Castle Paradox

[The Wobbler]

[Rinku]

[Newbie_Power]

I never played the Sims, but I assume it is simple since that seems to be the casual demographic and has been for years.

Honestly though. If you make a good argument for either claim, I'll just flat out ignore it. There are always exceptions to generalizations that are made. I am assuming Sims is one of these exceptions, though someone will likely prove me wrong.
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TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

[Rinku]

I only played it briefly, mainly my knowledge of it comes from watching other people play it and from Will Wright interviews. I think it does have a very complex system under it, there are hundreds of different meters and variables (for instance, even the horoscope sign you pick for a character affects a lot of things in the game). At the same time, it's easy to pick up and play and all that complexity isn't actually visible to the player; most of the players don't care if being an Aries rather than a Libra will help you earn more money or make more friends, they care more about things like creating a character that resembles their boyfriend.
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Tower Defense Game

[Rinku]

I don't really think most casual games are simpler, either. They're just easier for people who are not into games to get into. What I mean is, there's a subtle difference between 'lacking gameplay depth' and 'easy to pick up' -- you can have deep gameplay while being approachable to people who didn't grow up playing videogames.
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Tower Defense Game

[JSH357]

The Sims is very complicated underneath the surface, but there's no goal so it's all essentially a waste. Still a very impressive "toy," but it will not have much lasting appeal several years from now, I imagine.

[Newbie_Power]

The Sims being easy to pick up but complex underneath is absolute proof as to why the PvP comic at hand needs to be taken as satire and not truth. Games are not as one simple or complex as both sides try to make it out to be.
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TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

[Rinku]

Toys can have lasting appeal, though. SimCity and Mario Paint and such were toys too, but people still play with them today.
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Tower Defense Game

[Rinku]

As an aside, or rather, going back to the main point of this thread, I just thought of something: I think that challenge means more than how hard a game is to finish or how often the average player dies.

You can also think of challenge also as a measure of how much a game makes you want to beat it. A game that "challenges" you in this sense is working much like a guy who wants to duel you "challenges" you to a duel.

So when designing a game's challenge, it might be more fruitful to think about, not how hard or how easy the game will be, but rather how you will set up the game so your players will want to achieve things in the game. So your players will feel challenged.

Simplying making a game hard or easy, or having a good balance so that the game starts easy and gets harder as the player is faced with increasingly difficult obstacles, isn't enough to make a player want to get through those challenges and reach the end of the game. It has to be more than that -- the player has to have some reason to want to get through all those challenges, the player has to know it'll feel good to succeed and overcome the challenges, otherwise the player won't see it as a "challenge", no matter how adapted it is to their skill level.

What that reason is varies by the game; two-player games often get their challenge from the competetive instinct -- in chess or Starcraft for instance you want to win against your human opponent. Other games use a high score list and work by the players wanting to get their names up there on the list. Some games are driven by the story and you want to overcome the challenges to see what happens next. In some you're collecting things and the hoarding or completionist instinct causes people to want to complete their collection. There are probably many others.

So what I mean is that I think that type of thing -- why the player wants to overcome the challenges -- is a pretty important part of designing challenge; arbitrary puzzles and challenges aren't enough to cause most players to want to do them, you usually need to give them things beyond the obstacles themselves that "challenge" a player.
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Tower Defense Game

[JSH357]

[Rya.Reisender]

That's not true. I'm using Moogle1's definition of it:
Difficulty = How often you die
Challenge = How much skill / intelligence the player needs

A game where you throw a dice and only win if you throw a "1" three times in row, then the game is hard, but the challenge is basically zero, because you don't need any skills except in lifting the dice and throwing it. These games are boring, though.

Games that are actually "complicated on the inside" but don't show this complexity to the player are actually the games that I like. In fact, these games are my favorites. For example the battle systems of Star Ocean 2 and Valkyrie Profile are actually pretty complex regarding all the "positions", "area of damage", "knockback", "position after attack" and so on. But the player still can win most battles just by button smashing (and maybe a good setup once in a while, which can be done in some minutes). Another example is SaGaFrontier. The mechanics behind it are extremely complicated. It's almost impossible to determine when you'll learn a skill or get a stat increase at all, however, the player doesn't even need to worry about this at all. The game doesn't tell him anything about it, so he's not even forced to understand it. If you explore all the places in SaGaFrontier before going to the final boss, it's pretty much possible to beat him without understanding any of the mechanics except for "Use the skills that do most damage in a round". These games are awesome, they have a balanced difficulty, are very complex, but don't demand a high amount of skill from the player, that's why they are very enjoyable. You can just play them to enjoy them.

