Skippable Combat in Games

[deanb]

Oh I so wish I could downvote you right now...

 

Combat is one kind of gameplay, but it is not synonymous with gameplay. Kind of like how "pizza" is not synonymous with "food". Allowing people to skip combat does not mean they are not playing a game.

I've never once said that combat is the only form of gameplay. In fact in my OP I mentioned puzzles and strategy too. "Playing Portal, without having to do the puzzles. It's like bubble wrap without the air filling." So it should really be I downvoting you for not reading my initial post

[TheMightyEthan]

Okay, but you keep saying that skipping combat means you're not playing a game, implying that there's no gameplay besides combat.

[deanb]

In combat games, then yes if you remove the combat, there's no gameplay. You kinda just took it out.

 

I present to you the joke of turning off the gameplay in games:

"We call it 'The Aristocrats'!"

[Hot Heart]

I thought it was assumed we were talking about games in which a large draw of the game is the non-combat elements.

[Johnny]

Yeah of course you wouldn't remove the combat in a game where the game is only combat. That speaks for itself.

[deanb]

I thought it was assumed we were talking about games in which a large draw of the game is the non-combat elements.

Well then Mr Batman Arkham City, would maybe you lot come to a consensus on which games specifically you're wanting to talk about then?

Reason I'm going with the big brush is cos you guys are wanting a wide spectrum of games in which you'd love to be able to skip over the gameplay elements.

 

Batman - action/stealth title

Dragon Age - Party base WRPG

Mass Effect - shooter based WRPG

Bioshock - shooter

MGS - stealth

Grim Fandango - adventure game

BF3 - shooter

Witcher 2 - CRPG

LA Noire - Detective/action game

Heavy Rain - I don't know

Skyrim - WRPG

Agarest Zero - JRPG

 

(etcetra. Sorry phone call mid way through this)

[Hot Heart]

Well, to be honest, even if it's a pure combat game it would be nice to have the option to skip a bit you did not like (if they don't provide the option to adjust the difficulty, as the case may be). If people abuse it, that's up to them. Maybe they'll waste their money, maybe they'll come back to the game again and again to try and improve. If the mechanics are good enough, that's the real draw.

 

As for Batman: Arkham City, it is not purely a combat game. Or simply look at the scenario I described above. And, no, this isn't about listing every single game ever that we think it could work in. They are just examples to get people thinking about ways to implement it or ways it might be beneficial.

Edited February 24, 2012 by Hot Heart

[Strangelove]

I play every single game on normal, but im not gonna lie - I changed Dragon Age Origins to easy 10 hours into it. I heard the pc and console experiences are different, but it was very difficult on the PS3 for me. If i hadnt done that I would have hated that game.

[TheMightyEthan]

On Dragon Age I would sometimes turn it down for harder parts, but mostly I left it up.

 

But I think every game needs to have either the option to adjust the difficulty mid game or the option to skip any given part.

[MasterDex]

Interesting point, Dex, but I would think that people being able to skip your combat would serve as a greater impetus to improve it. We all know games manage to screw up bits of their games, so it would be nice if we could just ignore them if we so wish. Like Dara O'Briain and his Gears of Doors, he could get past that and enjoy the rest of the game. Developers pay attention to what people are saying elsewhere, I'm sure they'd pay attention to people complaining that they just had to skip a section for some particular reason. That is, if they didn't already have metrics set up to pay attention to this kind of gaming behaviour.

 

No one's saying that cutscenes and dialogue should be unskippable so developers will work to improve them. Developers are always looking to improve technique/design/whatever. This just goes a step towards removing some hassle certain players may have with a bit of a game.

 

I think the question of cutscenes and dialogue being skippable is different to any form of gameplay being skippable. I think all of us here can remember a time when cutscenes and dialogue, while they could be ingored, could not be skipped and it did affect enjoyment having to see that same scene again and again as you died in the battle after it. You could say the same about combat - like the random battles in FFVII when all you want to do is reach a savepoint but because they're interactive elements, I think there's better solutions than just offering a "skip" button.

 

That said, I do hear you about reaching a point you just can't pass it. I've reached walls in games myself and have broken them down for others so I get it. However, I think a better solution would be to save any skip button for a last resort. "Having trouble? Lower the difficulty.", "Still having problems? Would you like to skip?". For FF style random battles, adjust occurance and exp concurrently on something like a 5 point scale with 1 being no experience and no random battles, 2 being high experience and few random battles and 5 being low experience coupled with a high rate of random battles. At least then you're tailoring the experience to each player without removing the need to examine the gameplay elements on a deeper level than "Does it work"......Actually, I'm not sure how I feel about that idea.

