difficulty are related" suggestion. The game has different enemy AI between difficulties. In addition to increasing the number of enemies and reducing your life, foes gained new tricks on higher levels, such as ducking behind barrels, using low attacks, or tossing grenades down or up to get you.

To survive, the player needs to use more of their tricks. For example, knocking bullets out of midair is just for fun on easy, but on hard it's required to block the low bullets. On super-hard, enemies attack from both sides, so human shields are critical to survival. Places that used to be safe spots are no longer safe thanks to enemies tossing grenades, forcing you to find new and more difficult paths to clear the stages. You're also forced to think about the order you tackle the levels, so that you can get the upgrades you need to clear trickier stages.

I consider it to be a pretty excellent example of how to properly implement difficulty levels in a game.

[starsrift]

Is this question not academic in this locale?

Anyway, I guess the solution is to develop a complex game, and give it a derp-mode that streamlines everything and assumes averages or lets AI handle the more complex parts. The example of this that comes most quickly to mind for me is 4x games with planetary "manager" AI.

I'd be interested to hear how Civ5 might factor into this subject, from any who may have gotten it...

[RCIX]

Is this question not academic in this locale?

Anyway, I guess the solution is to develop a complex game, and give it a derp-mode that streamlines everything and assumes averages or lets AI handle the more complex parts. The example of this that comes most quickly to mind for me is 4x games with planetary "manager" AI.

I'd be interested to hear how Civ5 might factor into this subject, from any who may have gotten it...

There's a ton of whining on various forums about how it's "dumbed down", "feels kinda like it was designed for a console", the ui is "horrible", and the actual game mechanics are "combat-oriented and shallow". All this despite the fact that they merely made some changes to make the game more accessible to non-number nuts and remove/change elements that simply didn't work so well.

That's how i see it anyway

[bvanevery]

Big budget games need to be casual (because casual games make more money) or else they will loose money (unwise investment), but with this mentality games with more depth and difficulty are left behind, meaning that in the coming years as budget rises, we will see even more casualising of games and less deep and well thought hardcore games (games like rainbow six 1, deus ex 1 or system shock 1&2).

That Minecraft guy is making money hand over fist, and he's charging people for a friggin' alpha quality game lacking many basics that most gamers expect.  You know, like: instructions, graphics that aren't butt ugly, and performance that doesn't suck.  There aren't going to be "less" of these games, there are going to be lots more.  You can't make money like that without others trying to cash in.

So, here is a nice question, how develop big budget games that appeal to both crowds of players?.

Since you started with a false premise, do we have to solve this problem?

[bvanevery]

I'd be interested to hear how Civ5 might factor into this subject, from any who may have gotten it...

Huh.  Civ5 shipped then.  I'll be damned.  Shows how much I haven't been paying attention.  Ok, well, 2 weeks ago I was in the National Forests.  Had been there on and off for the past few months.  Then over Labor Day weekend my stuff got stolen, and a survival nut pointed a large caliber handgun at my dog.  So I retreated from the woods.  I'm only now just getting over that, so I really haven't been paying attention to Civ5.  Which is ironic because there's only 2 games I play regularly: Freeciv and The Battle for Wesnoth.  One is a "pop the huts" grind and the other is a "level up your units" grind.     Actually there's a certain amount of complex thought that goes into both, but they definitely both take too much time.  Part of why I stick with these 2 games is I don't have to learn anything new.  When I get sick of one, I tend to go back to the other for a few months.  Or else try to work on my own games, or try to get a life.

I ended up snapping Civ IV in half, like its predecessors.  For supposedly having improved the game, they sure didn't get rid of much tedium.  Really they just shuffled it sideways.  You had fewer cities, but you also had this "unit leveling and specialization" system.  So now you sit around futzing all these unit skills, bleh.  Also they didn't remove any buildings and added more religious buildings, so there's more crap there too.  Oh well, at least Civ V already has a demo!  I will try it and see.  If it's the same complication as usual, I'll go back to Freeciv.

