Unlabelled True Gaming Games with the best hardcore/survival/"alternate" difficulty modes?

1/04/2018 07:05:00 am
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True Gaming Games with the best hardcore/survival/"alternate" difficulty modes?

Games with the best hardcore/survival/"alternate" difficulty modes?

Posted: 03 Jan 2018 01:30 PM PST

For me, I never REALLY got in to Fallout 4 until I played Survival mode. Not only did it make things much more difficult, but changed tons of gameplay elements as well (such as taking previously marginal items like antibiotics and making them essential to surviving)

What other games have you played which include difficulty modes that make the game far more engaging, beyond just ramping up enemy damage/health and the "normal" hard mode changes?

submitted by /u/tbu720
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The World Health Organization's inclusion of a new disorder called 'gaming disorder' is unnecessary and potentially damaging.

Posted: 03 Jan 2018 10:53 AM PST

You've probably seen, but the World Health Organization (WHO) has included a preliminary disorder known as 'gaming disorder' for their upcoming diagnostic manual. As expected, it's been met with a lot of criticism and ridicule. As gamers, our instinctive reaction is often to laugh off things that may potentially threaten our hobby, but I wanted to view the announcement through a less biased viewpoint (I also have a Psychology background, which helped). I decided to go through the classification of the disorder step-by-step while critiquing it.

My thoughts are as follows:

  1. The definition is far too general. What consitutes problematic gaming isn't clear at all.

  2. There really isn't enough research or clinical evidence underlying the disorder's inclusion.

  3. It may actually have a damaging effect for the general public.

I've expanded on these thoughts and examined the criteria in this video, if anyone's interested in having a look! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNB1TFizQ1o

But I'm mostly interested in discussing it with everyone on here because I haven't really seen any constructive conversations about it.

  1. Do you think a gaming disorder is a necessary inclusion in a psychological diagnostic manual?

  2. Is addiction to gaming specific enough to warrant a disorder separate from the already-existing addiction disorders?

  3. What effects, if any, do you think this will have on society or video games in general? Do you think we'll see any changes in games themselves?

submitted by /u/StealthIsOptional
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Why "mass warfare" always devolves into a zerg rush, and how to fix it.

Posted: 02 Jan 2018 10:13 PM PST

We hear the stories of video games of the dramatic turn-around, where creative tactics and teamwork enable a small group of players to turn back an otherwise overwhelming force and win the day. Yet in an age of so many "Mass warfare" video games, why are these stories so rare? For these examples, I'm going to consider any game of at least 40 on 40 to be a 'mass warfare' game.

So let's look at some factors we can agree about how people behave in video games, and the considerations thereof.

  1. Mass warfare games have to account for player turnover. If a round lasts half an hour or more, you can't expect the people at the end to be the same people you started with. Thus mass warfare games are all drop-in and drop-out. Penalizing players for dropping out of such a game will kill sales.
  2. Progression systems have become integral to big online video games. A game where you're fighting "For the sake of victory" will lose to one where you're fighting "to unlock that next accessory on your gun" or "To get a fancy hat."
  3. A certain percentage of the playerbase HATES to lose. They want to win, they don't care how they win. Joining a game with 10 seconds left and getting a victory screen is the same satisfaction to them as a long hard-fought battle. It's a small percentage of the players, but it's a significant percentage.
  4. Even when there is a stated objective, many players are not playing to that objective. Call of Duty Domination maps are typically 10% people trying to win for their team, and 90% people who want easier kills going for those foolish 10% trying to cap objectives. Shooters like Overwatch are notorious for this in competitive, with people "getting gold elims' even as their team fails to secure the objective. For a significant portion of the gaming demographic, if someone doesn't feel assured that they're going to win at the game's objective, they make their own objective.

These lead to a consistent pattern: A game that could be an incredible back and forth battle turns into a zerg rush. Let me use a few of the games from before as examples.

  1. World of Warcraft, Alterac Valley: In "the old days" when people were fighting for the honor of their side and for the PVP experience, it was normal to have 20-30% of your forces on the defensive. A well-balanced defense could use their closer respawn point to hold off a much larger attacking force. But soon being 'a defender' was meaningless because it was hard, and people didn't want to do the hard job. So instead of 10 people on the defense, you'd be lucky if you had four, which would get overwhelmed by the full 40 players of the other side attacking. Modern Alterac Valley is two sides avoiding eachother at all costs and rushing their relevant bosses, such that there are perhaps 10 kills in the average alterac valley match (in a 40 on 40 match!)
  2. Planetside 2: Bases have a variety of spawn points and as they fall, your defensive forces become more concentrated and able to push back. A well-organized team of 20 could hold the line against an invading force of 50... if you could ever get 20 people to a base under attack. There are marginal rewards for defending a base, but tremendous (10x) rewards for taking a base, and the points go to everyone in the base at the time. So instead of 200 players being divided among five platoons attacking five bases, it's one giant zerg swarm of 200, attacking empty base after empty base (because even a high skilled team of 40 is a speed bump against even 200 noobs). And of course the opposing force is going to form their own zerg rush and retake the bases as the first swarm moves onto the next undefended base. Everyone gets points for capturing a base, nobody had to fight for it.
  3. Foxhole. Ideally this game would be AMAZING for "small unit with clever tactics takes on a much larger force" except that the average player avoids a fair fight. They want a win, so when a unit gets pinned down on three sides by the enemy, you'll find half the team evaporates because they'd rather quit and go find a game where they can be on the side pinning down the enemy.