So with Rinku's explanation of the difference between "lacking gameplay depth" and "easy to pick up", I can summarize it like this: I'm not looking for games that lack gameplay depth, I'm lacking for games which are very easy to pick up.

Just that I think that some optional difficulty should be given. There are people who want to care about whether Aries or Libra lets you earn more money. But there are also people who don't even want to know about these things, because knowing about they would make the game way less enjoyable.

This is actually a common effect I have with many games. If I know too much about the game mechanics, I can't enjoy the game anymore. It often happens when I check a walkthrough because I got stuck and then find some info about a certain system and I wanna try it out then and in the end there are so many system I need to take care of in order to make the game easy that I lose motivation to play the game altogether.

That's also why I quit almost all games eventually that offered complex systems like "Monster catching" and "Forging", that couldn't be skipped. Vagrant Story and Shin Megami Tensei are good examples here. I liked both pretty much until I wasn't able to continue without forging or catching monsters, but those forging and catching monster system are way too complex for the player to be enjoyable. In Vagrant Story if you don't use a full forging guideline it's almost impossible to finish the game at all. In Shin Megami Tensei you must almost always catch the correct types of mobs to even be able to beat the next boss, but there's no indication which mobs are good at all in the game, so you basically need to a guideline for this as well. And I totally hate these kinds of games.


Many good games make these things optional. In Tales of... games you can get a Nintendo Controller which when equipped makes the gameplay during battles way harder. There are also games like Azure Dreams where you don't even need to bother about catching monsters because you're starting monster is the strongest anyways. Or games that offer forging, but which can also be beat without it, because the weapons in treasure chests will still be better unless you invest a lot time into forging. You can also beat FFVII without raising Chocobos. You can beat FFVIII, FFIX without those card games. You can beat FFX without that waterball game (although, that waterball game was actually better then the real FFX game and I ended up only playing it instead of advancing the story). There are many games that also just offer a selectable difficulty. In some of those games the game mechanics are simplified on "Easy" as well, instead of just raising your health. Devil May Cry is for example enjoyable on Auto-Combo (Easy) mode for me, while on Normal mode it's no fun at all because you need to memorize all the combos and input them which basically makes me not using cool super-combos anymore and so the game looks much less cool. etc. etc.
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Snippy:
"curt or sharp, esp. in a condescending way" (Oxford American Dictionary)
"fault-finding, snappish, sharp" (Concise Oxford Dictionary, UK)
1. short-tempered, snappish, 2. unduly brief or curt (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

[Newbie_Power]

I actually agree... Complexity is better left under-layered under the surface, unless the game is for an audience that likes complexity (which I doubt is much of an audience).

This does not change my stance that I dislike features that help kill challenge. Features like that have little to do with whether or not a game is easy to pick up: It has everything to do with putting the game down.

Going back to Subspace Emissary, I think it did a lot of the right things concerning challenge, except for one thing: Losing all of your lives is beneficial, because you start out at the beginning of a level section and regain all of your lives. They should have recording the number of lives you entered that room with, and possibly allow the player to earn an extra life to help make up for it.
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TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

[Rya.Reisender]

Oh I forgot to mention. I hate games where you have to play against another human player. I can't play those at all. On the other hand, playing with a human player against the computer is awesome.

Even in MMORPGs I never do PVP. Only partying. And in strategy games like Starcraft it's the same. Secret of Mana is really enjoyable because you can play together with a friend.

Also you guys should check out Blaze & Blade, it's the only roguelike with two player co-op I know. Are there more games like this?
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Snippy:
"curt or sharp, esp. in a condescending way" (Oxford American Dictionary)
"fault-finding, snappish, sharp" (Concise Oxford Dictionary, UK)
1. short-tempered, snappish, 2. unduly brief or curt (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

[Camdog]

[The Drizzle]