I beg of you to go into a steak subreddit and tell them potted beef is steak. You might actually discover the most efficient method of negative karma farming in the known universe.
You're not crazy. It's an old school method for preserving leftover meat. It's mashed and mixed with butter or tallow with a little extra poured on top to form an airtight cap
This was in reference to the quote “censorship is like telling a man he cant have steak because a baby cant chew it” although we arent really talking about censorship. It was just what came to mind
I got that, but if you make a steak, mash it into a pulp and mix in some fats so that a baby can chew it, you basically have potted beef. Basically it will be possible for a baby to eat it, but it's not a steak anymore
Yeah that was exactly what i was referencing, even though we arent really talking about censorship, it was just what came to mind
Ive never heard that one tho. I had to reread it. The one i heard was “censorship is like telling a man he cant have steak because a baby cant chew it”
There was a video game conference a while back that was using a streamer struggling on where to go in a linear boat scene down the river in the tutorial for God Of War PS4. The point was that even though it was effectively a drift down the river, some gamers may struggle to find their way and that the developers need to account for them, which is dumb. That streamer was DSP btw.
Honestly if you look at the average intelligence of people nowadays, can you really blame them? Remember how Netflix had to completely change how they made shows and movies because people kept getting confused when the plot wasn't explained out to them?
tbf, anytime someone cries about not being good in a game the first thing they say is "I'm an adult with a 20 jobs and 30 kids and a life. Sorry I'm not a mouth breather living in my mom's basement playing all day!"
They should have at least made it an optional toggle or difficulty selector. Call it "Game Journalist Mode" or whatever. You need a way to turn off over-handholding for those that are annoyed by big red arrows floating on screen directing you on where to go in a linear hallway. Wolverine's SmellVision is super annoying that you can't turn it off. Other games make you hold a button to get itrusive trail hints.
I knew a guy from Activision who organised internal playtests of games. They formed the conclusion players will attempt to problem solve a puzzle/problem for about 7-8 seconds before they're bored of it. If someone couldn't find a window or didn't know where a key was or that they had to jump onto the pipe to get across the gap,, point it out to them after about 7 seconds or they basically don't like the game any more.
I’d be super curious to know if people were quicker to get bored/frustrated because they couldn’t see the solution or because they could but couldn’t find the way to activate it.
Like, “there appears to be nothing I can move to grant me access to the next platform” vs “I know I need to move that box to get to the next platform, but I cant find a way to move it.”
I remember that was a big problem with a lot of games back in the 2000's. There would be a progression blocker, but zero indication that the progression blocker existed (or how to remove it) because it was implemented by a team who had been staring that feature/mechanic in the face at it for 3~5 straight years.
If we take the description and that people are saying it happens anyway as truth, I'm assuming that if you don't press the button it will just sit there flashing with the scene paused.
I am all for accessibility options. If it's off by default and OP turned it on just to complain about it then it is misleading engagement bait. Unfortunately it plays into the existing narrative about the game being too hand-holding and treating gamers like idiots, which the game absolutely does do.
I'll enable it for that reason, I hate the QTEs in most games (unless they have really neat failure options) so I'll just disable them and enjoy the "cutscene" instead of missing most of whats happening in the scene waiting for a specific button press.
QTEs aren't great gameplay, but why even have them in the first place if failing is the same as succeeding them. Just save everyone the time and make it a cutscene.
That's my thing. I don't particularly mind QTEs, but if I'm locked in on playing a bad DDR clone, I'm definitely not paying attention to what's actually happening.
Its not engagement bait. Some people are jumping on the opposite bandwagon as all the blind haters and just blindly supporting.
The only difference if you toggle that feature will be if the button inputs will be displayed or not. Either way, pressing or not pressing a button during the QTE will not change anything. Theres no fail. They basically just added fake QTEs to cutscenes to make it seem like less of a cutscene
Whenever you start a game, the default settings besides like performance mode, FOV, and blur should be the default intended experience devs expect the average player to have. The fact that the game is this hand-holdy by default is the problem. But this example isn't a big deal. The more pressing concern is the scent trail that tells you exactly where to go at all times.