There is an exception to this of course, EVE online. What separates EVE online from the common 'mass warfare' game is that players have a stake in the outcome beyond a victory or defeat screen, where a battle for territory may impact their revenue for months to come. That gives them the reason to "stick it out and hope reinforcements arrive" in a losing battle, it gives them a reason to work together and use clever tactics. But EVE also requires a staggering amount of investment from the player, and penalizes loss, two things that earn it a very "niche" reputation.

There are a few solutions I see, but each has their own drawbacks.

  1. Empower players who are in an unbalanced battle. Wintergrasp in World of Warcraft was an open world PVP area where holding it every 4 hours granted your faction access to a particular dungeon with great loot. Thus there was a reason for each faction to want to win this battle and show up every four hours. Except... servers are rarely balanced between the two factions, and in some servers it would be 200 of one faction against 20 of another. The solution was to dramatically buff the under-represented faction. I remember a match where only FIVE enemy players showed up to attack, against perhaps 100 of my faction. We got ANIHILATED because with the entire balancing buff divided across only five players, they were walking gods and one-shotting entire parties. HOWEVER... in a game with drop-in drop-out, you'd have players stick around only for as long as they're getting that buff, then quit when they're no longer getting to be overpowered, and thus the losing side cycles between having 'barely enough' and "not enough" firepower.
  2. Greater rewards for fighting a losing battle. As nearly every wargame is now unlocking something in progression, what many players are chasing isn't the 'victory' but rather what they get from a victory. As such they'll quit if they don't think they're going to get that reward. The solution is to give a reward to an outmatched team for defending that is equal to, or perhaps even greater than, that which is assigned to the victors. I'll use Planetside 2 as an example of how this could be implemented. Currently there's only a minor point buff applied to defenders of a base, and attackers all get 2000 points if they're in the zone when a base is captured. What if instead, there are 20,000 defender points and 80,000 attacker points to be rewarded. If you were defending a base when it fell, those 20,000 defender points are divided among you and the other defenders. If you're one of the attackers, those 80,000 attacker points are divided among your group. Thus if you join a 'zerg swarm' of 200 players just stomping bases, you'll receive a mere 400 points, while someone defending a base with ten other players, even if it falls, will get 2,000 points. This "where's the carrot" approach would incentivize players to break into smaller groups and each hit their own target, to get a larger portion of the points to be had. Any base under attack will get at least one or two defenders, because two people defending a base will get to split the 20,000 points among themselves even if they lose.

I'd be very eager to hear what ideas other folks have for how we can deal with the conflict between 'mass warfare' game principles, and human nature.

submitted by /u/securitywyrm
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Are controllers doomed to their current button layout unless the big players collaborate on a new standard?

Posted: 02 Jan 2018 04:27 PM PST

It took many console generations but controllers ended up being very standardized: 4 shoulder buttons, 4 face buttons, 2 middle buttons, 2 analog sticks and a D-pad. Every controller has those basic elements and so every game is designed around that button layout.

You get companies trying different things like the Wii U gamepad or the PS4 touchpad but they almost always get completely ignored save for a few exclusives because they're not standardized. If you want to sell your game on multiple platforms then you can't cater to those specific controls other than maybe a nice extra. They can never be a core part of a game's design unless the game is exclusive to that console and controller.

At this point, can this ever change? I think stuff like the Steam Controller or the back paddles or the Xbox Elite controller are really good ideas, but they're never gonna be fully integrated into games unless they become standard across all controllers. Is it impossible to see a big layout change being implemented at this point unless Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo collaborate on a new standard?

submitted by /u/irelann
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I've noticed that games with the "difficult" reputation are often quite enjoyable for super casual gamers. Explanation?

Posted: 03 Jan 2018 09:37 AM PST

Recently, my wife has been playing through Ori and the Blind Forest, a game reputed to be quite punishing and often unforgiving. I hesitantly recommended it to her after she watched me the play and was enamored by the gorgeous artstyle. SHe is about as casual a gamer as you can get - 90% of her playing time is made up of easy time-killers like The Sims and Rollercoaster Tycoon. She also enjoys platformers like Mario and Donkey Kong, and old school games like Commander Keen and Pepsi Man (anybody remember that one?). So she starts playing Ori and to my surprise, she's actually even better at it than I am! She's just blazing through the game right now and loving it. She's also been playing Donkey Kong Country tropical freeze, another notoriously difficult game, and loving it as well while being really good at it.

So it really got me thinking, how is someone who has no knowledge/interest of the gaming industry and gaming mechanics be so good at games that even "hardcore" gamers may find testing? Is it that "blank slate" mindset that helps her be good at it? She is going into these games with essentially no knowledge of their difficulty, reputation or quality, and simply based on artwork (in case of Ori) and childhood nostalgia (tropical freeze). So maybe this lack of expectation helps her tackle the game on its own terms and get immersed in the experience as opposed to "expecting" a difficult game and seeing it as simply a challenge to overcome? FWIW she's tried many AAA open-world games which are typically easy and hand-holdy and didn't really enjoy them because "there's too much talking and too much stuff on the maps". In fact, she doesn't care for stories and narrative in games at all - she just likes having an objective to complete.

Kind of anecdotal but something I found interesting...also I'm jealous that she's better at these games than I am lol :p

submitted by /u/fabrar
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What do you think the "point" of tycoon games is?

Posted: 02 Jan 2018 10:50 PM PST

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