EA Exec: "Our Games Are Too Hard To Learn"

[DaveDQ]

Re: EA Exec: "Our Games Are Too Hard To Learn"

But we pay $60 for these games. You can get a great book for a 1/3 of that cost and pick up a digital copy of a classic film for less than that. What if the author said, "the vocabulary in my books is too strenuous?"

Shouldn't a video game be so positively complex that when we finally "get it" we jump up and give a solid fist pump?

But they are on this. They already charge the gamer to not play the game. You don't feel like playing the game to get that upgrade for your character? Sure, just buy this bundle and it'll be available on start.

I agree with Armor and Sword. These companies are breast feeding gamers.

[TheDutchDad]

Re: EA Exec: "Our Games Are Too Hard To Learn"

But we pay $60 for these games. You can get a great book for a 1/3 of that cost and pick up a digital copy of a classic film for less than that. What if the author said, "the vocabulary in my books is too strenuous?"

Shouldn't a video game be so positively complex that when we finally "get it" we jump up and give a solid fist pump?

But they are on this. They already charge the gamer to not play the game. You don't feel like playing the game to get that upgrade for your character? Sure, just buy this bundle and it'll be available on start.

I agree with Armor and Sword. These companies are breast feeding gamers.

It's not so much the difficulty we're talking about. I don't really have a problem with that really. None of the games I'm playing are difficult in nature. I mean, I love Portal for that reason. It's a puzzle game, with difficulty, but it takes you 5 mins to get the concept of what you're doing.

The issues here is the 2-3 hours it takes to introduce the gamer to all the mechanics in the game. Wasn't it AC3 that had one of the longest intros to a game ever, and made you learn how to play the game before you could really get into the game world?

[DaveDQ]

Re: EA Exec: "Our Games Are Too Hard To Learn"

I don't mind that at all. A game for me that is an example is EA UFC. I am just now understanding it's nuances and somewhat difficult control set. I'm finally competitive online. While I have some issues with the direction of the game, learning the controls has been rewarding.

[JBH3]

Re: EA Exec: "Our Games Are Too Hard To Learn"

I think the title of this thread is an excuse for EA to not admit their games suck. Yes...people are not playing the games because they're too hard...right...

I haven't played a good EA game since Mass Effect 3 and that includes sports titles.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: EA Exec: "Our Games Are Too Hard To Learn"

Oh, so more overly long tutorial sequences now? This is why I've fallen off on most AAA games. It takes 3-4 hours of playing a game until it fully unlocks everything. Compare Far Cry 2 with 3 and 4. 2 let you jump right in and go anywhere in the world and do anything you wanted. 3 and 4 bar areas from you until you complete certain missions.

Give me games like Spelunky, Binding of Isaac, and Darkest Dungeon where I can jump in immediately and learn for myself and don't have to deal with 3 hours of tutorials before the game gets going.

This is my biggest complaint with most games today. Give me a damn manual so I have something to reference and just throw me into the ****-storm of a story you have cooking. I feel like it takes 2-3 hours of set-up and hand-holding just to show basic run/sprint, melee, shoot/reload controls. They take literally 5 seconds to figure out on your own.

[Cusefan]

Re: EA Exec: "Our Games Are Too Hard To Learn"

I feel like we've been down this road before. EA dumbed down their games in the early 2000s with no success, It's all cyclical.


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[mgoblue]

Re: EA Exec: "Our Games Are Too Hard To Learn"

I just got GTA V for the first time and that's a little tough to get into....

The varying controls and stuff make me wonder "what do I hit to do drivebys again?" and other things...

It's really fun though, and they try to do the tutorials, but just so much you can do that it can get confusing. Plus controls are different from other games, so it's not always consistent.

It's really fun, but the control aspect I can understand. I don't think it's difficulty at all, it's learning all 8 million controls in different contexts.

[bigeastbumrush]

Re: EA Exec: "Our Games Are Too Hard To Learn"

Every EA quote is somehow related to money. That quote seems like a response to some sort of case study.