Yeah what this does is turn off the QTE popups completely. If it’s not toggled on, they pop up but will still autocomplete even if you don’t press anything. You can’t disable them displaying and autocompleting
Sure, sniper elite 5, hogwarts legacy, almost every ubisoft game especially the AC franchise, but i mean come on, ppl bring up sony because they are the biggest offenders of it. I was actually disappointed in spider man 2 and so i wasnt surprised that wolverine would turn out like this.
the mobile games industry basically created this. what constitutes a "game" on mobile is a string of animated cut scenes with autorun, autonavigate, autoshoot/act in a corridor-restricted environment, all done with a one-button press and littered with microtransactions and gacha mechanics. Choose Your Own Adventure had more control and choice than modern mobile games.
I once did a poll about difficulty asking how many times you would ideally fail before beating a boss in a game. The two most popular answers were 0 and 1, garnering almost two thirds of the vote.
It seems like most gamers essentially want to be a child who was handed an unplugged controller and think they’re beating the game by just mashing whatever.
I play a lot of total war and I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of players just reload battles until they win. It really seems like a lot of gamers don't want any negative outcomes when they play
IMO some games make the consequences so bad you may as well restart the whole game.
The XCOM remakes (not the OGs as much) have this issue. It takes a long time to level up your soldiers, and if you lose your good ones because an alien got a lucky critical from across the map, it will set you back a long ways, because now not only have you lost one of your best soldiers, but now you're even more outnumbered than before (because the remakes had a hard limit of a 4 person squad, then 6 with mid-late game upgrades).
Or maybe you don't lose anyone but you failed to meet the objective. Now you're short a scientist, and it's going to take twice as long to get laser weapons up, and now the aliens are fielding bigger aliens with more armor and health that the basic guns can't handle anymore. Each failure compounds on the last that all it takes is one or two bad missions and everything after that is just waiting for the game to tell you "so sorry you lost, try again from the start?". Some people don't have the time to play the long game anymore.
I'd say XCOM EW isn't too bad, but XCOM 2 WotC? One bad mission can RUIN you, and it doesn't help that Advent troops are stronger than the aliens in XCOM EW for a good long while. I'm in act 2 of EW with the detector troops, and they are still easier than WotC... and I'm on a higher difficulty than I'd played xcom 2 on.
You can TPK in XCOM2 really quickly if you're not careful, too. It's really rare to have less than 3 succeed with a mission that goes bad. Between the clock and the mobs, keeping just two soldiers alive can get into impossible territory fast.
I was doing a run of Darkest Dungeon after the recent DLC got dropped, a missclick on like week 3 sent my party to the farmstead to deal with the horde mode. I got out of that without losing anyone but the stress levels weren't great. I start my next dungeon, week 4, I've barely had any opportunities to hire new heroes, and the first room of the new boss I get jumped by a wandering boss that I think is from the farmstead's DLC who proceeds to kill my Crusader and my Vestal. I run back to the hamlet, and I now can't form a party because the game hasn't given me any tank or healer characters at all so I've got nothing but midline characters and no one for frontline or backline, so on like week 3 I just restarted the whole run.
It's a bit like how in XCOM 2 you can fail an entire campaign on the Gatecrasher mission at the start by getting your opening team massacred. It was even worse at launch if you played the tutorial because you only came out of gatecrasher with one squaddie, and the second mission it forced you into was kinda busted and dropped multiple sectoids on your rookies.
Does it have permanent consequences? I love challenge but do sometimes struggle with permadeath. I'm trying to psych myself up to play Fire Emblem next week with permadeath on.
It does, loosing a battle will put you in a worse position (Honestly, sometimes better by killing off an army and fixing your economy).
Overall, the reason you want to be okay with loss in a total war game is because it makes the whole campaign more engaging and distinct when compared to just an endless string of wins.
That sounds cool. I'm familiar with the idea of permanent consequences always being a bad thing if you cannot fully win a level. I like the idea of there being tradeoffs.
Fire Emblem games are normally made with the idea of being able to lose some units and still win the game (the exceptions being Radiant Dawn and Three Houses that dont really feel made with the idea of losing anyone for diferent reasons).
playing and accepting losses and seeing how far can you get its normally called Ironman (based on the same challenge mode in Xcom), its a fun way to play the games, even if you lose there is a lot of fun to be had.