 

And that's because combat plays such a central role in so many games that I think it would be hard to extract it without damaging the integrity of the product. For certain games - Uncharted, Mass Effect - a standard skip button would do well but I don't think it's widely applicable to any great degree of success unless we homogenise our designs more.

 

Gah! I don't know. I get the argument but I'm not all for it. I'm still not sure I have a well-formed opinion on the topic. It's a stickler for sure.

[FMW]

Nintendo in their pursuit of the wider blue ocean audience have cooked up two kinda different ways of approaching this issue. One is the Super Guide, which has been discussed here already and is (I think) seen universally as a good thing. Yes, there were angry fans on the internet when it was announced but it has since appeared in some of Nintendo's best platformers ever. It clearly doesn't ruin anything.

 

But Nintendo also tried something a little different with Metroid Other M. When you completed the game, you unlocked a movie mode. This mode retold the game story in the form of a movie. This was more than just running all the cutscenes in sequence, there was also a lot of recorded gameplay in there making sure everything remained cohesive and made sense.

 

I think that's a fantastic solution, and a good way to appeal to the market more interested in the story than the mechanics of killing things. Deanb, there is definitely a market more interested in story than the killing mechanics. It's not an enthusiast gamer market, but it's a large market. A lot of FF XIII fans I know actually fall into this category.

[TheMightyEthan]

I'm okay with just a super easy mode rather than an outright skip, but I do feel strongly that games need to let you change difficulty mid-game rather than making start the whole thing over.

[deanb]

Deanb, there is definitely a market more interested in story than the killing mechanics. It's not an enthusiast gamer market, but it's a large market. A lot of FF XIII fans I know actually fall into this category.

Does anyone actually have any figures on this? A few of you have suggested that the market for story instead of not killing things is large, but I'd say that at first blush with titles such as farmville, angry birds n COD topping the charts I don't think that's really the case. Gameplay heavy games are king.

 

The Metroid movie mode sounds very much like an LP viewing. In fact:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHllGUpXwk0

(I only got this top results cos I was wanting to check the inter-webs on what you're describing and it very much is basically a pre-cut LP of the game)

 

As far as FFXIII goes most a large chunk of the criticism on it was the story was crap, but it's combat system was the saving grace. (Personally I liked it all, I just felt the pacing was off. But that would actually be made even worse with skipping the combat, it needed fleshing out with towns n breaks). Talking of FF, FFX does have a sort of "skip battles" feature in that at the end game you can pick up an accessory that disables random battles. Story battles, such as forced battles and boss fights, still happen. And if you've spent end-game avoiding levelling up, will end up harder than they should have been.

 

Changing difficulty mid-game is a must. It's silly that this is still now an uncommon feature of games.

[Pojodin]

Changing difficulty mid-game is a must. It's silly that this is still now an uncommon feature of games.

 

Speaking of, I think a leveling and difficulty model similar to that which was implemented in "The World Ends with You" could work quite well in a variety of games. By turning down the difficulty, it was possible to fly through the game with ease. If the difficulty was increased, each battle became a tough struggle for survival, but the rewards were usually better and the experience earned was greater. This system might not work for every game, but I think there are aspects of it that could be used to accomodate difficulty and pacing issues that people encounter when playing through games, while also not removing an entire part/aspect of the game.

[TheMightyEthan]

Changing difficulty mid-game is a must. It's silly that this is still now an uncommon feature of games.

 

Well as long as we agree on that, I don't really feel strongly about the rest. Actually, I think in many games this would be the better solution rather than outright skipping.

 

Though I will say that in LA Noire by the second half of the game I was always intentionally failing the car follow sequences (the ones where you're not supposed to be spotted) so I could skip them because they were so tedious, not because they were difficult. Making them easier wouldn't have helped, and not letting me skip them (as most games wouldn't have) would have made me enjoy the game less.

Edited February 25, 2012 by TheMightyEthan

[Johnny]

I actually find it silly to claim any feature must be in ALL games. Take the changing difficulties for example, that wasn't in VVVVVV or Super Meat Boy, and I think both of those games would have been lesser for adding such a feature when the challenge was really the main point.

 

In VVVVVV's case the brilliant checkpoint layout and relatively short game time ensures that the game remains fair and largely non-frustrating (unless you want to tackle the Trinket challenges. Some of those will make you pull your hair out.)

Super Meat Boy manages the difficulty by making reaching the end of a stage far from "beating" it, using bandages, A+ times to unlock Dark World, and Warp Zone levels.

