The needless 'dumbing down' of games

mikey_boson

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I'll admit, I don't play many games anymore; I prefer to watch people gaming instead. One thing I have noticed is the distinct lack of thinking needed in quite a few games due to the prevalence of 'Detect' mode.

I have recently watched a few of the newer Batman games and from what I saw, the moment you needed to go somewhere, find something or flick a switch, you fire up Detect mode and voila, the way to progress in the game is shown to you. I know Batman is more about the action and adventure so it might not be the best example but there were moments when the way forward was pretty clear but you'd still press Detect to be shown where to go. The same was true for Tomb Raider, which if I'm honest seemed a particularly poor game (but that's another topic of discussion). Call me old school but the point of Tomb Raider was for it to be an action / puzzler game. Sometimes you'd enter a location and maybe spend 10 minutes working out what the hell to do, but that was the beauty. The game lasted a long time because you had to actually THINK about what you needed to do. I know Tomb Raider is slightly different nowadays and targeted at a different market but I just get the feeling that some of this market is borderline 'mindless' gaming.

To cite an example, in Tomb Raider the cliffs you were able to climb all had exactly the same texture and after climbing one, it was blindingly obvious that this texture was climbable. So why on earth did the fact you could climb these cliffs need to be highlighted when you pressed detect? To me (and this is just my opinion) it was like you were insulting the gamer's intelligence by (almost) implying that the gamer will have forgotten that a texture is climbable the next time they encountered it, therefore it must be highlighted when detect is pressed. Surely people are not so forgetful...?

Now I'm not tarring every game with the same brush but surely the excitement of games like Tomb Raider was the fact you had to find things out yourself, not just click Detect mode and then have everything laid out on a platter. Assassin's Creed seems to have started this trend but that is a game that was designed with a 'Detect' function in mind which is why is appears to work quite well. In Tomb Raider though? I just thought to myself, "What a joke".

It's as if games are designed to be completed as quickly as possible with minimal effort or thinking required and I think that's quite sad really.

Rather than being told to go to a specific building next, or even a room in a building, to look for something, you press Detect and you know EXACTLY where to go and which switch to flick (for example). It's almost like watching a film with a tiny amount of gamer interaction. Exploration of an area doesn't exist (in some cases) because you don't explore the area, you're told exactly where to go and what to do there. It sometimes makes me wonder why developers spend so long on graphics when most people will just sprint through an area. I'm not suggesting that these types of games need to make the gamer stop and take stock every 15 minutes to solve a puzzle, not at all. I just don't think that there's any need for things to be made so patently obvious at times, especially for parts of games that are already patently obvious.

To cite a game I thought did get things nicely balanced was The Last Of Us. This is a game that I really enjoyed because you weren't just spoon fed everything, you had to play the game, engage with it and explore an area.

It's just a personal opinion (gripe) of mine that some games are needlessly dumbed down to the extent that they almost play themselves, that's all.
 
You know, I actually thought a lot about this one. I originally thought it was because as the technology grew, games became more story-centric and cinematic, and moved more away from the gameplay being the main part of the fun. Then I realized sports games, beat-em ups, hack-n-slash, and shooters, among other genres, derived their fun much more from the gameplay than any story involved. Then I realized games weren't mainstream in the beginning. Video games, although well-known, were viewed more as a hobby for kids, loners, and geeks/nerds (although this is debatable). Once games became more popular and mainstream, games had to reach a wider audience, of all ages and backgrounds. I believe this is where games started to get easier as time went on. You'll notice this when looking through each console's library. Games have gotten easier over each generation, with more genres and bigger budgets with more of a fanbase/audience.

That's my opinion, anyway.
 
It seems to me that some games are being made to be more accessible for new fans and audiences (rather than "dumbed down"), but more importantly they're about delivering an experience. No longer are we grinding away at Atari Warriors, hoping we'll get past level 4 which looked exactly like level 1, 2 & 3. This called for a definite amount of skill, patience, problem solving and perhaps a strong drink but this isn't at all the focus of most games anymore. People want to feel involved in the world, characters and action, therefore the game must focus on delivering that experience. The development of stages, environment even ecosystems has become pretty integral to game production today.