Yeah I cannot imagine a Nintendo game locking me out of winning. Permadeath just makes me feel like maybe I'm going to miss out on interesting characters or something. I think I am finally just going to play permadeath and live with the results. The previews seemed to agree that the game is a bit too easy on normal.
I do that sometimes but to me the negative consequence is having to restart the fight. I like trying to figure out and redo missions/battles in strategy games until I win them or do them perfectly. Like I play fireemblem with permadeath on specifically because it forces me to restart the fight if I lose anyone not because I want to go the rest of the game without that character as a negative outcome for me failing that stage. Same with Xcom I like having to spend hours and hours redoing the same mission on the hardest difficulty to avoid the negative consequences of losing a solider.
If you played any somewhat skill based online game on launch you quickly realize that majority of players struggle with simple mechanics.
I always bring up Lost Ark launch as my point because the game had tons of mechanics where one person messing up meant full wipe and also got unusual amount of hype attracting people who never played such games before. The amount of hours I lost because other players couldn't turn their character towards marked players, hit orb matching their color or walk clockwise was eye opening to me.
You would wipe, explain mechanics, everyone tells you they understood then mechanic happens and same guy or two would just freeze or do everything wrong, repeat that for hour or two straight till someone got enough and rage quits to get better party.
Been a long time since I've played any MMO but I still remember my WoW days and whole raids wiping because just a few people who don't understand the concept of "don't stand in fire".
Same with the difference between sandbox games where you lose all your stuff if you die vs platformers, rpgs, etc where death is just a reset and you try again. Some people just hate grinding to get back all the gear they lost.
But Elden Ring does hold your hand (by a From title’s standards) - there are very simple ways to almost trivialise that game whereas older From games like Bloodborne and Dark Souls, if you couldn’t do something your options were keep doing it until you can, quit or summon someone who can do it for you.
And I’ll absolutely guarantee, a significant chunk of the player base for Elden Ring have never beaten Malenia or Godskin or PC Radahn without summons (NPC or real) and I’m not judging anyone for that but even From are making their games more accessible, which is a gentle way to say easier!
Comparing THIS to Elden rings is a stretch, i agree Elden ring is the easiest of their games and not my favourite one (sekiro fanboy here) but it’s still way better than this level of babying we see with Wolverine
She really isn’t. There are so many buffs, so many options available to you that just isn’t there in the older games.
I got back and fight Nameless King now and it takes me quite a few tries before I’m even remotely ready for him, I beat Melania first try and I beat her first try on most attempts.
I roll my eyes every time somebody makes this point. Elden Ring is still one of the hardest souls games despite all the tools you get.
Bloodborne is much easier than Elden Ring no questions asked. You have optional stuff just like in Elden Ring to level up, you have insane weapons (Chainsaw Blade lmao), you also have summons, and the bosses are easy. Only the DLC gets complicated.
Dark Souls also gets complicated but even there you have cheese strats or NPC summons.
Elden Ring is scaled the fuck up. Insane boss movesets. You do get more tools but the game itself is very hard so it cancels out. Elden Ring just has so much content and looks so good people of course stuck with it more.
I disagree. I overdid my build in Elden Ring and the game became too easy. I beat Malenia second attempt and Elden Beast first attempt. I did struggle early but if you're smart the game eventually gives you enough tools to completely trivialize the challenge. There is a reason why ER sickos have all these handicaps they apply. Like not using summons as an example.
I mean, I loved Elden Ring but there’s nothing wrong with calling it easy/“inclusive”.
Spirit ashes trivialize boss fights and make them boring, there’s progression skipping since there’s no skill gates like in any of their semi-linear titles, and also travelling across the entire map to farm for souls and over level.
If their next game is semi-linear again with no spirit summon mechanics, do you really think it’ll sell just as well? It’ll be criticized for not being “accessible”.
But thats the POINT. Without the new tools it is too hard for a souls game. Harder than it was when you WEREN'T an experienced souls player.
