HAND-HOLDING IN GAMES

If they're options for players and not mandatory, then what's the problem?

The only time I can see this being a potential issue is with competitive games. I play a lot of Guilty Gear, and you have the option of choosing a mode to simplify your inputs so you can just mash a button to do combos.

That said, I'm 100% okay with that mode being in the game. Guilty Gear's simplified mode changes a few core attributes that balance out the easy combo inputs, so it's not just "easy mode." That mode was intended to get new players into the game and get a general feel for how the game and the characters work. Once you get your feet wet, you're supposed to disable the mode and gain full control over your character so you can pull off the more advanced moves.

If it means more people get into Guilty Gear, it's a good thing in my book. And hell, if people just want to stay on the easy mode and not bother learning the advanced tech, I'd be in full support of that.

There's a difference between hand-holding and quality of life upgrades, I think. Just because you can make your player have to hold a button to run doesn't mean it's better than having the option to just turn run on for default. Teaching your player how to do shit (with the option to skip the tutorial) is infinitely better than just dumping them in the game and saying "yeah, go play. I ain't gonna teach you jack. Have 'fun'."

Frankly, I don't have an issue with teaching players to play or adding in stuff that makes your life easier as a player. Who likes fiddling with detailed shit when you can have it streamlined a bit and made easier to use and understand?

And quite frankly, I'll always pick easy or normal mode because I prefer to play games at my own pace and without having to worry about doing banal shit just to get through it. Granted, people do enjoy the challenges that hard modes present but if that's all you give the player then, eh, enjoy the loss of players I guess?

More options means more ways to play the game. Besides, you can always challenge yourself in-game without extra harder options if you want - but you can't always have the fun of breezing through the game if you make everything a struggle. (Quick example, choosing to use a melee character in Fallout 4 instead of a sniper type - even on easy that shit is harder. Another example - four white mage run in FF1.)

author=Prinnyhero
Growing up in the era of Nes and Snes games I can tell you it most certainly -is- a new thing. Those games didn't pull any punches, but that has more to do with limitations I think... Still though, there's a certain charm to a difficult game.

It's almost like game companies learned how to do things better and not cause their audiences to quit (fuck you Contra) quarter way through their shitly coded games. Or something.

In the NES era games were hard because 1: You only had a few games, so there weren't many other games to play instead. and 2: Games were very short due to limitations, so making them "Nintendo hard" was the way to increase play time.

I'm one of the people who always wants to play stuff at the highest possible difficulty level. I like a good challenge. But games should be accessible to everyone, and many people don't have the time to invest into being stuck in one specific game. The games should still be enjoyable for them, so if that means optional hand-holding, then I laud it! It's only when the hand-holding is non-optional that it can get annoying.

author=unity
I was hoping this was about literal hand-holding. Like, romantically :3

D'awww

You have to remember, games are a service now. People will select the games they want, play them to get served in the way that they want, then move on to the next game.

If I want to make a game in my own way, I can, but it isn't going to make people like me or my game any more unless it allows them to serve themselves in exactly the way that they desire. Game publishers can't afford to do this, because they have to recoup large development costs and make a profit, too. But individuals can. Just know the risks.

I'm kind of wondering where this whole idea came from that easy modes and hand-holding have only existed in the last ten years or so.

I enjoy when there are multiple ways to play games and not just "the one right way". The options menu is always the first one I visit in any game (which means I also dislike it when games just skip the main menu and go straight to the tutorial). Tailoring the experience so it fits me is pretty great.

Yes, sure, sometimes the tutorial messages can get on my nerves, like when I'm in at the final bossfight and there's still a popup saying "press space to take cover". But just as often I won't turn those off because sometimes I do forget which button I was supposed to press to open the door. (was U or H the use button, or was it Y this time because U was lean left and H was grenades?)

I haven't played Far Cry 5 but Ubisoft games are generally both... egregious and great when it comes to this. AssCreed games constantly suggested which items I should use. I sometimes wonder if there was some algorithm in where it basically showed tutorial messages because I hadn't used one of their hundreds of gameplay features enough.

Rainbow Six Siege also have all those button prompts on the screen which I also constantly find helpful (though I assume they are toggleable since it's a "serious esport" and whatnot).

Ghost Recon Wildlands was another one of theirs where the base game is actually not that great. But by toggling off most of the "help" you can get a decent experience out of it. Though in that one it is a bit problematic because certain systems are based on certain systems being in the UI, making gameplay sometimes annoying and sometimes you're forced to turn certain systems back on to know what you're doing.

Though I will admit. Sometimes these things go "too far". But that's mostly when there's not enough options. Like when a game just assumes there's a best way to play and that you should adhere to it. Like I remember some game had strict difficulty levels where a higher difficulty level disabled or limited the amount of saves you could make. Basically enemies got harder AND it also turned into Iron Man mode. Well personally I enjoy more difficult enemies but I also need to be able to save anywhere at any time and if I have to choose between the two I will always take the save slots first. So I only ever got to play said game in "cakewalk mode" because I didn't want to iron man.

Games with only checkpoint saves are the worst. Though I think that's a slightly different topic.

I feel like having more options so a player can choose their preferred method of play is good.

If you need to have content locked behind a skill barrier in order to feel a sense of accomplishment for beating that barrier... maybe you need a more satisfying hobby.

Like, OK, as an example: I am really fucking smug about my Dr Mario skillz. I now play starting at level 20 because that's the most fun challenge for me. I once played up to level 99 just to see what would happen.*

But if someone else wants to play on easy at level 1, I don't care. No, actually, I'm happy, because I want people to have fun playing a game that I like. I like it when people have fun, and I like it when people like games I like, because that means maybe I'll get more of those games.

The one worry I can see is maybe AAA games going all "Welp, gotta make 'em easy so everyone gives us money, also nobody likes hard games we just decided that right now."** Which, yeah, OK, but now that indie games have an amazingly low barrier of entry and are easily distributed, I don't think we're going to see any kind of extinction of super-challenging games.

So in the end I think the worst you're going to find is maybe having some change in the conversations surrounding gameplay, and that's easily changed with just making a specialized area of "Hey we're here to talk about having fun on hard mode, so post here if you have fun on hard mode."

It's totally possible to have fun with different levels of difficulty. You can even make your own levels of difficulty, a la the speedrun community, whose goals are basically "avoid playing as much of the game as possible." Even if the game's easier for some people to play doesn't mean you can't be creative and make it more challenging, if that's your thing.

*Nothing. Nothing happened. Such a letdown.
**Just like "nobody likes horror games" YES I AM BITTER