The two main games mikey_boson used in their examples above both have a heavy focus on creating an experience for gamers; the environments, combat and interaction are everything. The "detect" modes in both play a role, not to "dumb" things down, but rather to show what can be interacted with or where animals and enemies are lurking (survival instincts) or are integral to the game character (i.e. Batman is indeed a detecting crime fighter, so his detective gadgets are important to include and use in the game). Inevitably they let the gamer know what is what, but they don't solve the game for them. An example of this would be in Tomb Raider where you are constantly met with different combat scenarios, using survival instincts will give you the lay of the land and the location of the enemies in your line of view, but it doesn't tell you the most efficient way of taking them out, nor what weapon is best to do so, or which action will trigger more enemies to be alerted. This is all up to the player to solve for themselves.

Some people will find this kind of problem solving easier than finding gold trophies in Tomb Raider I, some will definitely not. I actually know gamers who started back in SNES days who, for the life of them, cannot figure the Tomb Raider reboot out at all, however, they 100% completed all the classic Tomb Raider games no problem. To say that the reboot is "dumbed down" doesn't allow for the fact that people will react to and figure things differently; different strokes for different folks and all that jazz.
 
I believe I was having a very similar conversation to this a few weeks ago. We can point this at any genre actually.

1) Let's first talk about Massive Multiplayer Online games or MMOs for short

* MMOs have became a very paradigm driven with a healer/tank/dps. With this logic, every dungeon boss fight is a way to get you more associated with a Raid boss. Though when mechanics start to dumb down or the gear is no longer needed for certain areas, these rpgs become so uninteresting. Their way to make it more interesting is by over saturating the market with Epics/Legendaries and so forth. This just makes it so every can play. What about all those gamers that were in it since the beginning where dungeon bosses took focus. Then when they get to raids coordinating full blown raids took large mechanic focuses.

i. Don't stand in the fire
ii. As a tank face the boss away from group
iii. Healer conserve mana while healing
iv. DPS use a rotation that is 3 button rotation that has been the same rotation since low lvl.
V. No longer use Crowd Control, have the tank gather all trash mobs.
VI. Tank now needs to have higher DPS and no longer needs to be sword and board only.

* Yes Guild Wars II did it different with no typical paradigm. Though everyone is a damage dealer and a self healer? Great.. maximize dps with a brute.

2) Let's talk about shooters

Call of Duty / Counter Strike / Battlefield (Most Popular as of today)

* The usage of little bits of auto aim on single player games is a handicap. The only thing that made these games fun are the fact that there was no auto aim and you can adjust sensitivity to be as quick as you could think.
* Cheap explosive tactics or one gun can be the sole basis on why a team might win. Strategy is taken out when one gun can basically cripple a whole team or grenade spam or killstreaks.

3) Let's talk about Real Time Strategies

* Macro Management of hot keyed buttons and groups of units; then, the cookie cutter solutions at the game are the only way to develop games. While I agree these games take the most thinking due to it's more like chess, than most, there are still people who can move their fingers faster put their units into position to wreck each others "towers/bases/barracks/strongholds", you name it.

4) JRPGs

* Everything and I mean everything has a hint. FF I was one of the harder games I walked through back in the day, due to I didn't know where the heck I was going. When I received a guide I didn't have all the info I needed either. I always had the risk of having my NES restart the game from the beginning as well. Now a days everything either allows you to max level and beat the game or just casual walk through these jrpgs due to they are so linear.

5) RPGs

* The Elder Scrolls Series is a joke if you level up or just go through the story mode. It is all about story line to be real.
* Fallout 3 - It could be hard, but you also change the difficulty to just casually stroll through the game.

* Dark Souls - Okay, yes hard. Though very addictive if you can figure out what is going on past the first few scenarios. This keeps you enthralled, but people shy away from it because it is too hard and yes you will die many times trying out new tactics and getting the mechanics down.
 
When people talk about "dumbing down" games, you have to realize that games have done this many times in the past. Taking a nice look at Squaresoft history, FFIV (II in America at the time) and Mystic Quest back on the Snes were both games that got "dumbed down" for the purpose that they thought America didn't like or couldn't play hard JRPGS.