If the next game was semi-linear with no spirit mechanics, no flask, they would either have to bump the difficulty down on bosses a little to achieve the same intended difficulty and get called boring by the experienced players OR keep the difficulty as is and get quit on by the majority of players that would've fought through dark souls and its intended difficulty
That doesn't make it accessible or easy, your way makes it more inaccessible. beyond YOUR ACCESS even.
but there’s nothing wrong with calling it easy/“inclusive”.
i've seen slips on youtube of streamers trying to fight some of the bosses and they die hundreds of times. streamer skill is all over the place but people who play video games, would not be dying hundreds of times to one boss if the game were easy.
Solo, it definitely is. And it’s still harder than most games out there but my first play through I used a couple of the ashes and pretty much all of the bosses, and I’m not exaggerating, I beat first try including some of the notorious ones.
I’m an experienced Souls player so that counts for some of it but I’ve been experienced at these games for a long time and that didn’t mean much against Nameless King or Gael or Rom (I fucking hate that potato) or Ludwig.
Elden Ring CAN be the hardest Souls game, it can also be comfortably the easiest too.
Also likely that a lot of people would think that they would most enjoy one-shotting or quickly beating a boss but in practice would get bored with a game like that.
Ex. one of my favorite boss fights and most memorable moments from Elden Ring was when I beat Godfrey first try. But it only meant so much because of how many times I had been manhandled by other bosses before him
it's 100% this, just look at any popular game community and you will see people with hundreds of hours played complaining that it should be made easier. If they really wanted that they could just play an easier game
people are extremely bad at identifying what they want, but quick to proclaim what they think they want
it's also funny to see the flipside, where someone who has cleared an obstacle gets incredibly indignant and offended when the developers acknowledge something about it was unfair and nerf it, e.g. Radahn
I will say that, in my opinion, the perfect balance of a game allows you to beat the boss on the first try but just barely. It presents a new challenge, gives me enough time to figure it out, and enough resources to complete the challenge on the first try. This allows me to progress through the game without having to replay sections or repeat content.
It's pretty much impossible to hit for every player though, because each person is different in their abilities and skillsets. It's a sliding scale as opposed to a hard line. Video games are the only media where you cannot progress if you don't pass a challenge. In books for example, you can just keep turning pages and getting more content, even if you "don't get it".
So a developer has to choose where on the scale they land. If it's too easy/hand holdy then you get comment sections like this. While the average/casual gamer appreciates that they continue the game, the hardcore gaming audience finds the lack of challenge silly.
The flip side is, games that are very difficult require dedicated effort, that might be off-putting to larger audiences. For example, even though Elden Ring sold very well, only 25-30% of people who bought it finished the game. 50% of the audience made the roughly halfway point, and the last 25% didn't make it to the first safe haven.
If you loop those groups together, roughly 75% of the playerbase have only experienced one half or less, of the game's content.
As production of content is the main expense of a video game, this means that somewhere around half of the production of the video game, was not experienced by 75% of it's players. The game was so hard that most players received less content than they paid for, simply due to a skill issue.
This causal audience will quickly find a new game to play, where they can just mash a controller and think they're winning.
And this is the challenge of setting difficultly in video games.
I think there is even more nuance than you're pointing out. For most games I am disappointed if I beat bosses on the first attempt even if it is just squeeking by. My sweet spot is 30-90 minutes to beat a boss. That being said, if a game has been kicking my ass and then I beat a boss first try I will be ecstatic. Or there are games I play where I am okay with them being on the easier end and beating most challenges quickly. Even for individuals the difficulty preferences are going to change from game to game.
I do agree with you that for mass audiances it makes sense to either make games easy or have difficulty options. I also think the standard difficulty should be fairly easy. On the other hand I disagree that FromSoft games being too hard for most players in an impediment to their sales. I think that is the specific reason they sell so well. I think they would be less popular if they added difficulty modes because then there would be less pride in having beaten them and their dedicated audiance would shrink.
It's crazy to me that half of ER audiance quit 50% through the game. The second half is so much easier if you're smart about making a good build. I wonder if it was running into a wall they couldn't beat or if they simply had their fill.
I don't have the free time to spend replaying a boss fight over and over. Why would you want to experience the same content ad nauseum because the boss is a bullet sponge or has tricky timing windows? At that point, you're not "reacting" and playing the game, you're playing a more advanced version of Simon where you're just repeating a pattern as best as you can.