[lansing]

I'd be interested to hear how Civ5 might factor into this subject, from any who may have gotten it...

Huh.  Civ5 shipped then.  I'll be damned.  Shows how much I haven't been paying attention.  Ok, well, 2 weeks ago I was in the National Forests.  Had been there on and off for the past few months.  Then over Labor Day weekend my stuff got stolen, and a survival nut pointed a large caliber handgun at my dog.  So I retreated from the woods.  I'm only now just getting over that, so I really haven't been paying attention to Civ5.  Which is ironic because there's only 2 games I play regularly: Freeciv and The Battle for Wesnoth.  One is a "pop the huts" grind and the other is a "level up your units" grind.     Actually there's a certain amount of complex thought that goes into both, but they definitely both take too much time.  Part of why I stick with these 2 games is I don't have to learn anything new.  When I get sick of one, I tend to go back to the other for a few months.  Or else try to work on my own games, or try to get a life.

I ended up snapping Civ IV in half, like its predecessors.  For supposedly having improved the game, they sure didn't get rid of much tedium.  Really they just shuffled it sideways.  You had fewer cities, but you also had this "unit leveling and specialization" system.  So now you sit around futzing all these unit skills, bleh.  Also they didn't remove any buildings and added more religious buildings, so there's more crap there too.  Oh well, at least Civ V already has a demo!  I will try it and see.  If it's the same complication as usual, I'll go back to Freeciv.

...arrives here from forum search for "civ v".

I had never played a civ game before, so I gave the civ v demo a go.  I played it for 65 minutes before it said the demo had expired or something.

I honestly felt like it was something dumbed down, I think I could have completed the demo by pressing a combination of space and enter at random and selecting any research options and any combination of units.

Felt like less of a game than say Age of Empires II, which is all I can really compare it to, yes I know AoE2 wasn't turn based.

Is it worth US $80? From what I've played, no.

[bvanevery]

Is it worth US $80? From what I've played, no.

$50 or $60 on Steam.  No game has ever been worth that much to me though.  I top out at $35.  Now mind you, $35 in 1981 dollars is worth a lot more today, but then my 1st PC cost $4000 in 1993.  My most recent laptop cost me $1250, a desktop replacement with intermediate 3D capabilities, and that was 3 years ago.

Ha, and now I've noticed that there's a "development 1.9.1" version of Wesnoth that I didn't notice before.  So we're having a download race!  Civ V demo on Steam vs. Wesnoth 1.9.1 dev version on Free Download Manager.  Who will get here first?  More to the point, which game will I be playing 1 week from now?  I wasted a buttload of time on Wesnoth today, so I'm not making any assumptions.

Umm Wesnoth is clearly going to win the race.  It's a smaller game, a svelte 288MB compared to the Civ V demo's whatever it is.  Also FDM is doing a good job hogging the bandwidth, whereas Steam seems to be trying to behave itself in the background.  276KB/sec vs. 88KB/sec, hardly fair.

Umm but will bed win the race?  I've been up all night, and a new rev of Wesnoth isn't something one stays awake for.  So I guess it'll depend on how quickly Civ V finishes up.

The winner is... Freeciv!  Which had a 2.2.3 revision that recently shipped, that I hadn't noticed.  It's a downright tiny 15.5MB, so even though Wesnoth was 90% complete when I started downloading Freeciv, it pulled ahead and won the pennant.  Ok, admittedly I did give Freeciv a "bump" in the priority queue to get the download to activate.  No sense starving the new guy just because Wesnoth was first to the trough.  It was quite the footrace, you really should have been there.  Glorious YouTube video it would make, not.

Well the true winner is bed.  Even with new Freeciv and new Wesnoth installed, Civ V is only 25% done.  I'll sleep on that.

[lansing]

It's sold for 80 USD on steam to Australians (because the data has to go through more pipes or what? I don't know.)

[mirosurabu]

You don't need to develop big budget games that appeal to both crowds.

Target specific crowd and if it's a niche crowd give the game a higher price. In the end, if your fans say your games are truly 'deep' and 'complex' higher price would be justified.