Now let us look at last generation. We had games that had functions that made things easier, like for an example in the Batman and Assassins Creed game, you had a "Detect" type of function that let you focus in an a certain person or a certain building. Now did this take away from the overall experience? I don't think so, for these were well explained why you could do this.
Are there games that add things that made a game easier just to make it easier? Sure, but I don't see this as often in any games I play that hasn't been done before in past generation.

Now let us look at a game Shu mention, a game that claims to be one of the hardest games of all time, Demon Souls (and Dark Souls while we are at it.) Are these games really that hard? or is it the way they are laid out that makes them hard? I think these games took a good chunk of their ideas from some old JRPGs that funny got hugely criticized outside of Japan for being too open and too hard Saga Fontier.

Both Demon Souls and Saga Fontier didn't have much of a "learning curve" or a "tutorial" They just kinda threw you into the game and said "HAVE FUN!" on top of that there was no arrow or real guide on where you had to go next, there was no "hey I need you to go to this cave and defeat this guy" or anything, they said basically "guess where you should go next!" going on in these games, which made it harder also. Lastly the open world feeling of both of these games also made it hard to decide where to go next.

Now for me I never saw Demon Souls as hard or challenging, because most of the time it was a bad camera angle that would kill me... Falling into a whole that was around a corner that you couldn't see or a bad turn took you to a boss that was at a way higher level than you were at, so you just go the other way and you were ok. Now I am not saying that there wasn't any challenges, there were, but I never saw this as one of the hardest games ever.... maybe on PS3..but...that's about it.

Now back on topic, the needless "dumbing down" of games. I really don't see this as much as maybe other people, but I see more games trying to hit more people from the young to the older games, and that might be why some companies tried to make games easier for the overall audience but I like I said, I don't see it really that much.
 
For those who have been gaming for a long time, it's simple to say something is easy when you understand how to do it. Since we, as longer standing gamers, are pretty adept at figuring out the logic behind a new game (having done this for years), things will appear easier to figure out and solve.

"Needless dumbing down"? Maybe not so much, perhaps you're just experiencing what innate practice brings you.
 
I think maybe to articulate myself slightly differently (and more briefly) I tend to get the feeling that instead of playing the game, the game plays you in quite a few situations. More often than not it seems like you're playing something that's 70% movie and 30% game. When I chat with people about games a good percentage of them say, "Oh, I just played the game for the storyline". This is fine, I've got no problems with a game having a good storyline, none whatsoever. It's just that people are able to blast through an entire game in 10-15 hours, often less, for not much else than watching a story play out with minimal player input. How can you engage with a lead character (or characters) in that short space of time, especially when a lot of this time is spent watching cut scenes. How can you engage with the game when progression is set out along a set of (almost) rigid rails and that doesn't ever stop for breath. (I know I'm raising other points for discussion here but I feel that they're quite closely linked with the topic in question).

It's sometimes like watching people on 'speed runs' of games when in fact that's the actual speed of the game. I've also lightly discussed this subject with a few other people and something that always crops up, as a couple of you guys have also mentioned, is that the audience of games has changed. I think the issue is that people's attention spans have considerably shortened, mine included I'll openly admit, due to the constant clicking and swiping on our computers and phones. A lot of us just can't stayed focused for long enough to figure out a puzzle in a game; you must be able to complete the challenge in under 30 seconds otherwise people will get frustrated and bored.

I suppose, thinking about it some more, my thread title could lose the word 'needless' because games have needed to be dumbed down somewhat to cater for the current generation of gamers. This is no disrespect either, it's just we're slowly becoming a society that needs fast, furious and constant visual stimulation to stay interested. I'm absolutely sure if people put their phones down for a while and didn't spend hours mindlessly browsing the internet, their ability to focus would return and any puzzles in games would be easily solved anyway.

Also, I did watch some more of the Batman games (in particular the 3rd one) and I did appreciate a bit more the use of the detect function. However, there were still some situations where I do think it was unnecessary.

p.s. On a slight side note, I did think the Tomb Raider reboot was dreadful. The storyline was poor at best, the characters were so stereotypical of the characters out of any survival / adventure / action / drama tv series (like Lost or The Walking Dead) and the Lara character was an embarrassment. Lara is supposed to be a strong-willed woman, extremely confident, very clever and with an attitude but which is classy. The 'new' Lara was none of these things, more of an emotional car crash, not confident in herself and completely missing any 'tough-guy' attitude. I have no idea what type of persona SE were trying to create with Lara but apart from looking visually attractive (which, I know, has nothing to do with personality), she had no redeeming qualities at all. And I thought the way in which the story was told with Lara talking out loud to herself, half the time wondering what was going on and then making a few guesses as to various connections, seemed very amateurish. Therefore, I don't think that the game being so bad helped with my negativeness towards the 'Detect' function within the game.