I want to see what else the game has to offer. Not handed to me, but if I've mastered the combat, I dont want an artificial difficulty spike because it's a "boss".
Yeah I think it's pretty safe to say that the spectrum of "how easy should a game be" ends somewhere before "the game will literally play itself for you."
You can look at steam achievement %s and easily see that 30+% of people basically open the game once, play for 5 minutes, then never touch it again (common to see for nearly every game), so I don't think % of game not experienced is a metric that matters.
Have you ever considered that other people have different opinions on what is fun and that doesn't make them babies?
I don't enjoy FromSoft style bosses because I don't like replaying the same content over and over. I'm an adult with a job, I don't want to waste my free time. A challenge is fine, but something that's explicitly designed to fuck me over until I memorize it like a speed run isn't fun to me.
I mean ideally I'd be awesome at everything my first try, or with one mistake I can immediately correct. This sounds like a problem with the phrasing. Because the amount of times I'm willing to tolerate losing to a boss before I take a break or quit is a lot higher, and that's true of most people I think. At least the ones who aren't here for story mode, which is a whole other thing.
I get what you're saying. I like to get my ass kicked by games but I'm currently playing Stellar Blade which I think is easy so I am disappointed in myself when I do not beat bosses on the first or second attempt. On the other hand I beat Melania in two tries and felt robbed of a good time by my build being too good. It really just depends on the game.
I agree that the phrasing in the poll could change the results. I don't recall my exact language but I personally love challenge so I imagine that bias showed up in the language. I think I asked something along the lines of "how many attempts do you think it should take to beat a boss in a game?".
It was on reddit so I also got written feedback to the poll. People who skewed towards less attempts gave the typical reasons for why people don't like souls games. "I'm busy", "My life is stressful I don't need that from games", etc. I don't recall anyone saying anything along the lines of what you're suggesting.
This is part of why pollster is a job, and a real skill in the sciences. The phrasing can change things so much as a baseline, there are inherent biases, ways that people approach questions, parts of neutrality, things around it, whether they feel like they're being seen or not.
I'm not amazing with it but I've had to do a little for my own job, and I think if this was my full time gig I would lose my mind because it is so stupendously picky.
The word "ideally" meaning, in the best case scenario, skews towards that. It's faster, it's more satisfying to be great at something first try no matter the challenge, it lets you do more things. There's also an age issue. For my generation, as people who started on the NES, my expectations for games is different. For people who are parents, there's a lot less time. How many times a week you get to game, that is a huge factor.
Grouping those same people together is harder and gives you skewed data which doesn't fully answer the question. Again, if I had to do this full time I would basically never stop screaming in my head the entire time I was at work.
Yeah I find poll construction to be very interesting. I work in politics so the biggest application for me is to look at polls and determine whether they were intended to be a scientifically rigorous attempt to sample the public, or a bad faith use of a poll as propoganda. A lot of groups will use question languauge that they hope will trick people into giving their preferred responses so that they can then use the poll results in their messaging.
I'll say it. (For me) If its a story focused game all of the cinema and fun of a boss battle go out the window after the fifth or sixth death. Beyond that I don't feel "a sense of pride and accomplishment" after. I'm just happy to be done with it. Too much of that across the whole game and I know I won't ever touch it again. I totally understand that poll.
Developers have gotten much better with save points at different stages of battles though so its not as bad.
People like you are so funny to me. You’re smart enough to understand statistics and science right up to the point that it suits your own biases but then no further.
Sure a several hundred people voting on a reddit gamer sub is not the most scientifically rigorous poll in the world but two thirds of hundreds of people saying they essentially do not want a game to provide is still statistically significant. I think the fact that most major games continue to get easier and easier proves this point because publishers have millions of data points from player telemetry, and it’s clearly telling them that to have the widest possible audience their games needs to be easy.
Deltarune fandom loves the superhard secret bosses, but there are definitely some who hate the difficulty spike. The latest one had a difficulty setting patched in.
That's kind of a bad question though because no one wants to fail, and it's oversimplifying. The answer to how many times we should fail before defeating a boss is really a question - how well do we understand the game mechanics?