[s0]

supposing the game is deep to begin with. Making it harder does not do that however. If the mechanics does not support nuance you only get tedium.

True, but keep in mind we're talking about modern mainstream AAA games here. A lot of them have the exact problem I was talking about earlier. The depth and nuance is there, but there's either no need or incentive to bother with it due to low difficulty, or even worse, the game handles most of the "deep" and challenging aspects automatically, also known as hand-holding.

On that note

Anyway, I guess the solution is to develop a complex game, and give it a derp-mode that streamlines everything and assumes averages or lets AI handle the more complex parts. The example of this that comes most quickly to mind for me is 4x games with planetary "manager" AI.

I thought Dragon Age was a game that did this really well. You could either largely automate the combat via "tactics" or play the game like in the old days of Baldur's Gate and do all the micromanagement yourself, or use a mix of both.

[ZombiePixel]

The alternative has already been presented - modify your game development methods so that you aren't playing into the hit-driven ecosystem.  The lower your overhead the more freedom you have to make the game you truly want.

[bvanevery]

I had never played a civ game before, so I gave the civ v demo a go.  I played it for 65 minutes before it said the demo had expired or something.

I've played Civ II, III, IV, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Call To Power II, and Freeciv.  Civ V is a lot like Civ IV.  I think the demo ended at 100 turns.  I took 5 hours to do it, because I like to think about every little thing.

I honestly felt like it was something dumbed down, I think I could have completed the demo by pressing a combination of space and enter at random and selecting any research options and any combination of units.

The demo was rather easy.  Yes you could have gone in any tech direction and it wouldn't have mattered.  100 turns doesn't represent very much time in the game.  I'm tempted to say that's only 1/4 of the way through the game, judging by the techs I was able to amass.  I only built 2 cities.  I played the Egyptians and built as many Wonders as I could get my hands on.

Not a buy for me.  This is Civ IV with a hex grid, religions (mercifully) removed, ranged combat, cities have self-defense capability, 1 military unit per hex, and maybe a few other minor streamlinings, but it's still going to be a long and ultimately tedious game.  Actually I'm wondering why this game exists other than to get more money from the franchise every few years?  The streamlinings probably make it better than Civ IV, but if you've already played Civ IV to death, this one isn't going to surprise you.

[starsrift]

There's a ton of whining on various forums about how it's "dumbed down", "feels kinda like it was designed for a console", the ui is "horrible", and the actual game mechanics are "combat-oriented and shallow". All this despite the fact that they merely made some changes to make the game more accessible to non-number nuts and remove/change elements that simply didn't work so well.

Is the 'dumbing-down' forced, then, and these are reactions of the hardcore players?

I thought Dragon Age was a game that did this really well. You could either largely automate the combat via "tactics" or play the game like in the old days of Baldur's Gate and do all the micromanagement yourself, or use a mix of both.

I don't disagree with your example as an example of a simplified system, but I think in marketing DA as a massive, deep game, they automatically drove the "casual" players away. I think RPG's in general are hard to make appealing to casual players, WoW aside, owing to the nature of the game - choosing your story and taking achievement in the long-term growth of characters. That said, NWN did an amazing job of marketing to non-D&D players, and they had a number of streamlining options. Another game that come to mind are Jagged Alliance 2 with its lots of guns and sci-fi modes.

I do disagree with your assertion that difficulty translates to deeper play - I can't imagine how, for instance, making Canabalt run faster and require more precisely timed jumps can translate to deeper gameplay. I do think that adding additional options for the player to utilize and then engaging them with those options does translate into deeper gameplay, and by requiring engagement of those other options at higher difficulty levels, your assertion makes sense. IIRC, didn't the PS2 Shinobi game require you to chain your kills at the higher difficulties, in order to survive? I'm probably mistaken, it's been a -long- time.


To bring this more precisely on topic, having more options for the player to use is: more features - and features are the first things that get cut owing to AAA devtime constraints, which, I think, plays into ZombiePixel's point.