 

Both of these games have their own ways of managing difficulty, ways that would not work for most games but work for them - though it can probably be argued that Super Meat Boy does not manage it as well as VVVVVV.

 

I'm rambling again. Anyway, the point was that while having multiple difficulty levels and having them changable on the fly makes sense and is probably the best option for a lot of games (most AAA games), I would be sad to see certain titles take that route.

If I'm allowed to speculate, I think it likely that the upcoming SSX is going to do what the franchise has always done and manage difficulty by having different milestones (Bronze, Silver and Gold) to beat, letting newer players feel a sense of progress as they learn the ropes and go from beating bronze to silver to gold.

[TheMightyEthan]

Oh yeah, I just meant that games that HAVE multiple difficulty levels should make them changeable on the fly, not that every game needs to have multiple difficulty levels. Specifically that wouldn't really make sense with platformers because you'd have to completely redesign the levels to change the difficulty.

 

*Edit* - I do think though that every game needs to give some method of getting past That One Hard Part. Whether it be changing the difficulty, Superguide, just letting you skip it altogether, or something else we haven't thought of yet.

Edited February 25, 2012 by TheMightyEthan

[TheMightyEthan]

Talking with Johnny on Steam brought up another point:

 

In games with distinct "levels", like say Halo, I don't think you necessarily need to be able to change difficulty mid-level, I think being about to change between levels is good enough. I just don't think you should have to restart the whole game from the beginning to change difficulty (IIRC Gears of War 1 works that way, but I can't remember for sure).

[Johnny]

Though changing difficulty on the fly makes sense for most games with multiple difficulties, I know of at least one case where that would do weird and potentially game-breaking things (Beat Hazard)

[deanb]

How long do Beat Hazard sessions last? I'm not sure twin-stick shooters need that kind of feature adding for on the fly difficulty. Talking more shooters, RPG, action titles etc.

 

As reminded by Elevens status, XIII-2 spawns chocobos around the area once you've "cleared" it. Thus you can come back, hop on a chocobo (does require a Ghysal Green, as per tradition) and wander around the area monster free to pick up items and other secrets. It's also the first FF game I've known of to come with a difficulty option too. (Can't be changed mid-game afaik though. I'll have a look next time I'm on)

[Johnny]

Beat Hazard sessions last either as long as the song you select in single track mode, or as long as you can survive in survival mode.

I've done survival mode for 35 minutes or so. The crazy people on the leaderboards keep it up for hours upon hours.

[Thursday Next]

FFXIII-2 gives you the option to change difficulty mid game. It also gives you the ability to kill monsters without going into a battle and also gives you more "encounters / less encounters" and "Tougher Enemy" abilities (these are all late / post game features, so not really ideal for helping noobs through).

 

For FPS games I think the best way to implement a skip feature would be to include the classic "God Mode" and "Infinite Ammo" cheats. That way you can go through the motions of the game without the frustration and tedium of having to go through the same section several times.

 

Same goes for your third person shooters. Uncharted would be a good example where the combat is a very separate experience. Enabling God Mode would let people skip the "hard bits" of the game while still letting them clamber, explore and solve puzzles. Same goes for Arkham. You could lay the smack down on baddies and feel all batmanish without having to worry about dying.

 

Castlevania let you skip the puzzle sections if you wanted, would it have been a so bad if they had let you skip the combat instead?

 

This wouldn't work for "pure gameplay" games of course. If you take the gameplay out of Tetris, you have nothing left really, other than a sound-track and changing background.

 

To be honest, I would think that skipping or auto-winning combat would be the same as fast-travelling. It may take away from the scale of the world, but if you want to get to the Caves of Mild Peril before dinner, then you just have to like it or lump it.

[TheMightyEthan]

Puzzle games often have hints that you can look at if you're taking too long to solve a puzzle, and the hints usually get progressively more obvious until it basically tells you how to solve the puzzle, I don't see how that's any different from allowing you to skip a combat section if you fail it several times in a row.

[Hot Heart]

Uncharted 1 and 2, had a cool 'unlockable store' that included such cheats. Not really saying I'd choose it over having skipping as an option too, but it was a great little feature. It's a goddamn shame that 3 appeared to have scrapped that.

[Thursday Next]

I think Uncharted could have done with that from the start. In fact. Uncharted and all other games, as well as having options to make the game easier from the start should also have Crushing unlocked from the start. I hate having to beat the game on hard to unlock Crushing, then beat it on Crushing, then go back and do all the treasure hunting (usually on very easy).