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You can lose. Some games are better about hiding their lies than others, but I can’t think of one that actually makes failure impossible. My favorite lie, from a Twitter thread years ago, was a racing game from the PS1 where all the cars had different stats and such on the select screen, but under the hood, they all behaved exactly the same. Your indie games probably lie to you too; the author of this video works on Rainworld.
I’d be interested in some kind of database where I could check if games lie to me. I feel like I’m good at detecting that, but maybe I’m just good at picking the more subtle games.
And yeah, driving games are total BS. I played Horizon Chase Turbo with my kids, and the only reason I kept playing is because my kids liked watching. It definitely felt like there was a ton of BS in it because I could still win pretty much any race whether I got the optional upgrade or not. So I don’t play many driving games anymore, because they all feel like they use a ton of rubber-banding.
They always have. Rubber banding has been common in racing games for as long as I can remember. We complained about it then too, but it’s not like developers didn’t try the game without it first.
If you want to find out if/how your game lies to you, you’ll have to either ask the devs or expose more information via mods or Cheat Engine.
True, which is why I very rarely play racing games. I play Mario Kart with my family and friends, but that’s about it. I’d much rather lose a race than have the game keep giving me second chances, just let me fail if I screw up so I can learn.
If you enjoy a game, but later find out that the game had some internal check where it auto-adjusted difficulty, will you stop liking it?
Again, not all games should have it. And not every dev implement it properly, that doesn’t mean a feature is inherently bad. There are places where it should be used, and where it should be used.
No, but I’d certainly feel cheated, may hesitate to recommend it to others, and I would certainly think twice about buying another game from that studio, unless they had really good writing and that’s what I was there for.
For me, a game either needs really compelling gameplay or a really interesting story, and if it has both, I’ll buy every game in the series. That’s how I feel felt Ys: I loved the “git gud” feel of Ys 1 (Ys 2 was a bit of a letdown), and that continued in Ys Origin, so I’ve been dutifully playing through the series. I’m less excited about the later games, which have added group combat (difficulty feels nerfed), but Ys 1 and Ys Origin are two of my favorite games of all time.
I love a good challenge and I love a good story, and I’ll put up with a lot if I can get either. And that’s why I’m not playing anything after AC: Brotherhood, the gameplay is kind of boring, and the story completely fell off a cliff. The same goes for most other popular action-adventure games, they just don’t appeal to me because they feel too hand-holdy. I really like Dark Souls though.
You can lose. Some games are better about hiding their lies than others, but I can’t think of one that actually makes failure impossible. My favorite lie, from a Twitter thread years ago, was a racing game from the PS1 where all the cars had different stats and such on the select screen, but under the hood, they all behaved exactly the same. Your indie games probably lie to you too; the author of this video works on Rainworld.
I’d be interested in some kind of database where I could check if games lie to me. I feel like I’m good at detecting that, but maybe I’m just good at picking the more subtle games.
And yeah, driving games are total BS. I played Horizon Chase Turbo with my kids, and the only reason I kept playing is because my kids liked watching. It definitely felt like there was a ton of BS in it because I could still win pretty much any race whether I got the optional upgrade or not. So I don’t play many driving games anymore, because they all feel like they use a ton of rubber-banding.
They always have. Rubber banding has been common in racing games for as long as I can remember. We complained about it then too, but it’s not like developers didn’t try the game without it first.
If you want to find out if/how your game lies to you, you’ll have to either ask the devs or expose more information via mods or Cheat Engine.
True, which is why I very rarely play racing games. I play Mario Kart with my family and friends, but that’s about it. I’d much rather lose a race than have the game keep giving me second chances, just let me fail if I screw up so I can learn.
If you enjoy a game, but later find out that the game had some internal check where it auto-adjusted difficulty, will you stop liking it?
Again, not all games should have it. And not every dev implement it properly, that doesn’t mean a feature is inherently bad. There are places where it should be used, and where it should be used.
No, but I’d certainly feel cheated, may hesitate to recommend it to others, and I would certainly think twice about buying another game from that studio, unless they had really good writing and that’s what I was there for.
For me, a game either needs really compelling gameplay or a really interesting story, and if it has both, I’ll buy every game in the series. That’s how I feel felt Ys: I loved the “git gud” feel of Ys 1 (Ys 2 was a bit of a letdown), and that continued in Ys Origin, so I’ve been dutifully playing through the series. I’m less excited about the later games, which have added group combat (difficulty feels nerfed), but Ys 1 and Ys Origin are two of my favorite games of all time.
I love a good challenge and I love a good story, and I’ll put up with a lot if I can get either. And that’s why I’m not playing anything after AC: Brotherhood, the gameplay is kind of boring, and the story completely fell off a cliff. The same goes for most other popular action-adventure games, they just don’t appeal to me because they feel too hand-holdy. I really like Dark Souls though.
That’s understandable. Everyone has their own preferences, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Cookie Clicker. If it qualifies as a game.
But the way that you can’t lose has nothing to do with adaptive difficulty, IIRC.
Sure. Just thinking about games with no loss condition at all. It’s kinda rare.