Gamers are getting older. No matter how many young cheesers there are online, the average gamer is up there in age.

With advances in tech..it's only natural that the control schemes get more sophisticated. To say it's too hard to learn probably has more to do with patience and their cost-cutting excluding paper manuals from games.

To this day, I have no idea how to fly a helicopter or aircraft in any game. I even struggle to drive cars/tanks.

I cannot stand sitting through some long, drawn out in-game tutorial to teach me how to do these things.

Look at the 2K series for example. In the midst of a game, you're really supposed to remember a 5-button/trigger/stick combo just to perform a crossover?

This EA guy does have a point. But guys like him are also part of the problem.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: EA Exec: "Our Games Are Too Hard To Learn"

I feel like 2k is a poor example because while yes, you can utilize the R stick to perform a crossover into a between the legs spin and spring for the dunk its not necessary to master the game itself. The mechanics of the game do not solely depend on how much you use those moves. With that series I feel like it can actually cater to what type of player you are - you can win with the basics and if you truly want to master the controls you can still do that and have the same outcome.

Setting a standard across the industry for games is something I would be against. Shadow of Mordor has the exact same control set up as the Arkham games, but not once did I think of Batman while playing. Nonetheless I would not want those controls to be the norm. Each game having a distinct control layout and feel gives the game and its mechanics an identity that would be lost if every 3rd person open world action/adventure brawler had the same setup. I don't feel the need to be able to jump in and automatically be able to master the controls of a game. Even back in the day with two buttons you still had games feel wholly different based on how those buttons were utilized be it with combo strings or timed button presses.

[dickey1331]

Re: EA Exec: "Our Games Are Too Hard To Learn"

I agree and disagree with the guy. Some games can be pretty hard to remember how to do what if you don't play it constant. I just wish we still had instruction manuals. Their has been a few times when I had to google something to figured out how to do the move.

[dickey1331]

Re: EA Exec: "Our Games Are Too Hard To Learn"

This meme reminds me of this thread

ImageUploadedByTapatalk1423719058.906508.jpg

[Hammerhunker]

Re: EA Exec: "Our Games Are Too Hard To Learn"

If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch with momma. IMO, this is a ridiculous statement.

[bukktown]

Re: EA Exec: "Our Games Are Too Hard To Learn"

Dragon age inquisition took me about 10 hours to understand what was going on. And I'm a smart dude!

[Hooe]

Re: EA Exec: "Our Games Are Too Hard To Learn"

There is nothing wrong with the topic quote because whoever from EA spoke it is absolutely right. Put a controller and Madden / FIFA / Battlefield / Dragon Age / whatever AAA video game you want in the hands of a new player with no prior knowledge and for at least the first ten hours said new player is going to suck hard at the new game.

AAA games today are so much more complex now than the 16- and 32-bit games people wax nostalgic for, the ones people remember fondly for their brutal difficulty. What isn't talked about in tandem with how hard those games were is the simplicity of those games' core mechanics. One of the hardest old-school games I know of, Battletoads, isn't much more than basic brawling and platforming, with but a few buttons to remember and only a few possible actions for the player to perform. Two of the most revered game series of all time, Super Mario Bros. and Sonic The Hedgehog, each only had two core actions to learn - jump and run. Compare that to any other game out today; the number of verbs a player may perform now in a given game has increased exponentially, what with right-stick gestures, button combinations and sequences, pressure sensitive inputs, etc. etc. available for developers to map any number of verbs to.

