What is the value in gating mechanisms that cause people to stop playing the game forever?
So many games are now much more than a skill test, but even with older games you would see strange driving or boss or puzzle sections that are simply miserable for some players.
Let's assume the game has a checklist for content that was passed with or without gameplay.
- How would you feel if all games had a 'autopilot' mode which allowed the game to play itself for a while?
- Is it better that players see no more of the game because of small pockets of content that they hate playing? Is skipping content so bad?
Speaking as a game designer, I'm currently trying to decide how best to balance challenge with players dropping the game forever.
I definitely don't think you're wrong on a fundamental level for sure, but I think some things should be highlighted about your post that make for important case distinctions. First of all, I want to say that I feel that for many players, getting past unexpected and challenging battles or puzzles is a very important part of what makes gaming so interesting: they get to do something that is conceptually hard but fun on a moment-to-moment basis. As a result, I think it is important to recognise that some people may find those sections you describe as "miserable for some" to be the main attraction of a game.
Considering the above, you inevitably get back to a skill discussion, since there is a fine line between challenging and insurmountable, and that line is defined by an individual's perspective, not by a general consideration of difficulty. I will write something on my perspective on difficulty levels at the end of my post, but first I will get to the points of discussion you posited in your post (these are the thoughts of a humble gamer, but I hope you can make sense and use some of what I wrote for your deliberations on this topic):
Assuming you forgo the responsibility to design a combat-puzzle system that allows you to tweak the difficulty to a level that fits most, if not all, of your players (this is a bit crudely put, I admit, but I put it this way because I think you can develop a set of very good difficulty options that solve most of the problems you describe), I would say that the worst thing that could happen is that people end up in a situation where they are enjoying the narrative but are unable to progress because Boss mcBossy seems unbeatable to them. If this is something you anticipate despite suitable accommodations in your mind for different skill levels (maybe your mission design loses its appeal if you drop the difficulty level to accommodate for less skilled players - like when your platformer only has very simple levels), then I feel an autoplay feature is a good idea, but I would make it a dynamic one: if possible, give players the option to jump right back in at any stage when they feel comfortable they can finish it (or after they have learned from the AI how to counter certain enemy moves). However, this sounds like a hell to implement: not only should your AI be able to defeat bosses, but it should also be able to do so with normal gameplay tactics. The major problem (having your AI beat the boss in a normal way) remains when you make the autoplay non-interruptible. An option to skip bosses is another possibility. This does presume that your game does not include story elements within said boss battles, since the goal is to make the narrative accessible. But if you don't have that, then this is the easiest way to allow people to follow the narrative (and play whichever parts they feel they are able to beat) without getting stuck.
It is my belief that most games can and should be for everyone, but I also believe that this can almost always be achieved by including suitable difficulty levels.
Discussion on difficulty levels:
In order to manage difficulty for different players, I would advocate well-designed difficulty levels: for those who are not quite as gifted at playing games, beating those challenging bosses you've designed may be too much, and they leave as a result. However, if they drop down to a slightly more 'manageable' difficulty, then they might be able to clear it. Of course, the way in which you handle different difficulty settings can help you to get the player to achieve certain goals in terms of skills. You might want to have the player achieve certain skill thresholds because you believe an important part of the fun in your game is to learn certain skills, like performing certain combos or learning when to dodge and when to go all-in for massive damage, and you believe that the player needs to have mastered a certain minimum level of proficiency before they can move on to the next stage in your game where you are planning on introducing more advanced skills, or plan to present bosses/enemies with ever more unforgiving combinations of moves and levels of power.
Let's use Bloodborne as an example, since the sub-genre it is frequently assigned to has had some controversy surrounding difficulty levels. There would be a number of different options to drop Bloodborne's difficulty level:
- Firstly, you could drop the enemies' stats: make them do less damage, or take their health down so that they are easier to defeat;
- Secondly, you could change the enemies' moveset, limiting them to a more basic set of moves that are easier for the player to read and counter.
