I can’t stop playing Supergiant Games’ Hades. I waited for it to get out of early access, which finally happened and now I’m just hooked on it. For those who don’t know what it is. Hades is isometric Hack and Slash roguelike where you play as son of Hades who tries to escape Underworld with help of randomized boons from Olympian gods and other upgrades. Death sends you back home stripped of said boons and money, but keeping some materials used for permanent upgrades. And at halls of Hades you can catch up with friendly characters, chat up some not so friendly ones and take some sneering comments from dad.
There was a bit where I had reached the final boss few times but felt like I had no idea how to deal with it, at which point I was getting frustrated. Getting through the quite trivial early parts of the game felt like waste of time when I just wanted to practice the boss. But then I managed to beat it, and then I did it second time in row with different weapon, and as I realized that any run, even on that seemed to be laid with bad luck, could be a clear, I was motivated and that hasn’t run out yet.
Some players want Fall Guys to iron out the randomized parts of its gameplay to become more of an esport
That’s exactly what Fortnite did, and then undid after they started losing players.
The quote at the end is good:
“I love Fall Guys so much,” Lauren said. “It’s not like I want to be salty. But I worry that when games are all about skill, even if they’re fun, eventually I get left behind because I’m not watching YouTube tutorials or practicing all day. I feel like I fell out of Overwatch because that game slowly became more about pleasing the best players. I worry the same thing will happen to Fall Guys.”
It’s interesting in that the mass market of gamers do not want, have never wanted, and will never want skill-based competition. They want activities and interaction. Overwatch isn’t doing anything in particular to “please the best players” and has plenty of entirely non-competitive modes.
But the reality is that if the skill input is there at all, then people who lack that skill feel the lack and are driven away.
The people, like myself, who primarily seek competition, are a much smaller market.
That’s so true. I really like the mix of randomness and skill in Fall Guys. It makes it fun to play with friends who are way less skillful than me and still be equal enough to not have them just watching me storm ahead.
In the end I stopped playing PUBG with friends because of a team air hockey problem. Once you are relying on others, and they suck, it’s really not fun. And if you are on a team with a much better player, you just feel like you are letting the side down. Or if you are on a team with someone who sucks but doesn’t know it or doesn’t admit to it… bad all round.
Haha, this is part of why I play FPSs so much. I started in the upper 1/4th(ish) of players in Overwatch day one just due to having played so many similar games before. And there were a lot of terrible players. I got to experience the game broadly without having to drill or train, and I could form groups from existing social circles easily.
As I get older, I tend to focus on games where I already have a strong foundation and tend to avoid games where I am starting from nothing.
Same with sports. I may yet look into paraskiing as an extension of skiing. But I would never really look into surfing at all (unless I lived somewhere like Bondi).
If you are a juggler, you start from scratch all the time. And fail so much.
I was going to make a video essay about how Getting Over It isn’t an interesting experience for jugglers, as it provides no new feelings or levels of frustration.
I also tend to really like fresh games. And it’s so opaque to try to get “back” into a lot of these games with serious formats if they have changed drastically in terms of metagame.
We were talking about this in my guild a bit with Among Us. Some people somehow wanted ranked competitive versions and some people get angry at others for playing it one way or another (too serious, too silly, etc). Exactly the kinds of problems you would expect with a werewolf/mafia game if people have different goals. In a similar context to this, and board games, the experts or constant veterans often want more minutia and more tools and eventually can make the game overwhelming to new players.
I’m not sure where I’m at for the skill based game discussion. I like to play competitive, skill requiring games quite a bit, fighters and fpses, mostly. But I’m absolute trash at them. But I also don’t have the drive and motivation to put in the necessary time and effort to get good at them.
If I have to choose do I want to get decent at one game, or play and experience thousand different games, the choice is very easy for me. Feed me the variety.
I’ve recently playing a ton of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2, a combined remake of the first two games of the series from the PS1 era. And it’s pretty good. I spent a lot of my youth playing these games so I am a prime target and for once they managed to capture the old, arcade-y feel without overdoing it like some of the later titles in the series did, all the levels look great and feel good to skate in, though I think they overdid the stuff a bit that some things kind of go missing in the textures, which is particularly noticeable in the Venice Beach level.
I played these games so much in my youth that I basically speedran them without knowing what speedrunning was. What I mean is that you had to complete each objective (collecting SKATE, finding the secret tape, high scores, etc.) with each Skater to unlock their video, and in certain early levels such as Hangar I could do the entire list in a 2 minute session. This however has gone by the wayside here. You only need to collect each objective once to unlock levels, and the levels stay unlocked for any skater. You still have to visit each level to collect the stat points for the skaters, but instead of having to do all the challenges, each skater (and the game overall) has a list of challenges to unlock additional deck graphics or outfits and gain money to to buy other stuff, including objects for the park creator tool. Some of these are tied to the objectives i.e. collecting medals, and hitting the “sick” scores in levels with that skater.
Speaking of medals: I either lost a lot of my skill in the intervening years, or these competition levels are a lot harder than they used to be. I am having an extremely hard time getting gold medals, and lost the gold in the last run more than I care to remember already. Some of the challenges also feel very hard and are kind of very obtuse in their restrictions.
Finally, I am very happy that they basically kept the entire soundtrack intact. THPS1 was a foundational piece in forming my musical taste. As far as I could find, only three songs from the original games are missing, and they added 30+ additional songs from a bunch of bands that I actually rather like, such as Screaming Females, Strung Out, Reel Big Fish, FIDLAR, A Tribe Called Quest, and Billy Talent. The only problem is that some of the songs are pretty heavily censored, particularly noticeable with Police Truck which is a rather offensive song (and intended to be).