(Thanks for the replies by the way, I know some of the forums are pretty quiet so responses are appreciated!)
 
This topic (in the broad sense, not this thread in particular) really brings my blood to a boil. There is no such thing as "dumbing down" of games. It's a concept invented by the people who were gaming back in the day when technology was so limited they were physically unable to create engaging 8h+ experiences, so they made up for it by introducing unfair challenges.

Take Silver Surfer on the NES. Is there a single reason why you can't have a health bar? A bullet hell-ish game where you can only take 1 hit and then you are back to stage select. How many people would enjoy the classic Mega Man hands if you could take 1 hit then it was game over?

They simply didn't have the technology to deliver gameplay AND story AND mechanics, so they opted for making it hard as balls so that it took you 8h+ to beat the game. That is not a fun experience.

Now look at Demon Souls / Dark Souls today. Those games are hard, but they are also fair. If you die due to rushing around a corner and having your head separated from your body, you know you could have taken it slow and listened to the audio cues telling you there was a monster there (rattling of bones / clanging of armour pieces) and won. Every single death in those games are engineered to be frustrating but fair. It's never a bullet you can't see before it's too late.

Please, stop perpetuating this ridiculous concept that gaming has been "dumbed down" just because it's more mainstream and technology has evolved to the point where they don't need to pad their games with unfair challenges in order to make it seem less shallow.
 
Please, stop perpetuating this ridiculous concept that gaming has been "dumbed down" just because it's more mainstream and technology has evolved to the point where they don't need to pad their games with unfair challenges in order to make it seem less shallow.

When I read this thread title, all I could do was agree that the majority of games are either tonnes of cinematics with QTEs (dumbing down the gameplay by miles) or that they have tutorials going on for hours for every simple thing ("here's how to jump, here's how to shoot, here's how to slap a nun"), when all you need is a controller setup screen or something. I agree with what you say too though...they were just made more challenging to compensate for other things, back then.

That's all I can really think of to say on the topic :wacky:.
 
when all you need is a controller setup screen or something.
Sorry, but this is 100% wrong. What you may have meant to say is "when for me, having a controller setup screen is sufficient because I can remember 8-12 buttons & all their possible combinations for hours, weeks or months until I need them in-game". Games that front-load their information through something like a controller setup screen are designed badly. You shouldn't teach people the mechanics of the game until the player needs to know said mechanics, anything else is lazy game design.

Is it really better for the gamer to have to revisit the controller screen every single time they start up the game if they lead busy lives that only allows them gaming throughout the weekend, and the controller layout got pushed out of their minds? Would it not make more sense to simply have the necessary controls displayed on-screen when they are necessary?

Can you learn how to play a whole guitar song by simply having a screen that tells you how to do various chords, or do you sometimes need to actually figure out what chords are needed at certain times during a song?

If you are told the specific order in which every chord has to be played in, does that mean you automatically know how to play the song? Or do you learn faster if you read the chords as you play, so you associate each chord with each stage of the song?


It seems to me this attitude is why people believe games are dumbed down, they don't seem to understand that not everyone has photographic memory when it comes to control schemes and not everyone has the time to dedicate to each game to make its controls muscle memory.
 
Sorry, but this is 100% wrong. What you may have meant to say is "when for me, having a controller setup screen is sufficient because I can remember 8-12 buttons & all their possible combinations for hours, weeks or months until I need them in-game". Games that front-load their information through something like a controller setup screen are designed badly. You shouldn't teach people the mechanics of the game until the player needs to know said mechanics, anything else is lazy game design.

Is it really better for the gamer to have to revisit the controller screen every single time they start up the game if they lead busy lives that only allows them gaming throughout the weekend, and the controller layout got pushed out of their minds? Would it not make more sense to simply have the necessary controls displayed on-screen when they are necessary?