I want to fail. My preference is for bosses to take 30-90 minutes to beat. I don't want bosses to simply test my understanding of the mechanics. I want them to test my ability to apply those mechanics at a high level.
I agree the languauge of a poll matters a lot. I don't remember the exact language I used, but I also received written feedback in the comments of the poll, and people understood what I meant. The people who answered 0 and 1 commented things like "I'm too busy for hard games" and the people who commented that they want to lose a lot said they don't see the point of playing games if there is not going to be a challenge.
Could also be hope and projection for what they are striving to be. Like “If I were a better gamer I could beat a boss the first time or after one failed attempt.” Thats not necessarily wanting the game to be easy, but themselves, the player, to be better.
It's something I've been thinking about recently. I played Bloodborne once and really struggled with it so I gave up, then later I went back after playing more Soulslikes and ended up killing many of the bosses on the first try. I had a much better experience in that second playthrough. The game wasn't easy, but its difficulty was low enough for me to struggle through without having to repeat the same content over and over again. I think that's the sweet spot most games should strive for, the "flow state" where you never lose but only because you're putting in 100% every time, and it's a really tough balance because everyone's 100% is different.
Seems like this is exactly why "difficulty" options exist. If people want to have their hand held the entire way, then that's their prerogative. But forcing that hand holding on all of the player base is where most of the criticism is coming from. What if I enjoy dying 20 times in one section until I earn the victory? Why would they deny me that satisfaction?
Depends on the game. Dark Souls bosses I expect to get my face kicked in repeatedly
Something like Dead Cells where just getting to the first boss was a bit of a challenge, the layout of the dungeon keeps changing, and it's a longass fight to get back to it because you go back to the start of the game, I get shitted off after a few deaths.
This x1000. I caught flack after the debut gameplay trailer when I said there was a disconnect from the aesthetic being photo realistic and mature but the gameplay looking arcadey.
Even GTA V had various directions like, "get in your car" or "lose the cops." I think those are pretty easy to figure out if you've got even a little gaming experience.
I mean basics for the beginning of a game are pretty normal. Half Life 2 gave us a tutorial on how to do most things we could do in Half Life. We also learned how to pick up the can which was a very important step.
Sure, but one thing is telling you what you’re supposed to do, the other is make your character enter the car and drive by itself if don’t do anything.
You really gotta wonder what their data says about the current demo of 18+ gamers. They obviously have a whole department dedicated to researching what their target demo wants so....are they making poor choices? Or are they giving a group of cavemen what they want?
I've seen plenty of comments on the reviews being like "IM A FATHER, THIS IS EXACTLY THE TYPE OF GAME I WANT AT THE END OF A LONG DAY" or "As long as I get to slice people up, I'm happy". We like to think that everyone wants what we want, but it seems like the target demo is happy with this "my first video game"-esque garbage
It's designed for me. I'm a 43 year old man with 4 kids and who loved comics as a kid. I work a lot, so I have little time for video games. When I do play video games, I play in short bursts, and do like to win. I do t want anything too frustrating.
All that said, they designed it for people like me, but it's still nothing I would buy, because while in theory it fits things that I should like, I don't actually want a video game that's mostly a movie. When I want my 20 minutes of video game domination, I just play a sports game on easy
What if 17 year olds are actually like that? I just realized how the new generation is doomed, they can't and won't read, can't calculate, can't follow some instructions manuals...
Don’t judge an entire generation from a few idiots, plenty of people my age that can’t and won’t read, can’t calculate, can’t follow instructions. Idiots in every generations
Well yeah the company who said gamers are "picky babies" doing exactly what they said they do. How are yall surprised. this is the same company who worked on games like Suicide Squad.
Seriously, there's a huge gap between "I work for a living and can't learn as many unique and deep combat systems as games seem to require nowadays" and "I got distracted by YouTube shorts and the controller is sticky from sugar."
Who is buying this shit full price? At this point for anyone interested just wait for the 85% off sale, based off what I seen though I’m not even buying it at that price lol
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u/Rendole66 Sep 11 '26
Mmm a rated 17+ game that’s designed for babies… that was an odd choice.