Just look at the right-stick commands mapping for NBA 2K; the number of possible moves is staggering and overwhelming, and the game never makes an attempt to teach _why_ a new player might use any one move over another. When do I try an up-and-under instead of a post-up fadeaway? When do I do a crossover dribble vs a behind-the-back dribble? You get my point. I have enough knowledge of basketball to know I don't know crap about basketball, and I personally have no clue when to use any of these moves. No basketball game has ever effectively taught me anything about how these moves work or why I would ever want to perform them. As such, I never use them - if anything I thrash blindly on the right stick to try and perform dribble moves to cross a guy up - and I get demolished by any NBA 2K player who is a devout hoops fan and just has that institutional knowledge of the sport and simply has an understanding of how these movements work that I don't. If the game never teaches me how to master these game mechanics, how I can ever expect to compete with this guy? Why would I ever want to buy any NBA 2K game going forward, knowing that I will never have the knowledge to compete with a highly-skilled opponent?

This is why we get so many uninspired hand-holdy tutorials and "training" first levels. There are so many mechanics to teach in AAA games these days, and we want to throw players right into the heart of the games - the cinematic set pieces where all the development dollars went. Everything is thrown at the player quickly without any time to naturally evolve the player's skill set without care for the consequences, because if the player can't have success in the core game in ten minutes you've lost a potential DLC consumer. Video games aren't marketed for just adolescent boys in basements anymore, they are trying to capture as large an audience as possible; it's a legitimate multi-billion dollar industry now. To that end, the game must be at some level accessible to everyone.

There are a number of modern games which teach the player the mechanics as he/she plays through. These games tend to be the most highly lauded and fondly remembered nowadays. The two foremost examples for me are the Portal games and Super Meat Boy. The Portal games gradually teaches the player how to solve the puzzles with the portal gun by presenting interesting concepts in isolation, and as the game progresses concepts are combined to create complex and innovative problems which truly challenge a player's spatial reasoning abilities and give the player a sense of accomplishment upon solving them. Meat Boy behaves similarly; obstacle types are presented in isolation first, then later chained together to innovate some of the most brutally difficult platforming sequences ever in a video game. Both of these games sold beaucoup copies and won game of the year awards, largely on account of rock-solid design of the core mechanics, ability to fluidly teach players the mechanics without disruption of the flow of the game, and ramping up the degree of challenge for players once mechanics were learned. An upcoming game that looks to be designed with this sort of learning-while-playing specifically in mind - and thus one I have my eye on - is The Witness by Jonathan Blow (PS4, PC).

On a similar line of thinking, I thought Titanfall did a good job with the "training level" concept and allowing players of all skill levels to succeed. The tutorial was separate from the main story game (i.e. optional), straightforward and fluid, and the verbs taught were chained together as the tutorial progressed. The addition of cannon fodder AI opponents and the Smart Pistol also helped to ease the learning curve of that game, as to allow new players to feel like they are contributing in team games while the expert players gunned down each other with their mastery of the twitch shooting mechanics honed over years of playing Call Of Duty games.

So no, it's not about "wussification of America", and it's not entirely about "just making money". It's about making a game with easy-to-learn and accessible action grammars which allow new players to be remotely competitive very quickly, yet allowing for performing advanced gameplay concepts by chaining actions from those grammars which will reward advanced players who spend lots of time with the game. Very few games even set out to accomplish that goal because it is incredibly difficult to do this - a big reason for all the derivative clones in the AAA game space, they just copy what has already proven to work - and even fewer do it successfully.

tl;dr - game design for very large audiences is a fluid problem that the video games industry as a whole is still learning a ton about. Also making great games for large audiences is very hard. Source: a decade-plus of institutional knowledge making video games.

[oneamongthefence]

Re: EA Exec: "Our Games Are Too Hard To Learn"

Games are much more intimidating now than they were 25 years ago. Give any one a controller to an Atari and they know how to play in about 30 seconds. Same with the NES. My wife wont play most games because the effort and time to learn them isn't worth it to her. I can't play most games with my kids because the controller is way too complicated for them to even understand. When I was little I could play most games with my family even though they were much older because the mechanics were very basic and easy to grasp. I wish consoles had the option of buying a kid friendly controller with just a few buttons that allowed you to play the games aimed at the younger kids demographic.