In my humble opinion, the first one is the best way to go: it requires the player to learn (and learn to counter) the whole range of moves, since none have been removed from their moveset. This means that a player cannot get by with just learning a subset of the skills you intended them to learn on the 'Normal' difficulty setting. As a result, you still demand of your players to learn the full set of skills. The difference with normal difficulty is that you give them more leeway: they can take more hits before they die, and therefore they do not need to master those skills to the level required to beat the normal difficulty. However, they can't get by with ignoring certain skills altogether, because the enemies will then overpower them with the use of the move that they didn't bother to learn. In short, a simple drop of stats will keep your combat system intact on multiple difficulties, whereas a drop in previously assumed basic skills (for normal difficulty) will mean you have to reassess whether your combat system remains entertaining across difficulty levels (if we take out all the 2-or-more-fold attacks from Bloodborne, for example, then the player only needs to take care of dodging one attack for each lunge the enemy might do, which will make the combat system fairly trivial and take out the essence of what made Bloodborne such an interesting game of chess -- just imagine the battle with Father Cascoigne when he only tries to land one hit at a time!).
The above example is, of course, a bit too limiting: what about more advanced moves? In Super Mario Odyssey, for example, if they had at some point required the player to master the Jump-Throw Hat-Dive-Jump-Dive routine, which might have been too difficult for a decent subset of players, then would it be fair to include a difficulty setting where an extra platform is added to make it sufficient to perform a Jump-Throw Hat-Dive-Jump routine, instead? I think it would be: it still requires the player to apply, under time restrictions, a combination of 3 different inputs (the last jump is automatic if the first three actions are performed in a timely manner) that each are very basic commands but combine into a somewhat more advanced move.
In addition, you should consider how the dropping of stats could impact the necessity to use certain skills. For example, if in a turn-based battle system you had a move that killed all of the player's characters if the player didn't use mechanics that protected their characters, and you now lower the damage done by that move such that it no longer kills all characters, then you have freed the player of the responsibility to prepare for that killer attack, effectively taking away a layer of tactics required for that battle. As such, the removal of mechanics and the lowering of stats are not wholly unrelated, and you should think about which skills you really want your player to be able to produce and how that impacts your options for lowering stats. Additionally, you can actually use this fact to free players of the requirement of displaying more advanced tactics by lowering stats to a sufficient degree. In my eyes, this should actually be a really fun puzzle for game designers to tinker with!
Another problem I see with the Bloodbornian gameplay design is the checkpoint system: it is regarded by some as a skill to learn how to retrace your steps after a death, but for others, it is considered a repetition of actions that you cannot do blindly due to the difficulty, but neither is it very illuminating in terms of learning new skills. I see the option here (again) being a setting for the number of checkpoints you implement in your game: for people who want to retrace their steps and find ways of optimising their return to a former part of the game, the option is there, and for those who don't want to retrace their steps, the option is there to increase the number of checkpoints. Maybe you can make sparse checkpoints the standard and instruct players about the option to increase them? That to me seems like the best option, since it keeps the intended (I'm assuming) scarcity of checkpoints but allows for a less repetitive gameplay loop for those who experience it as such.
Now, let's think about puzzles. In my eyes, Uncharted 4 brought some good ideas to the table, although it did not implement it very well. What UC4 did was have your companions give hints for solving the puzzle if you did not manage to proceed to a next stage of the puzzle after some time. However, this has two problems: firstly, people might not want to wait the time you have assigned before hints start coming in, and secondly, people might not want to automatically have a stage of the puzzle spoiled just because they take a bit longer to find the solution. In my eyes, then, the solution is to make hints optional: if you can turn them off completely, then you have all the time you want to solve it on your own. However, that would, in turn, integrate the gameplay with the options menu, since you would need to toggle this option if you can't find the solution on your own. The precise solution imo is quite hard, but I think either a button on the controller dedicated to asking for a hint could work, or maybe you could have your character use a journal with pages that you normally wouldn't access, but that can then provide hints when player try to review a situation. I would envision this as a bit of a notebook where in-game character writes their thoughts above certain situations, and in those descriptions they can intertwine some hints to solving the puzzle (maybe you can dynamically update the notebook as you solve parts of the puzzle, such that fresh hints are always available).
Clearly, optimising for difficulty is a very involved and intertwined process, so it will probably a good deal of work to figure out the best configuration of difficulty options for your game. Good luck!