Can you learn how to play a whole guitar song by simply having a screen that tells you how to do various chords, or do you sometimes need to actually figure out what chords are needed at certain times during a song?

If you are told the specific order in which every chord has to be played in, does that mean you automatically know how to play the song? Or do you learn faster if you read the chords as you play, so you associate each chord with each stage of the song?


It seems to me this attitude is why people believe games are dumbed down, they don't seem to understand that not everyone has photographic memory when it comes to control schemes and not everyone has the time to dedicate to each game to make its controls muscle memory.

Like I said, it's better than having a tutorial for every little thing. We can figure out how to jump without having a 2 minute tutorial with platforms everywhere; we know the triggers are going to allow you to shoot without having target practice ranges and shooting dummies for 10 minutes (ala CoD). These are both heavy dumbing down. I can understand needing more (optional!!!) tutorials for something like a strategy game etc, but not for platformers or FPS games for certain.

Basic gaming mechanics are very different from learning different songs, because the majority of games have almost exactly the same controls (for consoles). I'm not talking about PC games since I never play them and don't have the experience to talk about it, so much; either way, do you need tutorials for PC games when some games allow you to change the controls to what you want anyway?
 
Like I said, it's better than having a tutorial for every little thing. We can figure out how to jump without having a 2 minute tutorial with platforms everywhere; we know the triggers are going to allow you to shoot without having target practice ranges and shooting dummies for 10 minutes (ala CoD). These are both heavy dumbing down. I can understand needing more (optional!!!) tutorials for something like a strategy game etc, but not for platformers or FPS games for certain.
I disagree that every game should assume you have played a similar game.

Skipping tutorials, sure. 100% agree, but you are basing your "dumbing down" comment on your own frame of reference without taking into consideration others are new to the genre, and don't find things obvious.
 
I disagree that every game should assume you have played a similar game.

Skipping tutorials, sure. 100% agree, but you are basing your "dumbing down" comment on your own frame of reference without taking into consideration others are new to the genre, and don't find things obvious.

But trying a few buttons is simple on a controller. You can figure out how to jump for yourself and/or without the need to look at the controls map every 2 seconds. Even if you aren't an expert, you would need barely any help. But yeah, I think we can agree that it's just easier to keep everyone happy by making tutorials optional/skippable.

Anyone have any other ways that games are being dumbed down? I get bored easily with debates and stuff.
 
I don't think games are being dumbed down at all and pretty much agree with Belazor et Britannia's perspective on this.

It was also mentioned here that the level of cinematics in a game contributes to it's "dumbing down" but I fail to see the correlation between cinematic story telling and the degradation of gameplay and mechanics. The necessity of progression through cutscenes and and their frequency have more of an impact on a game's overall presentation, but they by no means influence the difficulty of the game's mechanics.

Also, how is teaching gameplay dumbing games down? Whether you look at a menu which tells you the game controls or you're given tutorials while playing, the end result is only that you know which buttons do what. That doesn't remotely make the game easier to play, it just means you know that X will make your character jump or shoot or whatever. This doesn't tell you where all the special rewards are, it doesn't kill the big boss for you and it doesn't barrel-role your ship so you can win the race.
 
It was also mentioned here that the level of cinematics in a game contributes to it's "dumbing down" but I fail to see the correlation between cinematic story telling and the degradation of gameplay and mechanics. The necessity of progression through cutscenes and and their frequency have more of an impact on a game's overall presentation, but they by no means influence the difficulty of the game's mechanics.
To play devil's advocate for a second, I think their point was that it's less skilful when cutscenes and/or gameplay make use of QTEs (e.g. the whole of Ryse, Son of Rome and some of the (at least early game) cutscenes in the TR reboot) instead of long, complex Street Fighter-level of button combos to execute flashy moves.

That being said, I don't agree with that notion at all. Like you say, it affects the presentation. Difficulty can be achieved through other means. From a practical standpoint, it takes a lot more effort and processing power to properly animate incredibly flashy finishers if they are seamlessly integrated instead of using "bullet time cam" e.g. Batman, and the aforementioned games. It's a design choice made by the developers in order to deliver a more visually impressive experience, which some of us appreciate.
 
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